directorcommentary | jasonbentley.org

So over time I've accumulated a ton of pictures I've collected during various Google searches - basically, if I come across a picture that stands out or looks cool or weird or sexy or whatever, I save it and throw it into the "My Pictures" directory on my si drive. XP features a screen saver that cycles through the pix in My Pictures, so over time it's become a strange art exhibit featuring the life and times of complete strangers. When randomly strung together, the nonsequiturs have taken on some poignancy. Or can when I need to find some.

I'll occasionally post a few here. Since I never really save the location from whence I'd saved them (isolating the images from context is whole point), I can't credit them. To whit:

Having recently watched Mary Poppins for the first time I dunno how long, a couple thoughts occurred to me:

1. When Mary decides to show off and say "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" backward, she merely recites the forward syllables in reverse order, except for the first, which she actually says backward. It should be "suoicodilaipxecitsiligarfilacrufus," not "dociousaliexpiisticfragicalirufus," as the arrogant Poppins proudly pontificates.
   
   
2. Show of hands - is Bert gay and is Mary his faghag? Think about it - he's the artistic type, musical, can dance like its nobody's business, likes to hang out on rooftops with other sweaty men...could this be why Mary sings that "ladies needn't fear when you are near, your sweet gentility is crystal clear." Sweet gentility? Hmmm. Sounds pretty Celluloid Closet to me. Of course ladies needn't fear if he'd rather be snoggin' a bobby. Yes, I know he's a cockney played by Dick Van Dyke, but that's going a bit too far don't you think?
   
   Indubitably.
   

So I think I'm going to start up an occasional series here called Adobe Gone Wrong - which will document some of the more egregious misuses or bad uses of Adobe software that I encounter on the net all the time. I'm talking about professional misuses - I'm not gonna harp on the suburban teenager that uses his cracked copy of Photoshop 7 to replace Jenna Jamison's head with Caitlin's from 3rd period trig. I mean the countless bad logos, horrifying illustratons, and altogether bad taste exhibited by those that should know better.

As we stumble toward the tenth anniversary of Windows 95, the pioneering days are over - the terra incognita arguement just doesn't hold water anymore. We're not just "figuring this out" or "stumbling our way in the dark," especially in the world of Internet media. Knowing how to drive the damn car when one is sailing down the road should seem a common sense necessity, non? Which brings me back to Adobe software.

Of the applications that make up what is now the Adobe Creative Suite, that is Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, InDesign, and GoLive, the first three are unquestioned industry standards. InDesign and GoLive are two relatively new additions that haven't had the time - or in GoLive's case, the sophistication - to topple more established tools off the desktop. Photoshop and Illustrator are used to create and/or doctor most of the published images you see every day, even in print publications. 'Photoshop' has entered the rare pantheon of Coroporate Brands cum Vowels, essentially replacing 'airbrush,' both in reality and lexigraphy as a noun, a vowel, and - an even rarer strata - an adjective. So, one uses Adobe Photoshop to photoshop the zits out of one's senior picture - but not too much or one looks way too photoshopped. One can only imagine how Photoshop has freed the sanities of thousands of high school portrait photographers across the US.

But I digress.

So this all came to me this morning when I logged on to Accuweather's website for the umptillionth morning in a row. Accuweather once supplied, *ahem*, accurate weather information almost exculsively to news outlets, shipping yards, utility companies and the like. Accuweather pioneered the meterological use of Doppler radar, practically invented the science of hurricane forcasting, and all kinds of advances that have actually saves lives (and do they ever get a thank you card from Florida? No, they never call, they never write). News outlets across the US and Canada feature "Accuweather Forecasts." To use Accu a as a prefix is now a cliché, but Accuweather, founded in 1962, was there first, so we can forgive them for naming their online store the AccuMall. Or not.

For, dearly beloved, we gather here today not to praise, but to scorn. For AccuWeather, pioneer and inoovator, employs hundreds of superaccurate weather forecasters, and one bad Illustrator guy.

I've long since turned to AccuWeather's website to get consistently right-on weather information. Horse's mouth, right? Besides, why deal with weather.com when you can get accuweather.com? Granted in Santa Clara, California, the L.A. Story rule pretty much applies: "Sunny. 72." But if it's gonna spike to 95 today, I wanna know so I can set up the bowl of ice-cubes and fan for Simba, my cat.

For months now I've had to look at this same ugly-ass ad that's right there on their index page for all the world to see. I've come to call him the Phantom of the Doppler.

Dig, if you will, a capture:



In any case, this is Adobe gone wrong - Illustrator sloppily used when 30 mins worth of work and could convey the point much better. How about the guy looking out the window at lightning? Or better let, lets get radical and draw lightning that *forks*. Maybe some glow to the light on the guy's face so that it looks like a reflection and not an abberation. Or maybe the guy should be facing toward the lightning so there's some kind of connection there.

Now, I'm no ivory-tower evangelist. I'm not out there conducting seminars on good web art, and I know that Adobe products, for the uninitiated, are as friendly as the attendants at a Fallujah gas station. Illustrator's curve is especially steep. But once you learn the basic tools, using them to make good visuals is only a matter of practice and imagination.

There's also many many good tutorials out here - those at about.com are enough to give the talented a base for extending their abilities with Illustrator and Photoshop. They can even give the seasoned veteran some interesting new tips. The point is that there are enough people out there adept at these tools to make the crap that finds its way online intolerable.

While I find the Phantom of the Doppler particularly offensive, AccuWeather.com is hardly a serial offender. The Flash "weatherman" that starts telling you about the "ID10T" award once you click on the Phantom is merely annoying and condescending, but at least its fairly well done. I'll wax snarky on serial offenders at a later time.

In the interest of putting up or shutting up, I offer Jason's Ten Minute Solution (starring me) to replace the pigment-deficient Phantom that's haunted their home page for months. Granted, it portrays a thoroughly unsafe activity (disclaimer: lightning-watching can get you killed - I was actually standing in a room) - but at least it makes sense.