Coexist Culture

The Buffet Is Closed

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:20:00 PDT

The buffet table or an ill-fated attempt at adding needed workstations into the studio has met its demise (thankfully). Unfortunately, the idea was brought to bare by yours truly. The relative discomfort created by the arrangement inspired individuals to take action, create a floorplan and a clever use of our space.

Pixel Perfect Illustraitor

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:26:00 PDT

I just can’t help feeling like a traitor (see what I did there?). Let’s get this out of the way first: I prefer Adobe Illustrator for designing for-screen output. I’ll wait for the wailing and gnashing of teeth to subside. “But Mark,” you say, “Illustrator is, was, and always will be for print design! Also you’re stupid!” Well, yeah, Illustrator was originally made for print production and it’s never seemed to agree with pixels all too well, but its text editing, object alignment, non-destructive editing and overall mathematic precision (just to name a few) provide huge advantages over Photoshop.

With the latest three Creative Suite releases, Adobe has at least pretended to step up its game. Unfortunately, even with the pixel preview mode, web presets, and Rasterise effect, it seemed exporting to pixels always resulted in an anti-aliased mess. You know what I’m referring to: 1-pixel lines that look faded and 2-pixels wide, even though they’re placed on whole pixels. Usually, I’d just apply a Rasterize effect to the offending objects, but it was always a pain to do, and on top of that, it was imprecise and never worked consistently enough. Another technique was to use Illustrator’s newer Align Stroke buttons from the Stroke palette and set it to either Inside or Outside. Unfortunately, this feature has its own set of drawbacks — like needing to overlap 1-pixel adjacent boxes — and as before, never behaved consistently.

The reason for all of this wackiness is pretty simple: Pixels have a physical area, while vertices (and vector lines) do not. The grid in Illustrator is made of vector lines, the intersections of which are in-between pixels, not at the centers. Thus, a 1-pixel line snapped to the grid will extend a half pixel in each direction. When exported, Illustrator tries to anti-alias said line, giving it a fuzzy appearance.

My solution? Select the top-most layer(s) and apply a Transform effect, offsetting by half a pixel in either direction. This forces the layer — and all its children — to shift off of the grid, and onto whole pixels. The result is a collection of nice, pixel-perfect, lines.

There are three shortcomings that I’ve noticed: One, keeping the Transform effect at the root level can really slow down future changes, so it’s best to apply it just before exporting. Secondly, filled boxes will have blurry edges (duplicating our earlier problem with the lines) unless you apply strokes to them. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it alters the perception of object sizes. A 16×16px square still “contains” 16 pixels in each direction. So by adding a 1px stroke the object ends up being 17×17px.

Ultimately, though, it’s just another example of having to bend the application to the designer’s will, instead of the application behaving intelligently. Why should objects even be placed on half-pixels when I’m in “Web” mode? (Flash and Photoshop, I’m looking at you too…) At the very least, offer an option to hard-snap everything to a pixel without disabling my custom grid snap (which is what pixel-preview mode does). Ideally, it’d be nice to see a unified application experience, with the same text-rendering, editing, alignment and distribution across all applications. I thought that’s what Adobe was trying to do with the Creative Suite.

Guess I’ll have to wait for CS4…

The assent of Possum Lips

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:36:00 PDT

"What an odd sport we inhabit, where bits of obscure rock in remote locations are recognizable." — Richard Pawlowicz.

Although a week long excursion into the Kentucky wilderness never disappoints, you come to realize how much you love climbing for the mere fact that it feels so good when you stop.

It was good to recharge the batteries and swear off computers for the week (even if I kept the treo close at hand). I finally broke out of the 5.10 range and into the 11's (US Climbing Rating System).

I got some pretty good pictures of myself "red pointing" a 5.10d climb called Possum Lips at Military Wall. Check out the rest of the pics.

Coexist Hits the Links

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:18:37 PDT

Sun. Nature. Relaxation. Giant metal clubs. These are the great things about golf. Coexist decided it was time for a break and that golfing was the way to go. Seeing as no one could really play the game we decided it was best for us to do a scramble / best shot. Apparently a few people lied about their lack of skill. The level of play ranged from 300 yard drives to hitting balls backwards. This difference didn't deter on the overall outcome of the event. Sunburns for all. Maybe sunshine isn't such a good thing for people who sit on computers all day long.

We had a blast and showed that Coexist is multi-talented. The winning team was only 4 over par. Pretty impressive for a bunch of computer geeks don't you think?

Spring
2008 Conference

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:06:00 PDT

First we let Ohio State check us out. Now we turned the table and invaded Ohio University in Athens for the Spring
2008 technology conference.

Headlining the event was Eric Meyer, a renowned CSS voice who spoke on the benefits of controlling page styling by hand. Sessions were also given for Flash, Flex, Air, Podcasting, Accessibility and Usability.

As expected, we came back with a few new ideas and new contacts. The conference was a steal at the low prices they charge. Let’s keep that part just between us though; we don’t want to give them an excuse to join the other conferences at 1K a pop.

If you didn’t get the chance to attend this year, check out their site and hopefully we’ll run into you at next year’s event.

A Visit from Ohio State

Tue, 20 May 2008 07:50:00 PDT

Last week we had a visit from The Ohio State University's Department of Industrial, Interior, and Visual Communication Design.

The Design 514 "Graphic Production" course has been attending various businesses related to the design industry for the past 9 weeks, with a focus on the world of print design. Clearly, the world of design is much larger than the printed page.

Coexist partners Christian + Dan took it upon themselves to provide a glimpse of the interactive design world from a production perspective—what exactly goes into all that we do?

Of course, all of this couldn't be crammed into a 2 hour visit—nevertheless, hopefully we were able to spark interest in the minds of the student design community.

Adobe Flex's its Muscles

Thu, 15 May 2008 06:22:00 PDT

I recently had the opportunity to explore the Adobe Flex framework and although it's really just Flash on "component" steroids, I came away impressed. Novices and experts alike can build rich web applications with ease in just a few lines of Flex code. What really had me impressed was the fact that Adobe opened up the source to the free SDK, and based their design of the Flexbuilder application on the widely popular Eclipse IDE. The one downside is that the components themselves aren't easily customizable, so more advanced users who want to create visually pleasing applications will have to devote a little "eye candy" time before deploying their code.

Follow this link to the Adobe website if you want to learn more about Flex. Also check out the Vector Magic website, which is quite possibly the most amazing example of a Flex application you will come across today.

Sad

Tue, 06 May 2008 11:16:17 PDT

Forward thinking, progressive design, fully committed to balancing environmental issues and sustainability with business objectives — all of these could have been used to describe nau.

I don’t get it. Great ideas are always supposed to prevail.

Their stores were revolutionary, their online experience was beautiful (if a bit clunky to shop but I'm hyper-critical in this area) and their product delivered. It was lead by savvy, former execs from companies like Patagonia and Nike.

What went wrong?

Micro-experiences with food

Thu, 01 May 2008 10:44:51 PDT

When you work in a microagency 24/7 - there is nothing better than jumping outside of your world and into another that fully appreciates what it means to live by a "micro" mindset. Just last night, my wife and I decided to visit the culinary stylings of Dragonfly - a local vegan restaurant that prides itself on offering a place that embraces agriculture, artists and gourmets alike.

As you pull up to the restaurant located just south of the Ohio State University campus, you will notice a small garden in back that has been meticulously set up to grow all sorts of vegetables and herbs - most of which you have probably never heard of or even seen before. The garden’s completely maximized use of space, no bigger than a typical 2-car garage, can feed up to 50 diners with the efficiency of a full on corporate kitchen. Obviously I can't help but draw parallels with the Coexist studio and our approach to efficient collaboration and I begin to blush.

Once an order has been placed, the very personable waiter teases diners with a mini salad-type of appetizer aptly dubbed "micro-greens" and the presentation of color and ultimate pay-off with a burst of unexpected flavors makes me smile as I contemplate the beauty of this micro-offering. The subsequent plates that follow are amazing in both originality and taste and it just becomes so crystal clear as to why the micro-approach from dining to creative agency makes so much sense.

I am sitting in this quaint, yet perfectly sized restaurant and everything speaks to me in this moment - from the host and waiter to the seating to the artwork on the walls to the dim lighting to the ambient music piped through at the perfect decibel - this is the way it is supposed to be. Intimate, personal, original, inspiring and fulfilling.

A very peaceful hour and a half later we get our check as well as a complimentary order of micro-beignets and again I reflect on this wonderful evening. Wow - what a difference a focused micro-approach provides. Whether it be some strange mushroom dish that I can't wait to tell others about or that new online demo we just launched that must be shared with others - the micro way is the only way to go.

Mac vs. PC - Tales From The Cave

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:30:00 PDT

It’s often easy to overlook the inner computer workings of a company. At Coexist, we have the pleasure of mixing the designers’ Mac machines, with the Windows PC that the developers use and keeping the battle lines drawn between the two camps. You can’t do this on the server side because at some point the design will need to be developed and moved into the Windows environment.

We, like all growing companies need to upgrade from time to time and the mixed environment we live in can cause some unexpected challenges. One such challenge came to light when we began to move our data to a new location and wouldn’t you know it, Windows didn’t want to handle some of the Mac files. Naturally, we as creative developers found a small shareware application to do the trick.

Why can’t Microsoft and Apple Coexist better? If a small software company can create the fix to a compatibility problem, why can’t the multi-billion dollar Microsoft? It may sound like I’m only blaming Microsoft here, when I really put the blame on both parties. It’s easy to point out the examples of Apple being stubborn, but I don’t believe they’re at fault for this one.

To Apple and Microsoft – Neither one of you is going away, so let’s step up the effort to make those of us who live in a mixed world lives easier!