Digital Anarchy – Page 21 – Digital Anarchy

Gearing up for a product release.

Adobe Photoshop plugins, cartooning software, Digital Anarchy products

We’re all pretty excited around here at Digital Anarchy about our upcoming product release. Usually we don’t talk about products until they are released, but we pre-announced this product earlier in the year — err, a few times earlier in the year — and it’s finally hitting the market this week. The product is ToonIt! Photo and you can see images, well, right here. You can also check out footage showing off last year’s release of ToonIt for video apps. The medium is different but the underlying software is the same. Even though I am working through the weekend, I’m having a blast writing our manual and web pages and tutorial scripts. After all, how can it NOT be fun to turn yourself (and mom) into a cartoon? regards -Debbie

Comment @ your comments.

Office Stuff, Technology

Sadly, the one major casualty of moving our blog over to WordPress — and the server maelstrom that followed — has been losing all of the wonderful comments that people made. In particular, I remember seeing someone post a photo of himself wearing a Digital Anarchy t-shirt shortly before the blog went down, and I am very sad to have lost that photograph. We still do want to hear your thoughts and see you in our Digital Anarchy tshirts. Enjoy our blog’s new look and let me know what you think. regards -Debbie

Digital Photography and Childrens Books

Industry Stuff

An interesting story from Diane Berkenfeld over at Studio Photography magazine about the use of digital photos as illustrations in the childrens’ book “Babar USA.” Not exactly revolutionary technology but it does make one think about how digital photography (from DSLRs to cell phones) is really become ingrained in the culture. Not only in the US, but the entire planet, particularly in third world countries where the cell phone is being used more as an all purpose computer since computers are too expensive. cheers, Jim

Adobe CS4 Launch Event

Adobe Photoshop plugins, General Rants

Went to the filming of the Adobe launch event on Monday which was interesting. I’m not exactly sure who it was aimed at or what the purpose of it was, but I can’t say I was overly impressed by it. The products are cool enough with some great new features, but the event was trying too hard to be Oprah or something and just didn’t work. It would’ve been better if they’d filmed the hipster designers talking about some cool project they’d used CS4 on and showed the clips instead of having said hipster designers come on stage and fumble through a product demo. Ben Grossman from the Syndicate did a good job, but he didn’t talk about his stuff, just the standard Adobe demo material. I would’ve been much more impressed by a 3-5 minute clip of him showing where CS4 was used in the Radiohead video. Then again, I’m just a jaded and cranky plugin developer. Maybe it worked for everyone else. 😉

Where Has Your DA T-shirt Traveled To?

Office Stuff

We created what I think is a stellar company t-shirt some time ago. The shirt speaks a little more to our former After Effects video line than our current Adobe Photoshop plugins. But we’re almost out of them so the next line will be photo-centeric. Sometimes our ‘anarchist’ t-shirts take matters into their own hands, er, arm holes and wind up in the most interesting locations. Just recently in August 2008, at the Burning Man arts event in Reno, Nevada, USA.

Digital Anarchy Sells Video Plugins (a letter from Jim)

Adobe Photoshop plugins, Office Stuff

As some of you know we have sold off our film/video plugins to Red Giant Software to focus on the Photoshop side of our business. For the details you can read the press release here. We’re pretty excited about this as we’ve got some great ideas for Photoshop and think Red Giant will do a great job of taking care of those of you who’ve been our customers on the video side of things. We feel passionately about all our products and it was a difficult decision to make changes. However, we felt we were stretched too thin trying to handle both film/video and Photoshop. I’ve been talking to Andrew over at Red Giant for some time about doing ’something’ together, so when the decision was made to focus on one side of the company or the other, they were naturally first people to talk to. I’ve known Andrew and Sean over there for quite awhile and they’ve got a great team put together. So I’m confident they’ll be able to support and upgrade the products moving forward. They have some big ideas for many of the products, so I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by many of the changes and updates they’ll be making over the next few months.

Macro vs Micro at Microsoft Pro Photo Summit.

Industry Stuff

Digital Anarchy — that’s me and Jim Tierney — attended the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit this week. It’s a pro-level gathering that we have attended for three years, since the summit’s inception. I’m usually in contact with photographers about limited topics, like how to choose a chromakey screen or problems installing our software, so it’s refreshing to get a macro view of hot topics in the professional world of photography. Speaking of ‘macro’, the two main topics of the Summit this year dealt with orphaned works and its related topic of internet image piracy, and competing with low-cost ‘micro’ stock sites (mainly www.istock.com). The topic of stock photography was especially succulent since not 24 hrs earlier, Getty Images and Flickr announced a deal of limited reciprocation.

Fonts In Distress

Office Stuff

In doing the redesign for our digitalanarchy.com website, I found a terrific website for free, distressed fonts. It’s called www.dafont.com, which I love that much more because around the office, we refer to Digital Anarchy as ‘DA’. Here’s the section I’ve been paying attention to: http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=109

Visualizing Data

General Rants

There’s a great thread on the AE List (www.media-motion.tv) about designing data graphics. Some really great links came up (thanks in particular to Rich Young). In truth, I love graphics derived from data. I think it can be truly beautiful to see how some data sets emerge visually. Our Data Animator 1.0 is just a baby step towards a more full featured set of plugins for really playing with data. Hope to do more with it soon. Some links… There is the master of infographics, Edward Tufte: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ If you do anything related to designing information graphics, his three books are must reads. They contain some beautiful examples of charts and graphs. If you didn’t think infographics could be beautiful you have not seen these books. One of my regrets with Data Animator 1.0 was that we couldn’t incorporate more of his ideas.

Designing Our Support Banner

Office Stuff

Well, the earth shook a little and in celebration of Memorial Day, we have posted a new version of our www.digitalanarchy.com website. It’s only been two years in planning; the challenges of a small company. Here is a fun design exercise that I would like to share. I had the opportunity to design all of the banner graphics for our website. For the non-product sections, I wanted to have a little fun, so I conceptualized the Support Section banner by starting with two images. One is a banner graphic that I’ve always liked for the website www.inhouseticketing.com, which is a company that services tickets for many fun events in the Bay Area. The other is a photo a friend wearing her kool kid Digital Anarchy t-shirts after a bike ride.

Patterns in Anarchy

Office Stuff

Something that is interesting about doing our customer support is seeing the purchasing patterns. Each week seems to have a different theme in terms of products that are bought and requests that are sent For instance, two weeks ago, the big sellers were 3D Assistants and Psunami Water. It was water, water, water all week long and everyone needed it yesterday, as if they were gasping for liquid. I have a feeling that the two factors working here were a writeup in Layers magazine about 3D Assistants, and a tutorial on the fabulous Digital Media Net by Kevin P McAuliffe. Kevin has been a friend of Digital Anarchy for awhile and we always enjoy his articles, even when they’re not about us. 🙂 You can read the Psunami tutorials here on Audioproducer.com I’m trying to locate the Layers magazine article by Rod Harlan. That’s one of our favorite publications and I know it’s _somewhere_ around the office.

fxPHD

Technology

The folks at fxPHD.com have started a new term. If you’re looking for visual effects training, they have some of the best out there, especially for the higher end stuff. They are an excellent example of the new type of training available that I think either enhances traditional education or completely replaces it. For computer based artists, I really don’t know that the $25,000/yr schools give you your money’s worth. cheers, Jim

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