This has been bugging me for awhile.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Most of the time I give them a once-through and then immediately delete them. Podcasts are a source of information for me, like reading nytimes.com. I don’t consider them part of my music library. When I review my last.fm profile, I don’t want to see Bloomberg News up there in the top ten all time next to Radiohead, U2 and Neko Case. Last.fm is about keeping track of my music profile, not my podcast listening (for me at least).

Every six or seven months I’ve gone in and deleted podcasts from my library in order to make my total play count and artists charts more reflective of the information I’m actually trying to track. Recently I figured out how to avoid scrobbling these tracks all together. The mythical holy grail of permanently banning specific artists, if you will.

I use the last.fm scrobbler desktop application for Mac OS X. It starts automatically whenever iTunes is open and also tracks my iPod plays. Here’s how to modify the preferences so that the last.fm app only scrobbles the tracks you want to track. (I’m not saying that this is the how you can tell last.fm not to track all of your N*Sync plays, but you know…however you want to use this information is entirely up to you. Weirdo.)

Permanently Unscrobble Specific Artists

• With the last.fm application open, click on the last.fm menu and select “preferences.”
• In the preferences window click on the “Scrobbling” submenu in the left hand window.
• In the window that says “Only tracks from the selected directories will be scrobbled,” double click on the hard drive icon and navigate to wherever you store your music. (All of my music is under my user account in the Music folder).
• Now, click off the check mark buttons next to all of the artists that you do not want to scrobble. As you can see in the image below, I’ve turned off all of my podcasts:

How to know if you’ve done it right

When you play a track in a non-scrobbling directory the notation in the scrobbling status bar will indicate that it will not be uploaded to your last.fm profile:

Notes

• The same technique can be used (I would assume) for individual albums, but as far as I can tell, you can not drill down to specific tracks. It only works based on directories. If for some reason you desperately don’t want the world to know that you secretly rock out to Abba’s “Dancing Queen” behind those inauspicious headphones, you could always change the album title in the track information to something like “ban” and then Consolidate Library in the iTunes preference window. The file structure will reorganize itself with “ban” as a new album under the “Abba” directory with “Dancing Queen” as the only file in the folder. Uncheck “ban” and you won’t scrobble any of the tracks included.

Jim over at humanradiator.com posted an interesting take on efficiency and file management today. You should check out his post. He raises some good points, most of which I tend to disagree with.

As I represent the wild and unstructured half of our Harvey Dent-ish web design team, I posted the following as a reply to his post.

(It’s probably important to note that this is not personal. Jim’s an exceptional designer who I really enjoy working with. He just has strong opinions that I happen to disagree with. Nothin’ wrong with that, challenging each other makes us both better. Nothin’ but love for you, Jim.)

My Reply

Having a system is great. arbitrarily assuming yours is the best because it works for you is not so great. let’s take a look at the other side of the coin:

“Do you really have to have hundreds of icons on your desktop?”

who cares? it’s my desktop.

most of the time application windows are open and you can’t see it, and the desktop is a great place to drop PDFs and skitch screen grabs because it’s one click away from the “find attachments” dialogue box.

When you’re emailing a PDF to a client, all you have to do is click “desktop>date modified” and pick the most recent file. I suppose I could bury my PDFs in a complex file structure requiring sequential naming and 5 clicks to uncover (assuming I remember where it was saved, but this way is easier. also, leaving all of those files on the desktop for a couple of days without deleting them means ALL of the various jpegs and PDFs that I am most likely to need going forward remain one click away AND they all get backed up in Time Machine automatically every hour. Although our server does back things up, no one has ever shown me how to easily and quickly recover the files, so I use Time Machine for this where possible, because I don’t have to think about it. Every two or three weeks when the icons need to be pruned I Select All and drag them to the trash. Even then they’ll sit in the trash can for a day or two in case I need them quickly.

I think it’s grand that you snap align only the most important icons on the desktop. you probably do this because it works for you. I don’t judge, it’s your computer. I will say that all of the organization in the world doesn’t do squat to help anyone looking for a file who isn’t intimately familiar with your personal file system. That’s why I put all of my essential job files on our central server. No one ever has to see my desktop, because my job files don’t exist locally on it.

The idea of trying to keep folders below 700MB is an interesting one. In all seriousness, that’s pretty clever. It sounds like a holdover from a time when your files were stored locally and had to be backed up regularly, but it is a clever idea. I use the terabyte of space on our central server to store those old files. Backing anything up on disk makes me twitchy because I know that the disk will either never be used again (common), or lost (very common if the disk has to be referenced in the future).

re: Layer Masks and Adjustment Layers.

Some people’s brains don’t think in terms of naming layers in process. To me it’s like taking the time to write notes in the margins of a pencil sketch about the weight and thickness of each line as you are drawing them. My creative process is way too unstructured to do this. I’ve tried it. I create layers on the fly with option drag so quickly and in such large numbers that pausing in process to label everything is simply not conducive.

I am not unaware of the effect this has on developers, so I used to, at the end of a design process, when files were ready to hand off to the developers, go through and delete all hidden layer, rename layers, and (before Adobe bought Macromedia and it became unnecessary) created new layers out of each drop shadow and applied each layer mask and adjustment layer because these things used to not translate properly into Dreamweaver Fireworks (sorry, Erik. See Comments). (this was especially true of layer masking).

As far as I know, this problem has been solved, and layer masks are a perfectly valid way to control layers and groups of layers that has no adverse translation effects for Dreamweaver Fireworks users. Also, to the best of my knowledge, no developer has ever told me which way they prefer. For the most part, I don’t select layers in the layer palette anyway, I use Auto Select Layer by holding down Command and clicking on the area I want to access. (Holding down, I think, Control while clicking with the Move Tool will bring up a quick list of all of the layers under that pixel as I explain here.)

Layer Masks and adjustment layers have a built in advantage that you are over looking and make for better PS files (albeit larger…you have a point there): Neither layer masks or layer styles destroy pixels. You can always undo or revise what you’ve done with them later, because they do not require you to lock in your changes. While it is true that you might be able to “get the same effect” most of the time without them, it’s not always (or even generally) true that you can do this and still retain as much control as possible.

A good example is a placed image (serving as a placeholder) to represent, for example a rotating homepage image. I would absolutely never place that file in my PS layers and clip it to the size I want. I would use a Layer Mask of the size I want. Why? Because if I ever need to change the arrangement of the image or the crop or whatever I can just click the lock on the layer mask and drag the image around until I’m satisfied, because all of the original pixels are still there. Layer Masking allows me to do this quickly and easily. Again: this USED to give Dreamweaver Fireworks fits. It does not anymore. (Drop shadow opacity was another thing that didn’t translate well in the past that has been fixed so I don’t do a Create Layer on my Drop Shadows anymore either).

“Because it adds file weight,” is, in my opinion, not a good enough reason not to use a specific tool. Layers also add file weight, but we’re probably not about to flatten everything. If you’re only trying to avoid the spinning pinwheel, you may as well either 1) quit your other open applications 2) get a faster computer with more RAM. What you’re saying about the files being too big, is the same argument I hear from vendors who insist on not keeping their software current and require files to be provided in Illustrator 10 format. I don’t doubt that you find it frustrating, but the problem is not the file, it’s the hardware. If you find yourself limiting your designs so the computer doesn’t have to think, you need a new computer.

Two years ago, the good people at the Camp Fire USA River Bend Council asked me to work up a T-shirt design. The result was the basic illustration you see on the left.

Created fairly quickly and without a tremendous amount of planning or forethought this illustration turned out to be really popular both with the staff and campers and was eventually adopted as the official logo for Camp Tannadoonah which is an overnight camp in southwestern Michigan. (I’ve yet to have one of my marks tattooed on anyone’s body. For the time being, the Tannadoonah mark drawn on concrete with sidewalk chalk is the best I’ve been able to achieve.)

Unfortunately that left the day camp, Camp Tawanchi without a comparable logo. The challenge was to design a mark for Tawanchi that fit with the existing branding of Tannadoonah while still remaining distinct. Where Tannadoonah is all about spending a week in the woods in a traditional summer camp setting, Tawanchi is more about bringing a touch of that camping experience into the city. Tawanchi campers spend the day at “the Res,” a building located in one of South Bend’s city parks. The intent was to reference this building as a symbol for the Tawanchi experience and to render it in the rough style already defined in the existing Tannadoonah mark.

Both marks were created using expanded brush strokes in Illustrator. The thin font is Myriad Pro Light and the thicker serif font is the extremely elegant free font Nevis, which is available here. I think Nevis compares favorably to the far more expensive (but incredibly beautiful) sans face Gotham from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

In our initial client meeting, my client for the InfoZerk business cards suggested that he’d like to see a “dystopian” concept for the cards which I thought was a very cool descriptive term. I had concepts already so I decided to push the third one a bit to try to achieve the elusive “dystopia.” The areas of silver would have been rendered in silver foil or metalic silver Pantone Ink.

Just wrapped a very trying project designing these business cards for James Avery of InfoZerk/ZerkMedia. The cards are printed on a solid black stock (no white edges), and feature a white foil for the content area and a raised shiny textured area that forms an off-set “Z” (for Zerk) at the top of the card which is rendered with thermography.

I learned the hard way while getting these cards produced that foil and thermography do not play together well. The reason (as it was explained to me) is that, in order for thermography to render properly, there is an upper limit on the weight of the card stock then can be used.

Unfortunately, foil requires the exact opposite: a thick, firm stock in order for it to apply properly. If it’s applied to a softer sheet the foil press tends to push into the material and the foil ends up “climbing” out of the letterforms. I compare this to a meniscus on a test tube (if you remember high school chemistry). This foil creep can cause the counters of letter forms to fill in, or to put it non-designer terminology: My lower case E’s looked like O’s.

(It’s possible that none of what I just wrote is accurate. If so, please leave a comment and set me straight. I’m going on what I was told by my print vendor).

So the thermography required a soft stock, which made it tough to apply the foil, which I had to use to be absolutely sure that the type would come out pure white, because the whole design was based around the contrast between shiny and dull on the black card, and that required a black stock upon which white ink could potential look slightly gray…and around and around we go.

In hindsight, and for future iterations of this card, I should have asked for Gloss Varnish instead of thermography and specified a thicker, heavier sheet in order to get the foil to apply properly.

Luckily I had a very understanding, patient client and a print vendor who bent over backwards to make things right. All’s well that ends well.