Publicious Links: The Educated Cheese Edition

I know, I know: what the hell is educated cheese?

“Educated cheese” is a phrase uttered by Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley in his color commentary during a recent Red Sox game. It is my favorite new term, and I use it as much as possible, simply because it the caviar of baseball slang. And it makes me giggle and be glad to be alive. So I am trying to ignite a grassroots movement to increase its popularity. In baseball, “cheese” is slang for a good fastball. See also, “easy cheese”, “hard cheese”, and “cheddar.” “Educated cheese” is what a veteran pitcher throws when he no longer has the physical dominance to throw fastball after fastball. He can’t blow away the hitters, so he picks his spots. He finds a rhythm, and when the time is right, he lets it rip. Educated cheese. If he’s having a really good night, he may even “paint with educated cheese and salad.” But now we’ve gone beyond caviar slang to flying fish roe floating in a flaming absinthe smoothie slang.

So like that pitcher, I’ll pick my spots and hope to paint this post with nine slices of educated cheese.

First up, a tremendous short video on The Secret History of Fonts. It’s one of the Ignite series of brief, structured presentations. Most of the time, I love the Ignite format (aka, Enlighten Us, But Make It Quick). But this time, I was left begging for more. The presenter, Bram Pitoyo, should do a longer version. Beware of poor audio in spots. But it’s still worth it.

@students Creative Resource is a nice treasure trove of graphic resources and links, mostly Web related.

If it’s the second Tuesday of every third month, it must be Adobe Patch Day. That’s Adobe’s new scheduled day to release security patches, a la Microsoft. Nice to know they’re taking security as more of a job than a hobby. Not so nice to know that they have to.

Mr. Doob’s blog is where you will “find some random experiments done with Flash, pv3d (Papervision 3d), and ape”. Some really interesting/entertaining bits. My favorite is the one where you can literally bring down Google with one mouse click.

Creatives Are is a browser toolbar add-on for Firefox, IE, and others that puts all kinds of resources for designers, illustrators, and other creatives at your fingertips.

Not sure if you can afford an enterprise class publishing system? Rent one. K4 is now available for rent. How long till you can rent InDesign for a week, month, year? Hmmm. Or maybe even shorter, like you have a project and you need Photoshop but just for the weekend? $9.95 for 72 hours? Just sayin’.

Despite all our troubles: war, disease, recession, climate change, and the downsizing of the Cadbury Egg, the ’00s have been one helluva clean decade—if you judge by trends in graphic design. Everything is shiny. Blame Apple perhaps, for spreading the shiny germ. Here’s your chance to jump on the shiny bandwagon before the inevitable matte-lash: my post in InDesign Secrets, Shine On.

FreeConferenceCall.com  sounds too good to be true, and they know it. There’s a “something’s fishy” graphic on the homepage. Free conferencing, free recording and downloading, up to 6 hours per call, up to 96 participants, no ads, no spam, etc. But as someone who’s used it a couple of times, and know folks who’ve used it more, I think it’s legit. And an awesome resource to take advantage of.

Last, I leave you with my favorite images of the week: the headless brides. They’re Photoshop templates for graphic artists to insert models’ smiling noggins into. Certainly this offers us a wonderful opportunity to make Frankenbrides, cat-brides, etc. ‘shop on, kids.

The Non-Designer’s Design Checklist

About a dozen years ago, as I embarked upon my journey into the realm of publishing, I bought a book called The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams. I’m pretty sure it was recommended to me by the guy who taught my first Quark XPress class. I remember thinking it was a fine and fun book. It may have taught me just enough about design to be dangerous. I made up business cards, and took on a couple freelance jobs designing flyers and the like. Years later I had enough confidence to take a side gig designing newspaper ads. Not exactly the peak of the design profession, but it was fun to at least be the guy picking the fonts. I left that job after I’d made enough to buy a second family car, and then spent the better part of a decade forgetting everything I learned from the Non-Designer’s Design Book. So I was happy to stumble upon a copy of the brand new, 3rd edition a few weeks ago.