Category Archives: Ramblings

I’m not a graphic designer, but I dabble

I came across a link today to a blog post from a speech to the Royal Soc of Arts which was a sort of overview of graphic design from the start of human history to the modern day. It’s a great post, and you should put aside 15 minutes and go and read it.

I can recognise good design, and on vanishingly rare moments in my 15+ years of playing with desktop publishing to produce posters and leaflets, I have produced good bits of design I am proud of years later.

Perhaps the poster I like most was one I did for Yeoman at university. One clip-art crow (let’s pretend it’s a raven) and a kickass old looking font, and voila!

yeomanposter

Some other things I’ve done: the logo for NUSCR, which is half University logo and half church bell – although it was changed by someone else the year after I left and I can’t remember what was me and what wasn’t. Concept mine, definitely. Then these additional posters for university G&S shows: Pirates:1999 (my execution of image, someone else’s idea), Iolanthe, Ruddigore and Pinafore (all with my lettering and RP’s excellent drawings).

Of course, there has also been years of political leaflets, some good, some bad, many just reusing other designs. A handful of my designs have been used by others.

Then this, for our fringe event at the Harrogate Conference later in the week:

Learning the lessons from the Obama campaign

It looks reasonably good, even in black and white, but I shudder to think what the Risograph duplicator is going to do it.

Strong graphic design was a feature of the Obama campaign, not least because of Designers for Obama.

EDIT: also on the subject, last week in the B3ta newsletter was a link to this delightful blog about an artist and his daughter.

Twice as likely to die

Amusing Twitter banter on the subject of obesity set me into a brief spell of reading the detailed page on the subject on Wikipedia.

It’s interesting and scary stuff, and it teaches me that I am Class I Obese, which, in the words of the page when I read earlier in the week, means:

“A BMI of over 32 is associated with a doubling of risk of death”

Good lord, really? I’m twice as likely to die? Doubly certain?

I was pretty sure that what was said was not what was meant, so queried it on the talk page, and it was clarified the following morning as a doubling in the mortality rate. That’s better – twice as many people per 1,000 population die who are obese as compared to the normal weight population. It’s still not a particularly useful statistic for judging personal risk.

The other really fascinating thing on the page was this picture of two abdominal CT scans, showing the difference on a slice of person that the extra weight makes.

A much coveted award

Today I won a Bad Taste Award for a staggeringly awful post I wrote this year in the Archers newsgroup UMRA.

Throughout the year, UMRATs compete with each other to say the most awful things, and if you are caught doing it, a fellow reader will pounce on your post and say BTN! which is Bad Taste Nomination.  These are all carefully collected through the year by the BTM (Bad Taste Monitor) known as the Purple Potter. (In addition her duties on UMRA, she’s a talented ceramacist.) At the end of the year, they are judged against each other, and the BTAs are awarded at a glittering ceremony on Usenet.

My solecism?  A person had been grumbling that you can’t move a foot in France without being taxed for it; at the time, body parts had been washing up on a North American beach and, well, I’m sure you can see the link I made. 

In Canada, you’re supposed to call the police before moving a foot off  the beach.

The sad thing is I wouldn’t even have realised if it hadn’t been for a friendly nudge on my wall on Facebook.  UMRA generates a lot of messages, and I seldom have time to read them all – these days, more of my online time is taken up with blogs than usenet, and every other group I’m in has more or less withered away.

Talking of Twitter

A meme has been doing the rounds amongst seasoned twitterers to find who you followed first. If you hop along to this helpful website it will tell you.

It told me that the first person I followed was Alan Fleming, who now seems to twitter once a day, like clockwork, and seldom blog. You can read my first post about Twitter here – and Alan’s here.

As you’ll see from my post, it was a toss-up between Alan and Troubled Diva about who it was who really first got me into Twitter.

It’s rather flattering, but since the meme came along, at least three people have disclosed that they followed me first, so I got them hooked. (@willhowells, @jonxyz and @rfenwick)

But perhaps the tallest claim I can make in relation to Twitter is that I got the Lib Dems tweeting. You can see from my first blog post on the subject that I thought politics was ripe for the twittering. I suggested it in a forum to the Innovations Dept, who were at first hostile, and then later took to it like ducks to crepuscular water. That led quickly to Lynne Featherstone MP taking up the twitter baton and it spread through the party and then through UK politics more generally.

Of course, had I not come along, the Lib Dems and politics more generally would have caught on to twitter without me just fine.  I’m sure Innovations had been thinking about twitter before I made my suggestion.  And the US presidential election was a massive time for twittering to catch on in US politics – @barackobama, @hilaryclinton and @fakesarahpalin all made their marks.

A sobering thought about Christmas cards

It’s no secret I’m not a particularly Christmassy person – read here about why I don’t like the orgy of commercialism – but I do like to send cards out. In the main this is to a group of people I don’t talk to much but don’t entirely want to lose touch with. So I send a jokey card from Private Eye, and one of those much maligned Xmas newsletters (here’s last year’s) about what the cats have been getting up to in school, etc.

And people send me cards too. This year, I’m definitely getting organised to do something with them. And getting organised to write down who sent us one.

The thing is, people also send cards to Jenny, who lived in this house until she died in August 2005. There were shovel-loads in Christmas 2005, which we took to the estate agent who (hopefully!) passed them onto the vendors who could marry them up with Jenny’s address book and let people know the sad news.

But there are a persistent handful of cards which still arrive for Jenny, still with bits of personal data (“Phil’s recovering nicely from his second heart-attack…”) but with no address. So we can’t let them know the world has moved on and their contact list is out of date.

So here’s my plea. When you send Christmas cards this year, include your address. Put a sticky label on the outside or your full address somewhere inside. That way, if the worst has happened and someone other than your intended recipient is opening their cards this year, they can let you know what’s what.

PS – one exciting thing this year for my cards… I’ve stocked up on James Bond stamps to make the festive greeting that little bit more interesting! Hmm, Royal Mail website has stopped working, will check link in AM.

EDIT 2011 – See this post for the final piece of information about Jenny’s friends sending Christmas cards.

Aha – suppress a category in feed

For a while I’ve been importing blog posts into Facebook automatically. I’ve also been importing Tweets automatically into Facebook updating my status.

This has meant, since I started automatically making blog posts of tweets, that I have been importing tweets into Facebook twice – as they go in statuses, and again every morning as an imported note.

I have now learned how to suppress an entire category from appearing in a feed.

So, if you would like to subscribe to my blog without receiving the daily Twitter post, use this address:

http://www.alexfoster.me.uk/feed?cat=-19

Whereas if all the tweeting doesn’t bother you, use this:

http://www.alexfoster.me.uk/feed

Next to learn… how to use Feedburner to combine my postings here with my postings on Lib Dem Voice (

http://www.libdemvoice.org/author/niles/feed

) into one handy feed to present to Facebook…

Thanks to Perishable Press for the skillz.

Sheffield council sign

Would someone please reassure me that the sign below is not something the Council is really wasting its time doing?

fail owned pwned pictures
see more pwn and owned pictures

I mean seriously.  Laminated signs with hole punches?  They’re not nearly sufficiently weather-proof enough for that sort of use.  Makes much more sense just to remove the bench to be on the safe side.

Your top Twitter words

Remember this post?  In it, I suggested people using twitter and wordpress and a plugin that copies your tweets to a blog also try using KB Linker to turn key words and phrases into hotlinks automatically.

If you’re wondering what words you use a lot, there’s a helpful thingie at www.tweetstats.com that tells you about word frequency.  You can find a handy tag cloud it worked out for me – the larger the word, the more frequently I said it.

My top Twitter words are, it seems, “time, day, wondering, getting, watching.”  Not sure what that says about me.  But it also gives plenty of other frequently used words I could turn into links.  @jamesgraham, @willhowells and @miketd  could all be linked to their respective blogs, for example. I say “Nottingham” quite a lot and I could choose to link that to any number of things: the Council, the local Lib Dems, the open.guide…

ONe more Twitter thing – I have occasionally thought that it would be useful to schedule a tweet for the future rather than send it now.  For example, if two amusing things strike me at once, it would be a waste to send them both together.  So it would be handy to schedule the second one for, say, an hour from now, when I will be busy and have forgotten.  This is now possible using a service at Twuffer.com  (Twuffer is apparently twitter + buffer — maybe twitter + chrontab didn’t look so good)

As a trial, I’ve scheduled a series of tweets about what I will be cooking tomorrow for the good people of Nottingham Lib Dems who are turning up at my house to stuff envelopes. EDIT:  Twuffer FAIL – it posted the whole series of messages hours early for no apparent reason 😦

Right. It’s gone 5am. They will be here shortly.  I ought to at least attempt a little more sleep before then.