Eminem vs. George W. Bush

Eminem takes on George W. Bush in “Mosh” (QuickTime)

 

“Why Choose GNOME?,” Letter Size

I finished the Letter size version of “Why Choose GNOME?.” A4 versions in French and in English are still available; see this post: “Why Choose GNOME?” Out In PDF.

Restyling viralata.net

Viralata.net’s previous white and gray design is no more. I got rid of it because I was getting tired of it, because it looked too web-like, and because I wanted to experiment with web typography. It’s still pretty minimalist but it’s also more textured: there’s a tiled background and a basic serif font working together to create richer and fuller looking pages than with the previous black sans-serif on plain white background. That’s partly what I mean when I say that I wanted something that wasn’t so web-like. I wanted to capture the feel of a printed paper page.

The default font size is much larger (12 points) than usual and the traditional blue and purple links have been replaced by a dark red (#a60000) and a dark gray (#333333). Playing with link colors is not something I would normally do. But since this is my personal site I can relax a bit and ignore the more conservative guidelines for good web design. I have nothing to sell on viralata.net and the site is small enough that I don’t expect anyone to feel lost and curse me for not playing by the rules.

The more unusual decision for me was to work with fixed point sizes, especially for fonts. While this goes against my normal preference for relative units, I figured that, once again, this being a personal site, I could bend the rules. Firefox and Opera are both able to display this new design at greater or smaller font sizes; I imagine that Safari can too. Unsurprisingly, Internet Explorer cannot but I can’t say that I care.

Using fixed point sizes helped me gain some control over the structure of the page. I have tried to play that element up by paying special attention to the space between lines, paragraphs and headers. I further tried to control the color of the page by redefining the strong and b tags not as indicators for bold weight but as red “ink.” I hope that I was able that way to create a contrast without disrupting the unity of the textblock.

“Why Choose GNOME?” Out In PDF

The design of newer PDF versions of “Why Choose GNOME?” and “Pourquoi choisir GNOME ?” is done. I made a few typographical corrections on the first French version and modified the original English text to bring both documents closer to each other visually. Both are formatted for printing on A4 paper; a North-American-friendly Letter size version should be out soon.

The GNOME Marketing list has woken up from its torpor which is excellent news.

Three GNOME Posters

Continuing my work with GNOME promotional material, I designed the following three posters. They are large (1189 × 841 mm; 46 ¾ × 33 in), black and white, and somewhat plain. Their size is meant to draw people in when groups of volunteers are presenting the project at trade shows and conferences. They are black and white to keep production costs low. They are plain because I wouldn’t know how to design them otherwise and I like them that way. ;-)

The theme is “values of the GNOME Project” which I chose to define with those three words: freedom, intelligence, respect. Each word actually represents several of the qualities GNOME embodies. I still have to write the short texts detailing what those are. “Freedom” should explain the benefits of GNOME’s GPL and LGPL licenses. “Intelligence” should illustrate the ways in which GNOME strives to be a smart, integrated, easy-to-use environment. “Respect” should be about the importance of interoperability, accessibility and internationalization.

To give you an idea of how large these posters are, I marked on a scaled-down image of one of them an area which is shown full-size, on a 300 DPI export, next to it. What you’re seeing is a footer which appears on all posters and reads “The GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform – www.gnome.org.”

ISO A-Series Paper Sizes

I’m tired of googling for them.

A0 2384 × 3370 pt
A1 1684 × 2384 pt
A2 1191 × 1684 pt
A3 842 × 1191 pt
A4 592 × 842 pt
A5 420 × 592 pt
A6 297 × 420 pt
A7 210 × 297 pt


GNOME Promotional Material

I want to review as much GNOME promotional material as I can: slides, posters, banners, handouts, pamphets, etc…. I’d like to inventory all of it and put it somewhere it can be reused by all of those involved in GNOME promotional efforts.

Part of this work, the part I enjoy the most, is modernizing some of this material, redesigning it so that it’s more appealing, more consistent and visually stronger than it is now. This afternoon, I reworked the French version of “Why GNOME?” (« Pourquoi choisir GNOME ? » existing PDF | redesigned PDF)

I used Scribus to produce this new version. It’s pretty nice overall though slow and awkward at times and, unfortunately, not GTK+ software. Regardless, it gets the job done.

Programação Telecine

I finally did what I had been meaning to do for a while now: redesign the schedule page of Telecine’s 5 movie channels. Telecine, Brazil’s Cinemax if you will, does have a schedule posted on its website but it’s done in Flash, it’s slow and it’s poorly designed. What’s more, it’s not going away anytime soon since they just completed their grand redesign.

My answer to their non-site is quite simple. I wrote one Python script which parses their monthly schedule file into XML—that operation happens once a month—and one PHP script which displays what’s currently on and what’s showing for the next 12 hours.

Check it out; it’s called programação Telecine.

democrats.org vs. gop.com

Looking at the front pages of democrats.org and gop.com it struck me that the Republicans were using much more of their space attacking Kerry than the Democrats were attacking Bush.

I tried to put this impression in numbers and came up with this: 9% of democrats.org’s front page is dedicated to negative content—attacking the Republican Party or Bush—whereas gop.com has nearly 20% of its content focusing on attacks on Kerry and the Democratic Party.

Here’s how I came up with those numbers. First, I calculated the total area, in pixels, of both pages opened to the same width, on the same browser, using the same font size. Then, I subtracted the area of all links, images, flash animations, etc. containing or linking to negative content. The percentage reflects the relation of all negative areas to the total area.

I defined negative content as anything designed solely to attack a candidate’s record or personality. Comparisons of a candidate’s plan to that of his opponent was not considered negative content. Links to pages mixing negative and positive content—content praising one’s achievements or character—were not considered negative. I used the same criteria for both pages.

My silly calculations notwithstanding, it’s hard to visit gop.com and not be surprised by how much of it is dedicated to John Kerry. At the time I took the screenshots above, there were 4 pictures of him on gop.com vs. one, albeit a big one, of George Bush on democrats.org. His name appeared 36 times on gop.com’s front page, vs. 5 times for Bush’s name on democrats.org.

The GOP’s front page is longer and has, on average, 2.5 times more words or characters than the Democratic Party’s front page. But even taking this fact into account, gop.com is still more Kerry-intensive than democrats.org is Bush-intensive.