Sunset after rain

I’ll post source res if people want it.

Office 12 – new breath of life?

Microsoft have released a series of press images from their Professional Developers Conference 2005, some of which give shots of the new Office platform — creatively code-named “12″ (yes, 2003 was 11). Whilst there hasn’t been much significant change to Office in recent years (dare I say since 97) aside from UI enhancements (2003 did that properly, with a little bit of groupware stuff thrown in on the side), this version looks as if it’s going to break that pattern. Certainly, Vista’s internal font-rendering engine must have something to do with it, but it seems to me from the released screenshots as though Office has changed, also, in the way it handles graphics and layout. Personally, I’m dying to see what justified text looks like in Word.

So, I’m a sucker for graphics. Hopefully this upcoming release will reflect aesthetic advancement in the documents it produces, as well as the interface that surrounds this. (Alas, there appears no hope of Microsoft natively embracing PDF format, as they seek to make Word documents the ubiquitous format. Even if it doesn’t display properly in other versions of the same application, or have font embedding. Doh.)

Bogart, vegetarian dog extraordinaire!

Or maybe he’s not vegetarian afterall… perhaps he was just making use of a garden… bed?

ArtsEdge

ArtsEdge is a seriously impressive website. Go there, check out the design (stunning, clear), then look at the technical aspects of it — this is the most surprising part. Semantically brilliant markup, even if a little div-heavy, and 100% CSS styling. This is the kind of website that print graphics agencies strive for – only, more often than not, they’re stuck in a fixed-pixel mindset which means no fluid design elements like on this site (e.g. the orange “lick” at the bottom and core content area background element, which displays in full at 1024+ and doesn’t visibly have anything missing at 800×600 or less). Its print stylesheet is also good stuff, trimming everything but the content and core branding itself — not enough websites do that.

As is too often the case with web companies, the agency responsible for this site, Cube7, don’t appear to have had the chance to give their own website this treatment yet. Even so, it’s a great testament to both their capabilities and the design potential of CSS.

When the whole web goes crazy

When the whole web goes crazy, and spammers send completely random characters down the line to completely random addresses, their aim now it seems moved beyond even any idealism of making money and simply into the abstract realm of “How much do you reckon we can piss these people off?” Finally, professional spammers and teenaged crackers have realised their lives are utterly meaningless, and that their stereotypically poor self-esteem is entirely deserved. You people are the scum of the planet.

Email, however, is not enough. You pump drivel down our contact forms, down every channel of communication, in the vain hope that someone will listen to your inane messages. Or, alternatively, not even to that: just that someone will read the random characters your program has generated. Congratulations, you’re a tool. You took a medium designed for communication, and reduced it to nothing. This isn’t communication, this is transfer. Of nothing. This is the realisation of the world of Lea, only worse. You aren’t even abbreviated humans: you can’t even pretend you have a language. You don’t even have that. Only your characters, lacking syntax, form, meaning. Not even in the sense of an abstract poetic idealism: just words. You don’t even have that.

We’ve watched from afar as you have spiralled to your death. As slowly, your attempts to evade detection have slowly fallen in purpose. From well written, but ill-founded, communications, you have regressed — your language loses regularity of form, anything to evade detection. Collective action has seen the demise of a medium, spiralling into nothing. You brought about this demise. Your own perception of what is and isn’t successful. You are, even now, destroying your own [messed up] livelihood.

Go back to being introverted geeks. Have no contact with anyone: we’d prefer it like that. Stay that way, or rot in the backwaters of the Internet: your own cess pool of meaningless characters.