Great school, great teachers, great peers. I must say I’ve really enjoyed my time there and experienced a load of stuff I don’t think I would’ve elsewhere. There was a faint nostalgia in the air as we saw each other in the morning, waving goodby-

Blahdiblahdiblahdiblah.

In other news, the printers on the IT floor have been complaining about cheese, asking people to INSERT COIN, and another seems to be humming the lyrics of Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, good bye. One has finally realised "I PRINT THEREFORE I AM", and the remaining printer credits it to the most awesome class of 2010.

Also in unrelated news, a box of latex gloves from the science department have been converted into water balloons, and several offices seem to have been clingwrapped in the most devious of ways.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

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I am happy and proud to announce what I believe is the best issue I have ever produced, and you yourself can compare it to the first, the second, and the third issue.

Perspective is made using free and open-source software including The GIMP, Scribus, KDE, Okular, and Vim. However as the industry standard is the proprietary format Adobe InDesign, I am required to convert it to this format at the final stage. However rest assured this is nothing more than copy and pasting – I present to you a magazine made (almost) completely with free software.

This issue is special because you can download this magazine in PDF format. Feel free to read it – it includes a lovely front-page article by me, 3 entires into the art pages at the end, as well as a two-page article about open-source nearing the end featuring pictures of KDE and Elephant’s Dream – the open-source movie by the Blender Foundation. Some kid also wrote an article about the history of web browsers, but I was quite shocked to see that one line said “Google Chrome was released as a beta in September 2008 by Microsoft” – I think they meant for Windows. Nevertheless, my job is to bother about the design, not the standard of articles, and I’m happy to say that this has upped the bar – from what I see at least.

Clickety here to download.

Oh, and for the lazy, here is the thumbnail view of the entire magazine.

Thank you for scrolling through, I hope you’ve enjoyed the magazine over the year, goodbye and good luck to whoever replaces me.

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It had something to do with the fact that there were unwanted grey borders around our gradiented background boxes (they should’ve been borderless!) which clashed horribly with the text. It also had to do with the stunning TWO editions which turned out instead of the lovely red one I was expecting. We now have Perspective: Bromine Edition and Perspective: Dirty-Swamp-Green Edition. Well, arguably the colours do look quite nice, but THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ONE COLOUR.  Not a clear difference between half the issues. “Hey there, how come yours looks a strange colour compared to mine?” Not to mention STUNNING visual effects such as blur, smudge, ink-splatter, and shadow being applied on the text, making it look visually rich and appealing . With these new additions, you will surely be a professional at answering CAPTCHA questions. (those “please enter the text in the photo” things on websites to check whether or not you’re a robot – normally featuring distorted text). Oh, and did I forget about the modern 3D technology used to produce anagliffs for random photos? (Anagliffs are those generated images such that if you look at them through red-green 3D glasses they look 3D) That’s right, but we don’t ship with the glasses. Conclusion? The printer has made nothing short of vandalism of our hard work.

Skimming very -very- quickly through the booklet you might not notice these defects enhancements, but will notice several mysterious visual apparitions artistically misaligned double sets of pages, with an obvious difference in colour between the left and right pages.

I quite liked the front page and the upgrades I did to the inner page templates (including fashionably fake curled up pages where the page number and category could be displayed – but these printing issues have truly cast a dark shadow over these improvements. The printers have done a fine job of coming a stunning 5-6 hours late on their promised delivery time both times we’ve worked with them, and their annoying ringtone (take me into your heart!) does little to appease the humour as we try to predict their true arrival time and next creative excuse.

I also want to take this opportunity that I have a newfound resentment to being called the Layout Editor. I didn’t sign up to be a Layout Editor. From here on out, I shall be referred to as The Layout Designer, or any title which has the word “Designer” in it. The reason? The job of a Layout Editor is to edit the freaking layout – that is to position boxes of text and images so that they fit on a page. I’m sorry, but last time I checked, I’ve seen this done by a 3 year old. Heck, we all do it when writing our essays (which have pictures). Before I came to this position, the magazine was quite literally just arranged boxes of text with some boxes that had another colour to differentiate articles from one another. I don’t blame the Layout Editor then- I don’t think he was well known for creativity (not really an insult, he was exceptional in other areas and still is). However this time, I’m sure people have noticed the big differences – though they are limited to the front page template and the inner page template.  To me, out of the 28 pages in this issue, I actually designed 2. That’s 7%. Wow, I didn’t even hit double digits. There is so much that can be done to visually enhance (now not in the sarcastic sense of the phrase) each and every single page, and this is simply not being done at the moment.

You see, currently the process is that every single “meeting” we in general don’t get anything done, then we wait for everybody to submit their articles late, then we cram in the “designing” stage at the very end. For this issue, the “designing” stage lasted 1 day. For 28 pages. Like mentioned before, all it consisted of was two slightly edited page templates and stacked boxes of text. I’m sorry – but how about this: we actually make designing part of the creation process, and not just shove it to a shoddy job done at the very end of the production line when the release date is in a weeks time.

Ask another designer to accomplish this feat and they will say  flat out “screw you”. It’s impossible to do. They are not going to waste their time stressing over such crappy time schedules. No matter how much money you offer them, they will not do it. It’s almost as bad as the time I got asked to do a 10 minute animation in 2 days. Those 2 days can take a running jump for all I care.

Oh wait, I forgot to mention that we don’t really want you to design during that time. We just want you to put boxes on a page.

“Sure”, says the designer. I’ll do it. Except might I quickly correct something? That is NOT design.

The excuse we’re using is that “we don’t have time”. Screw time. If it’s going to take a long time, then it will – but it should NOT go out looking just like an arranged list of articles. I’ve known enough about website creation to know that you can create just another website, or you can take time and create a masterpiece. Believe me, any other web developer will know the difference between a polished website and a shoddily done one. Oh, so will hackers. Even decent web users can notice the difference.

If you so as respect my ideas on design and layouting, please drop me a comment on this post so I may persuade my stiff necked “lead editor” to allow me to rebel on the next issue – hopefully making something truly worth printing.

Edit: the grumpy looking picture was added because some people complained that this post was a “wall of text”. It was among the first results in Google images for “grumpy looking guy”.

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This month’s issue features a happy yellow design, adorned with silhouetted acrobats on each page, as well as slightly modified first page. I actually had some ideas for a-pimpin style but schedule clashes prevented these from being realised this issue – perhaps the next issue might get some love? This issue was done with Adobe InDesign, as per request from somebody who dealt with the printers last time, but turns out that’s not what they want at all. I plan to take this into my own hands and organise the printers myself for the next issue.

The .pdf is not up for download due to some space issues I’d rather not provoke, but hopefully a proper photograph of the printed issues with good lighting will make up for it (in the unforeseeable future).

Ah, enough of the waffle and syrup, here there be previews! (Again, click on the image to get a higher resolution image)

Again, apart from the compulsory usage of InDesign, a great deal of open-source applications/projects were used in the creation of this magazine. Including The GIMP, Vim, OpenOffice and Gentoo Linux. Yet again, open-source has not failed to contribute!

Unfortunately, there will not be a December issue, but there will be one released sometime early January or so. I wonder what colour to do for the next one … green?

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October 13 is the Expression error: unrecognised punctuation character “{“th day of the year Expression error: unrecognised punctuation character “{” in the Gregorian calendar. There are Expression error: unrecognised punctuation character “{” days remainingExpression error: unrecognised punctuation character “{“.

Wow, looks like they’ve got some errors on their site.

Anyways, my magazine has been distributed today. I would upload it here (pdf) so you could download it but my webserver is running a bit low on space (it’s 70mb). However, what I do have is some thumbnail views I screenshotted from Okular. There are two pages missing but that’s because it just doesn’t fit on my screen. Click on the image for a higher res:

Yes, all design, arrangement, compiling, etc, done by me. Applications used were OpenOffice, Scribus, GIMP (all on Gentoo Linux). Articles were not done by me though. (Note: the pages are imposed, therefore they do not go in the format page 1, 2, 3, etc. They go assuming they will be folded into a book.)

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