nate update

Hey friends, if you know me personally, you probably know my summer has been a total zoo. (If I cash in all the “Rain Checks” I have issued, I’m going to be out of the house until Christmas!) I recently became a father, remodeled a home, moved my family  into it, and turned my old home into a rental – all while working full time with no vacation time and the amount of sleep you’d expect with a 5 month old in ‘da house. All that said, Project Dinner Table is a can’t miss event in Las Vegas. I wrote about it earlier this summer here. Be sure to visit the official PDT site – check it for schedules, pictures, menus, videos and – no brainer – to buy your tickets!

Below, I’d like to share some photos from the last Las Vegas dinner event held in front of the El Cortez in one of my favorite places – Downtown Las Vegas, where it’s as funky as it is fun. Coincidentally, the next Project Dinner Table Event will be held only a few short blocks away, at the Historic 5th Street School – a truly cool space that really gets what it means to contribute to building culture in Las Vegas. From AIGA to The Vegas Valley Book Fair – each time a creative group needs a venue, Richard Hooker and the good people at the 5th Street School have their hands up willing to help.  I hope to see you there on September 11th. I’ll be the guy with the camera

I’m extending a special invitation to the Las Vegas Creative Community about this event because I think its very important that Vegas steps it up a notch. In order to step up our game, we need to see what’s going on in creative communities globally. The days of picking up a publication and expecting design inspiration are soooo 1990s.

This is the official event information. I hope you’ll attend.

Order tickets via Eventbrite:
http://chineseexchangelv-efbevent.eventbrite.com/

Ni hao!

…An exhibition and idea exchange
with 30 design ambassadors

Spend an amazing transglobal
evening socializing, exchanging ideas and crossing cultures. Thirty Chinese
graphic design professionals exhibit their latest work in advertising,
packaging, book design, posters, photography and contemporary Chinese
calligraphy.It’s a true cultural
exchange where we’ll share the flavor of Fabulous Las Vegas with our visitors,
while getting a glimpse into the design sensibilities of their vast and
fast-developing market.

Las Vegas is distinguished to be one of only four U.S.
cities on the 11-day tour that also includes Washington, D.C., San Francisco
and San Diego.

Hosted by the Center for CrossCultural Design, which fosters greater communication between designers across cultures, and a better understanding of the interwoven experience of design and culture.

EVENT PRESENTERS

City of Las Vegas

Center for
CrossCultural Design

Colors of Lupus Nevada

Las Vegas Chinese Association

Las Vegas-Clark
County Library Foundation

EVENT PARTNERS

AIGA Las Vegas

International Association of Business Communicators

Las Vegas Cultural Corridor Coalition

The Neon Museum Las Vegas

Studio J Photography

EVENT SUPPORTERS

American Advertising Federation

Association of Students in Communication, UNLV

Student Association of Graphic Arts, UNLV

Produced by eurie creative

Watch for new Event Partner and Event Support listings as additional sponsors come on board

For information about being
an event partner, contact Victor at victor@euriecreative.com,
or call him at 702-383-9805.

Here in Las Vegas, design means commerce. Here’s a testimonial that says this is not always the case.

For the 2nd year in a row, I’m designing shirts for a memorial bike rally honoring a family who recently lost 2 brothers (husbands, fathers, friends) in Nebraska and Wyoming, near my hometown. Long-time friends of my family as a kid, and good guys to have a cold one or catch a concert with. And, for the 2nd year in a row, I’m feeling lucky as hell that I can contribute to the event. Today I received photos of the last event and it really hit home, especially now that I’m a father.

I’m reminded of a song by Rancid called Indestructible. The jist of it is that as an artist, you can live forever – indestructible – through your art. I get it. You can, without a doubt. Another way to be indestructible is to be a good friend, a father, a brother, a mother, a sister and leave your mark on things through helping other people and causes. That’s what these types of projects are about. Try getting this kind of emotion, longevity and gratification from a routine paycheck. Fat chance.

Hey, you can do a quick google search and you’ll find several pages of people reviewing CS5 and Lightroom 3 beta. Some are experts, some are lame. I’m not going to waste my time or yours giving you another review. Instead, here are my notes / observations while I run Photoshop CS5 alongside Lightroom 3 beta for the first time, along with some screen shots:

• First glance of Lightroom 3 beta is very impressive. I knew in 2 minutes that I’d buy the upgrade in July. Very fluid import of a ton of large DNG files sold it for me.
• PS CS5 Lens correction filter worked somewhat well on a 16-bit photo. Took about a minute to load it, using what looks like the beginning of a flash movie loading up. Kinda cool. Kinda annoying like a flash site on a dial-up connection, depending on your processing power.
• Irritating that most of the filters still do not work with a 16-bit photo, even after converting it to a smart object. I’ll keep toying with this.
• Do we really still need the render>cloud filter?
• Freaking lovvvve the Kuler extension built in. Mini Bridge has potential to be great, too (ONLY if you have 2 monitors like I do).
• new photoshop color sampler tool is cool, though I’m not sure its functional.
• Grain feature in Lightroom 3 is nice. I think this will really make printed pieces look great. Or like a really decent scan of a film print, if there is such a thing.
• Brush heaven! If you are a digital painter, you’ll absolutely love the new brush functionality. Very cool with a Wacom Tablet. Identifies Left and Right handedness. Several new brushes.
• To date, I have not had a chance to sink my teeth into HDR photo conversion software. This product will be the tool that introduces the rest of the world to HDR photography. It’s easy to use, very intuitive, and allows amazing control for infinite creative possibilities. I know there are other HDR products on the market that are very reputable, but this one wowed me.
• Be patient when you play with the HDR images. The files can get really big in a hurry.

I’m just scratching the surface with these two applications. I’m curious to dive into the 3D tools and other improvements. The content-aware tools have got most of the attention to date, and I know my Vegas Photoshop User Group Co-Manager, Krystal Hosmer has plans to demo this at the Adobe User’s Group mega-meeting on May 25. You’re RSVP’d right? You should be there, since we’re giving away multiple copies of the CS5 Master Collection, as well as a whole gang of other cool schwag.

One year after closing my creative services studio, and hearing about more and more layoffs in ad agencies and belly up studios like mine, I can’t help but to sometimes think about creative services as sort of a paralyzed industry. In my case, there were several reasons contributing to my studio’s demise: my inexperience, some poor judgement, some bad luck and probably more than all those combined: bad goddamn timing. But I’m not bitter. I’m evolving, and the rest of my industry should, too.  Okay, maybe the creative services industry isn’t exactly dying, but it sure is starving – at best.

But I think I’ve been wrong. The industry isn’t paralyzed, it’s just changing – quickly. In a different era, advertising ROI wasn’t as prevalent and Agencies could staff up – becuase profits were high all around. Now, the temptation to use a smaller, less expensive company or a freelancer is great. Crowdsourced creative, template sites and stock houses are tempting to companies on tighter budgets – and sometimes they can work quite well. Sometimes they’re a disaster. The importance of quality photography and design in all areas of your campaign has never been more important. Advertise smarter, in other words.

Today’s advertising industry has expanded to encompass traditional print and brodcast mediums as well as the new engagement/experience driven marketplace, and I predict this should boost the creative services industry – and here’s how I think it will go down.

Quality control will be at the forefront of your strategy. Here’s why: Your product cannot “suck.” If it does, with poor ad placement or a bad – say – retail product,  people will A) know and amplify the shortfalls via social networks; or worse B) not even see it and it will dissolve into obscurity. if you hire a lousy designer to make a lousy menu – someone will tweet about it, write a review on Yelp and post it on Facebook. Hire a lousy guy to design your brakes. Ask Toyota how that could go down. Hire a lousy designer to design your website, your business card, your menu, your packaging… all potential public or financial FAIL. This is why its so important to invest in good design, or suffer the consequences.

To summarize, companies must put their best foot forward at all times to get noticed and do it alongside a good creative professional team. Stakes are higher now than ever. After all, the new consumer is the media, and they’re still always right.

No pressure.

Of course they are. But there’s a few no-brainers I want to shed some light on that can help your company save some money and evolve your 12 point piece of paper into a conversation piece, instead of something someone writes notes on.

1. Retail & sales contacts need cards. Back of the house staff don’t. Save yourself some dough and make a company card for those who don’t need a lot of them.

2. Don’t use a template that came with Microsoft Word/Publisher, etc. There’s a reason nobody uses clip art anymore. It’s garbage. Usually these are the wrong resolution, the wrong color mode, and incompatible with any professional software your printer can work with. Pay for a real designer who knows what it means to build a cohesive brand identity for your company.

3. Don’t have cheap cards. If you do, I fully expect you to show up to your next business meeting in sweatpants and a torn, stained white shirt, because you clearly don’t value first impressions.

4. Websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, eLance, etc. won’t kill the business card industry. Why? Not everyone has bump (or an iPhone, for that matter), and what are you going to give people at mixers, bars and golf courses?

Want some cards designed? Email me, maybe I can help.

For some reason, my favorite twitter app gets overlooked in some lists. (Mashable’s recent list can be found here with no mention of Hootsuite, oddly). Friends, I’m here to testify, it’s a damn fine social media tool. If you’re in business social media – you should have this in your arsenal. Here’s why:

Hootsuite is a great twitter application for business social media usage. It’s web-based, not Adobe AIR-based like the very popular Tweetdeck, and therefore it doesn’t rely on calling an external Twitter API. (Which I thought was going away, but still seems to be looming overhead). Since hootsuite is web-based, your column setup looks the same on your Mac, PC, laptop iPhone and your desktop. It doesn’t take long to set your preferred channels, i.e. import and monitor twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, RSS feeds, WordPress blogs and more. One feature that I particularly love is that you can schedule facebook fan page updates. There may be other apps that do this, but I haven’t discovered them yet. (Seesmic, maybe? Can anyone help me out with suggestions – I welcome your comments.)

Tweetdeck is a very decent app, but it just doesn’t have the scale that I need as a corporate social media operator. A couple little nitpicky things that I do like about Tweetdeck: I like the way it counts down, not up, when counting characters, and I like to change out the colors of the interface from time to time to keep it fresh. These are small, but important when you tweet like I do: 30-40 hrs of informative (we hope) tweets to a vast customer base with somewhat diverse interests and as much correspondence as time allows. Some pre-programmed tweets are scheduled on weekends and time-sensitive events & announcements, too.  I have 40+ inches of columns on two flat screens monitoring multiple brands, competitors and keywords in real time every weekday, so its understandable that the real killer for tweetdeck to me is the API call. Regardless, I do have both open simultaneously most of the time.

Today, I’m hearing from Mashable (by way of friend @VegasBill) that there are more new features on the way for hootsuite – integration with mobile apps like foursquare are exciting as well. All the more reason to get on board with hootsuite, if you haven’t already.

If you’re in the creative industry, (unless you live under a rock) you have probably noticed in the last few years or so, most professional Graphic Designers have successfully adpoted the use of quality photography and the way it is utilized in advertising. We rarely see low-resolution photos in print anymore, and more often than not, the images are using correct exposure and beautiful depth of field, therefore lending great imagery to commercial projects.  Now, I’m issuing a challenge on behalf of designers: Photographers, its time to raise your design game.

This is the week the WPPI (Wedding & Portrait Photographers) Convention comes here to Vegas. It’s always a great show.  On behalf of my city, I’d like to welcome some of the best photographic talent in the world.

I have attended the last 3 or 4 WPPI conventions, and it’s clear that my email and mailing address has been cycled through several mailing lists.  Let me tell you – there’s something awry with much of this massive load of photo-promotions. It’s not just email marketing, either. Many of the trade publications, sites, signage, and mail pieces, too. Most of it’s really, really poor.

Look, typography is a science in itself, so don’t be surprised to learn that cute font that came with your wife’s Dell just doesn’t cut it. While you were in the darkroom, Designers were in their second semester of color theory. Look at the “big guys” at the trade show. They have beautiful booklets, great logos and packed booths. Not a coincidence.

Investing in porfessional design shouldn’t be hard to grasp for shutterbugs. And its certainly not meant to sound condescending or offensive. All of us creatives need to check our egos and take a critique from time to time. The experienced Designer’s mantra is identical to yours, Photographers: when your clients hire true, experienced professionals, they get top-notch results. Designers carry the same responsibilities as Photographers, too. Deliver results on behalf of your client, or your phone may not ring again for awhile. In this, the era of facebook and twitter… word gets out about poor service in a short moment.

I’m as aware as anyone of the financial challenges both industries face, so my advice is this: Buddy up. Professional photographers should seek partnerships with Professional Designers and vice versa.  Build it in the budget. Find a way. Work out trade deals, retainers, industry-rates…  hell, issue frequent flyer miles if you have to!

This is a guy who just plain “Gets It.” I read my first Tom Peters book about 5 years ago, and now I am stoked to see that he’s sharing tips and advice via YouTube (new to me, anyway).

This week, I was graciously invited to be the co-manager for the Las Vegas Photoshop & Print Users Group, or, VegasPUG. What’s that, you say?

“Vegas PUG exists to introduce or reacquaint  people with Adobe’s powerful desktop and web applications for Print design. Our meetings are structured in “show-and-do” lab format, giving attendees an immediate opportunity to put what they’re learning to use right away as well as tapping into the knowledge of our PUG Xperts as they roam the room answering questions and providing individual instruction where needed. Quarterly advanced labs will give seasoned users an opportunity to expand their skills or to share a technique with the group. Meetings are held monthly and are free for members”.

I’m excited to connect with this new community (I’m a community type of guy) and share some of my tricks with Photoshop and all things Adobe (big fan).

Over the next few weeks I’ll have some more news about upcoming programs and – who knows – maybe some other really exciting stuff to share.

Here’s a link to the group page on Adobe’s group pages. Currently there are 59 members. Are you one?