The Fringe Podcast – Theme Song

Looks like we’ve got a mild internet hit on our hands!

The Fringe Podcast has recently been opening their show with a theme produced and performed right here at SpringSprang Studio, and apparently fans are asking for it. The Fringe Podcast Theme by SpringSprang is a rocking version of the non-rocking theme of Fox’s show Fringe.

You can download it below or wait until The Fringe Podcast guys post it on their site. (Clicking on the ZIP option will download an archive of the MP3 for those having trouble.)

THE FRINGE PODCAST THEME
(Arranged and produced by John Trauscht at SpringSprang Studio)
Download as a .MP3 or Download as a .ZIP

In addition to our design work, we write and produce music for several of our clients. Usually the songs tend to be tied up in video production schedules, so we can’t really share them when we finish them, until now!

And by the way, if you watch Fringe (on Fox or Hulu), you really owe it to yourself to subscribe to The Fringe Podcast on iTunes. It is an excellently produced fan podcast, and hosts Darrell and Clint provide informed and concise content and commentary. UPDATE: Since this posting, The Fringe Podcast has been awarded Best Entertainment Podcast for the 2010 Podcast Awards. Congratulations, Derrell and Clint!

3D with an iPhone?

Remember ViewMasters? They let you view a quality of 3D that even Hollywood couldn’t touch at that time. In the 90′s we were introduced to Stereograms, compelling people to stare at walls of digital noise for hours trying to see hidden 3D images. For my money, I’m still a fan of the old ViewMaster photo, or Stereoscopic Photo. Unfortunately, the format isn’t exactly convenient to produce. However, there is a free and efficient work-around, as long as you can cross your eyes!

About 5 years ago I started making Stereoscopic 3D photos when I went on vacation. These are from my family’s latest road trip. My tool of choice this time was my iPhone.

Step 1: Position your head perpendicular to the image

Step 2: Remaining perpendicular, position your eyes straight toward the center of the whole image (where the individual images butt against each other).

Step 3: Keep your head straight (don’t tilt it!).

Sep 4: Slowly cross your eyes until the two individual images merge.

Click the image to enlarge. Enjoy!

View of Longs Peak from Twin Sisters Mountain, Estes Park, CO.

 

An area of The Badlands, SD where visitors can explore the landscape.

Mount Rushmore, Black Hills, SD.

A view from Artist’s Point, Yellowstone National Park, WY.

Another view at Artist’s Point in Yellowstone.

GLUG Motor Oil

My friend Mark Frankel recently started a Facebook page called Designer Geeks. Mark is a talented designer up in the Chicago area, with whom Karen and I both worked at Big Idea, and Karen also at Disney.

The idea of Designer Geeks is for designers of all stripes to submit their designs for a specific topic. The page is inspired in part by the site Drawer Geeks, created by another former Big Idea co-worker, Greg Hardin.

Our first assignment topic is OIL (and designs are due at the time of this posting). I’d tossed around the idea of knocking BP or spoofing another oil company, like Shell or Gulf, but aggressive social commentary is generally not my thing. I prefer subtlety and humor – a little wink. Something that puts its arm around you like an old friend, pokes you in the chest and says “Hey, I like you!”

If you’re a designer and want to participate in the next assignment, SIGN UP!

Engine Have a Bug? You Can TRUST Glug!

I opted to emulate the old motor oil designs, some of which I think are really cool, like STP or Pennzoil. I also wanted it to look like it had been laying on the floor of a mechanic’s shop for 20 years, or sitting on the shelf of an antique shop.

I used 6 or 7 different textures to mimic all of that. I also discovered that coffee stains look an awful lot like oil stains. Click to embiggen!

SpringSprang Has ICRS Swag!

This is no ordinary re-usable shopping bag – it’s our very first piece of self-promotional swag!

Many of the people we’ve worked with over the years will be at the 2010 ICRS convention in St. Louis this week. Karen and Carol will be roaming the aisles, handing out these beauties to whomever may need one, each including our very first self-promotional brochure (click to download). We’ve kept a few bags at the office, so even if you’re not at ICRS this week, swing by our office, and if you’re really nice to us, we might just let you have one! (Supplies are limited, of course).

Note for designers:

This bag is made from recyclable material, so it is very sensitive to screen-printing driers (they shrink up into little scraps of plastic). The bag vendor could only print one side in a limited area, so we had the other side done at a print shop. When you print on these things, your screen printer will need to order special air-drying ink. If you do it the way we did it, give yourself plenty of time to make sure the second printer can match the ink color.

Designing “Firehouse”

Back when I worked at Big Idea, our Licensing VP wanted to distribute fonts with the VeggieTales style guide. Due to font licensing restrictions, we decided that the least complicated way to do that was to create our own custom fonts. That was a decade ago. Fortunately for me, while the era of OpenType fonts is upon us, PostScript Type 1 fonts are still fairly standard on the Mac, and the process to create them has remained more-or-less the same for the last 12 years.

SpringSprang’s “City of Franklin – Firehouse™” font is based on the painted type in the window of the Williamson County Fire & Rescue firehouse less than a block from our office. I’ve always loved type and have been known to take pictures of it when I see something I like. To the right is the shot I took with my iPhone walking to work one day. This is what I used as inspiration to create the full set, filling in the blanks where needed.

After cleaning up and straightening out the letter images in Photoshop, I used Adobe Illustrator to create the final art. The number “14” didn’t seem like it belonged, though, so I made the numbers look more like the letter forms.

Once the art was completed, I used my workhorse copy of Fontographer 4.7.3 to create the font itself. Fontographer is largely unchanged in the last 12 years, only receiving occasional maintenance updates to keep it compatible with current operating systems. I’m looking forward to the long over-due version 5 coming this May from FontLab, which will support the OpenType format.

To celebrate our new endeavor, we’ve decided to make the Firehouse font available for free from our website for a limited time. Now through August 31, 2010, you can download it for free for Mac* from the SpringSprang website. (Some restrictions apply. See documentation for details.)

After August 31, we intend to have other “City of Franklin” series fonts available for purchase, and the Firehouse font will be included with those.

* Currently we are not making a PC TrueType version of Firehouse available. Call me a typography snob, but the TrueType format is really an inferior format for various reasons. However, an OpenType version (PC compatible) will be made available once we’ve upgraded to Fontographer 5 in the coming months.

Enjoy!

What’s Your Vector, Victor? Anybody for a Bitmap?

A pixel is a square of solid, flat color. Bitmapped art is made up of pixels and is resolution dependent.

You see it countless times in the movies and on television. Usually someone is analyzing security camera footage. “Can you zoom in on that?” “Can you enhance that?” Most of what we see is pure techno fiction, but it can be confusing to the average person. After all, we live in an age where technological leaps are happening all the time, why wouldn’t some of these things be feasible?

There are two basic types of digital art

PIXEL – A single, solid, square of digital color. Pixels make BITMAPPED art.

VECTOR – A mathematically defined path. Sometimes referred to as “line art.”

A pixel has no detail – only flat, solid color. Pixels makeup bitmapped art, such as photos, scans, or anything on the web or in video. Bitmapped art is resolution dependent. It requires the original image to have a high pixel count in order to show better detail.

A vector, on the other hand, is resolution independent. You can enlarge and reduce vectors all day without any loss of detail. Vectors can be given a fill color and a stroke color. Typical vector art includes logos, fonts, and flat-color illustrations created in Adobe Illustrator. However, vectors cannot give you the real-world imaging that bitmapped art can. (Sometimes people refer to vector art as “line art,” but not all line art is vector, as the term can also apply to hand-inked drawings.)

Let’s go back to our security camera footage. It is digital video, stored on a hard drive, and made up of pixels. The best security cameras on the market today only have a resolution of 811 x 508 pixels. That’s about a half of a megapixel. (Most cell phones take higher res pictures than that.)

On CSI, when they “enhance” the reflection in someone’s eye, the reality is there are likely only a dozen pixels in that part of the image (consider the eye in the top image). If I drew a dozen solid-color boxes and showed them to you, would you be able to see an image of another person? Of course not, because the information simply isn’t there. CSI is lying to you.

Can’t they just “zoom in?”

ZOOMING IN is something that a camera can do optically, but once the image is recorded, it’s pixel count is locked. “Can’t they just blow it up?” BLOWING UP is the common slang everyone uses to describe INTERPOLATION, a process in which software adds new pixels to an image by determining the most likely colors to exist between current pixels.

A bitmapped image can be “enhanced” in a variety of ways. You can manually repair it, but this is time-consuming, and you have to be a good image manipulator. This is the digital equivalent of taking your image to a car body shop. You can also use adjustment layers and sharpening.

Sharpening a bitmapped image will pull out details that are already there, but it can’t create detail. The sharpening process takes neighboring pixels and increases their contrast with each other. (This is a different process than increasing the Contrast on an image as a whole.)

Why does PRINT need images in such a high resolution?

In the design industry, we frequently run across this issue. A delightfully unknowing client may say, “Here’s some great pictures for that project. I pulled them off our website.” When asked if they can supply higher res pictures, they often wonder why we can’t just “blow it up.”

Unlike a website, which requires a relatively low pixel count, print requires 3 to 4 times the pixels for the same image at the same size because of a print process known as line screening. The higher the line screen, the better quality print you have.

Remember your old crumby laser printer from 15 years ago? It most likely had a line screen of around 60 lpi (lines-per-inch). A typical print press line-screen is 150 lpi. The way the science of printing works, you need two pixels for each line screen count. So a 150 lpi screen requires 300 ppi (pixels-per-inch). “Pixels-per-inch” is also called “dots-per-inch” or “dpi.”

“Blowing up” or interpolating a 72 ppi web image for print requires software to guess at filling in 3 pixels between each existing pixel. That’s a lot to interpret! Imagine driving down a road and only being able to see 1/4 of what is actually there. Or listening to a song in which only one of the beats from each measure is actually played. The software cannot add detail to what would have normally been there in real life – it can only fill in the blanks.

Used conservatively, interpolation can be successful in meeting print requirements without noticeably negative effects. Misused, however, interpolation will create unsightly digital details which you don’t want, instead of the real-world details which it cannot create. This is referred to as pixilation. While it is true that there are software techniques that can improve interpolation, at its best, it can only reduce pixelation. It still cannot recreate real-life details.

How to recognize a bitmapped file vs. a vector file

Common file formats for pixel-based (bitmapped) art are: .psd, .tif, .jpg, .gif and .png.

Common file formats for vector-based art are: .ai, .eps and .pdf.

A .pdf can contain both vector and bitmapped art, but unlike pixel-based formats, a .pdf will retain the original vector information.

An .eps also can contain both vector and bitmapped art, but unlike a .pdf, not simultaneously. Although it was an essential file format even 10 years ago, the .eps is fading in its importance. You’re better off avoiding it.

Thanks!

I hope this gives you a better idea of how to talk to your designer and provide elements for your projects. It’s my hope that this will ultimately save you time, money and aggravation! Much success to you!

Recording Duet

Whether writing songs, recording an instrument, or producing voice overs, if you want to record professional quality audio to a computer, you need an audio driver interface.

A few of us here at SpringSprang have music/audio backgrounds, and we enjoy using those skills whenever we can.

Recently, while working on a project, I was preparing to record a demo for a song that one of our clients hired us to write. Having been pleased with a variety of M-Audio products before, the audio interface that I had been using at the time was the Firewire 410. As audio drivers go, the 410 is a good bang for the buck, and it records well … when it works.

The 410 may be the single most finicky piece of equipment I have ever used in my life, and the software driver is equally bad. Part of the recommended troubleshooting process even includes installing a fresh system – a painful and time-consuming process, to say the least. After spending nearly an entire day trying to fix it, and this having been at least the third time I’ve had to deal with it, I decided to leave my 410 behind.

Hello, Apogee Duet. This simple-looking, wonderful piece of equipment had me up and recording in minutes. It’s so easy to use, and the quality is outstanding. The Apogee Duet was made specifically to work with Apple Logic and/or Garage Band (sorry, ProTools users), but Apogee makes a variety of other great interfaces and drivers for you, too.

I haven’t abandoned M-Audio completely – I’ve got a great pair of BX5a studio monitors, a decent pair of IE-30 in-ear monitors, and a nice, basic keyboard. I almost got the ProFire 610 instead, but the simplicity of the Duet won me over.

Shag

I was going through some old things from my Big Idea days and ran across this business card signed by SHAG (whose real name is Josh Agle) at the 2007 San Diego Comic Con. All I had on me at the time for him to sign was my business card, and this is what he did.

I went to Comic Con with my friend and Big Idea co-worker Greg Hardin. For those of you who don’t know what Comic Con is, it’s the biggest gathering of pop-culture on the planet, allowing fans and industry professionals to mingle and gorge on all things geek and pop. This is where George Lucas announced a little film called Star Wars many years ago, and it has grown ever since. From major studios promoting the latest sci-fi show to independent comic book artists trying to sell a few issues of their wares, this is the place you need to be.

Throughout the convention, there are dozens of panels with speakers including the stars from top-rated shows like Lost, blockbusters like Iron Man, industry groups like Disney publishing, and individual artists of influence, such as Shag and many others.

By his own admission, Shag’s taste is questionable. He proudly describes his work as “low brow.” Yet, I’ve always loved his technique and had assumed for many years that it was based on vector art (as in Adobe Illustrator). Not so. Shag illustrates all his pieces the old fashioned way – with pencil, paper and paint. No computer. It allows him to have gallery showings of real artwork all over the world.

My favorite font house, House Industries, designed several typefaces about five years ago based on Shag’s work. Had I realized that I would meet the guy, I would have brought the packaging for him to sign (it sits on my desk like a framed picture), but I’m kinda glad things turned out the way they did. Now I have a unique SHAG work of art to call my own!

Farewell, IE6.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iMac, he also said that Apple would no longer support the floppy drive. It forced the issue on a dying technology. The tech graveyard is full of lots of formerly cutting edge gadgetry and software, and it appears we may add another familiar face to the graveyard this year – Internet Explorer 6.

For a number of years now, the bane of every web designer has been IE6. In fact, in the recent update of our own site, after looking at our analytics and finding that while 17% of our visitors use IE7 or 8, only 3% use IE6. Considering the amount of time it would take to make our site support IE6, we decided against it. I’ve since learned that we are a part of a trend in that decision, and now you can add Google to that list.

IE6, meet floppy drive.

Franklin considers parking passes for visitors

Visitors to downtown Franklin may have another parking option as city aldermen explore creating a limited parking pass program for downtown office owners.

Under the proposal, business owners could give parking passes to their guests who need more time to park their cars — besides the current free, four-hour time limits on street parking spaces and downtown’s two free, public parking garages.

Business owners hope the proposal might help reduce the number of parking tickets in downtown. That problem apparently arose after the city began enforcing new four-hour parking rules in the public parking lot behind the retail/office Five Points Building at the intersection of Fifth Avenue North and Main Street.

“When you have an office and you have visitors come and they’re getting tickets, it makes it difficult to lease that space,” Mayor John Schroer said. “We don’t want to run people out because there’s not available parking.”

Aldermen discussed the proposal at their first meeting in early January. If eventually approved, this would be another step by Franklin leaders to help bolster downtown Franklin.