3D printing is a process of making three-dimensional solid objects from a digital file usually layer upon layer. 3D Printing is currently rather a hard term to define. Officially it is just one of the rapid manufacturing techniques, however; the term 3D Printing itself is used as a synonym for rapid manufacturing.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/27/ORDbot_quantum.jpg/330px-ORDbot_quantum.jpg

“The official definition maintains that 3D Printing is just one of the many ways that you do this. In that light: 3D Printing is a technique that deposits material layer by layer using a head similar to that of a inkjet printer. The head tends to move along the X and Y axes and the object being printed moves up and down on the Z axis.” (Peels, J, 2008)

Technology:

http://www.createitreal.com/images/stories/chesssmall.gif

Using 3D printing technology allows the human to build real object from a 3D design no matter ho complex the object is. The technology cut the virtual object vertically to make 2D slices of the object and then build the real object slice by slice. The 3D printer print the slices on top of each other and every slice is given a thickness that is added to the real object volume.

History:

Charles Hull is the inventor of the technology for printing physical 3D objects from digital data in 1984, he named it and he obtained patent for the technique in 1984. Charles Hull had been developing and improving the technique for four years and he made it available to the general public in 1988. Since then 3D Printers where only sold or used for commercial purposes or design studios and this monopolism lasted 20 years until 2008 where 3D printers were sold for home use. The lowest price for a decent 3D printer is approximately $5000.

Charles Hull Story

“3D printing was developed by Charles Hull, the founder of 3D Systems in 1984. Mr. Hull, born May 12, 1939, was an inventor of over 60 U.S. patents in the fields of ion optics and rapid prototyping. In his patent for the “Apparatus for Production of Three-Dimensional Objects by stereo lithography”, issued on March 11, 1986, he defined stereo lithography

http://www.compete.org/images/sized/25th/uploads/speakers/chuck_hull-greyscale-200×200.jpg

as a method and apparatus for making solid objects by successively “printing” thin layers of the ultraviolet curable material one on top of the other. Originally called Stereolithography, in the early years the technological development of the 3d printer systems by 3D System using

the Stereolithography technique was in parallel development to Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), invented in 1988 by Scott Crump, the founder of Stratasys. In 1993 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) added to the development of this field by patenting “3 Dimensional Printing techniques” based on modifications of 2D printer technologies, which was then licensed to Z Corporation for development of their 3DP printers” (A Brief History of 3D Printing, 2011)

By Dawood Aljabr

More Links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing
• http://3dprinterhub.com/3D-Printer-Companies/Ultimaker
• http://www.skillshare.com/Design-for-3D-Printing-with-Shapeways/1752050217
• http://www.zcorp.com/documents/194_2007-1212-Wall%20Street%20Journal-3DP%20Turns%20Web%20World%20Real.pdf

References:

• 3D printer technology. (n.d.). Create It Real. Retrieved June 10, 2012, from www.createitreal.com/index.php/en/3d-printer/48
• A Brief History of 3D Printing. (2011, September 9). Buildatorn 3d Printers. Retrieved June 10, 2012, from http://buildatron.com/history-of-3d-printing
• Anderson, A. (2007, November 15). A whole new dimension Rich homes can afford 3D printers. The Economist. Retrieved June 10, 2012, from www.economist.com/node/10105016?story_id=10105016
• Peels, J. (2008, July 15). Shapeways | Blog: 3D Printing. A definition and links. Shapeways 3D Printing – Make Your Ideas Real with the Shapeways 3D Printing Marketplace & Community.. Retrieved June 10, 2012, from http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/39-3D-Printing.-A-definition-and-links.html
• Sherman, L. M. (2004, August). 3D Printers Lead Growth of Rapid Prototyping : Plastics Technology . The Online Magazine of Plastics Technology : Plastics Technology . Retrieved June 10, 2012, from http://www.ptonline.com/articles/3d-printers-lead-growth-of-rapid-prototyping

Who is Stefan Sagmeister?

Stefan Sagmeister is a New York-based graphic designer and typographer. He is best known for his album covers, posters and his uniquely packaged and designed books. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith and Pat Metheny.

Biography

He began his design career at the age of 15 at “Alphorn,” an Austrian Youth magazine. In 1991, he moved to Hong Kong to work the Leo Burnett’s Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work at Tibor Kalman’s M&Co design company. His tenure there was short lived, as Kalman soon decided to retire from the design business.

Stefan then proceeded to form the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed branding, graphics and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner. Sagmeister Inc. has employed designers including Martin Woodtli, and Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker, who later formed Karlssonwilker.

Stefan is a long-standing artistic collaborator with musicians David Byrne and Lou Reed. He is the author of the design monograph “Made You Look” which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions. Solo shows on Sagmeister, Inc.’s work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Japan, Osaka, Prague, Cologne and Seoul.

Awards

• He received a Grammy Award in 2005 in the Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package category for art directing “Once in a Lifetime” box set by the Talking Heads.
  

  Once in a Lifetime, 2005

• He received a second Grammy Award for his design of the David Byrne and Brian Eno album “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today” in the Grammy Award for Best Recording Package category in 2010.

His motto is “Design that needed guts from the creator and still the ghost of these guts in the final execution.”

Stefan goes on a yearlong sabbatical around every seven years, where he does not take work from clients. He is resolute about this, even if the work is tempting, and has displayed this by declining an offer to design a poster for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Stefan spends the year experimenting with personal work and refreshing himself as a designer.

By Sungkyun Lee

References:

• Tsedyhotn, A.(2008, February 3). What Stefan Sagmeister has learned in his life so far, The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/arts/01ihtDESIGN4.1.9677515.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1
• Stefan, S.(2008, September). what he has learned. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_on_what_he_has_learned.html
• Stefan Sagmeister homepage. retrieved from http://www.sagmeister.com/

InDesign is one of the Adobe’s family of products. It is a versatile desktop publishing application that gives you pixel-perfect control over design and typography (“Adobe InDesign CS6”, n.d.). It can be used to create works such as flyers, magazines, brochures, posters, books and newspapers. Production artists and graphic designers are the principal users, creating and laying out periodical publications, posters, and print media (Wikipedia, 2012).

http://www.creativepro.com/files/story_images/20100506_fg01a.jpg

History:

In late 1994, Adobe InDesign evolved from Adobe Pagemaker, an earlier version of the Adobe desktop publishing program that, while well-meaning in its purpose, proved limiting, especially to users with little graphic design experience. In 1998, Adobe InDesign has taken the place of Quark Express as the standard for desktop publishing software in creative print industries such as news, advertising and public relations. It was code-named “K2” and was released as InDesign 1.0 in August 1999 (Pearce, 2008).

In 2002, InDesign was the first Mac OS X-native desktop publishing (DTP) software. In version 3 (InDesign CS), it received a boost in distribution by being bundled with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat in the Creative Suite.

InDesign exports documents in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) and has multilingual support. It was the first DTP application to support Unicode for text processing, advanced typography with OpenType fonts, advanced transparency features, layout styles, optical margin alignment, and cross-platform scripting using JavaScript.

Later versions of the software introduced new file formats. To support the new features, especially typographic, introduced with InDesign CS, both the program and its document format are not backward-compatible. Instead, InDesign CS2 has the backward-compatible .inx format, an XML-based document representation. InDesign CS versions updated with the 3.1 April 2005 update can read InDesign CS2-saved files exported to the .inx format. The InDesign Interchange format does not support versions earlier than InDesign CS.

Adobe developed InDesign CS3 (and Creative Suite 3) as universal binary software compatible with native Intel and PowerPC Mac machines in 2007, two years after the announced 2005 schedule, inconveniencing Intel-Mac early-adopters. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen had announced that “Adobe will be first with a complete line of universal applications.” The CS2 Mac version had code tightly integrated to the PPC architecture, and not natively compatible with the Intel processors in Apple’s new machines, so porting the products to another platform was more difficult than had been anticipated. Adobe developed the CS3 application integrating Macromedia products (2005), rather than recompiling CS2 and simultaneously developing CS3 (Wikipedia, 2012).

http://arianecdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Adobe-10-years-software.jpg

By Ibrahim Alghunaim

 

Useful Links:

• http://arianecdesign.com/a-decade-of-adobe-indesign
• http://quarkvsindesign.com/history-of-the-war/
• http://www.mediacollege.com/adobe/indesign/

References:

Adobe InDesign. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 12, 2012, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_InDesign
Adobe InDesign CS6: What is InDesign. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign.html
Pearce, M. (2008, June). InDesign History. Retrieved from http://lowendmac.com/software/i/indesign.html

The Interesting Design Concept- COOL HUNTING

A design concept is the idea behind a design. It shows one’s plan on solving the design problem in front of you. It’s the underlying logic, thinking, and reasoning for how you’ll design a website.

We can think of design concepts in two ways.

• Verbal – the verbal parts of the concept might be words used to describe the design. Verbal concepts tend toward the abstract. They’re focused on the message that the design is to communicate.

• Visual – the visual parts of the concept might be a specific image or color scheme. It might be an idea to use circles prominently. Visual concepts tend to be a little more concrete. They should come from the verbal part of the concept. Visual concept are focused more on the how to convey the message of the design.

Good Communication Happens By Design

Cool Hunting is update on ideas and products in the intersection of art, design, culture and technology. In early 1990s cool hunting is a term coined that refers to a new breed of marketing professionals, called cool hunters. Their job to make observations and predictions in changes of new or existing cultural trends.

Cool Hunting is a website for creative professionals to find new and inspiring stories and videos from a wide range of categories that includes art, design, style, technology, music, food and travel.

Made By Breath

Michaela Tomiskova, a Czech designer crafts elegant and modern lamps by combining glass, crystal and electricity. The 2011 Prague AAAD graduate uses her eccentric use of materials to give new life to traditional production. Her production collaborate two national glass-works and each focus on different forms of production. The Made by Breath is more art than lighting. It is very beautiful specially when lit. The Made by Breath collection pays tribute to two different styles of Czech craft heritage.

The collection shows an astonishing combination of crystal and glass with electricity. It produces an unusual fashion by using usual materials.

Thank you for reading my post!

Interesting Links:

http://www.designconcept.com/

Home

http://www.coolhunting.com/design/made-by-breath.php

References:

• Design Concepts. Design Concept. Retrieved June 12, 2012, June from    http://www.designconcept.com/

• Cool Hunting. Cool Hunting. Retrieved June 12, 2012, from http://www.coolhunting.com/

• Cool Hunting. Made by Breath. Retrieved June 12, 2012, from http://www.coolhunting.com/design/made-by-breath.php

• Wikipedia. (2011). Design. Retrieved June 12, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design.

Movements are formed around a core – an idea, ideal or ideology through word or picture, the principles on which the respective movements are founded (Heller, 2003).

Modernism

Modernism is the concept used to describe an extremely diverse range of innovative and experimental practices, covering the period from 1880 to 1939 (Wallace, 2011). It is less than a single, consistent ‘movement’ than a retrospective, multifaceted category which is categorized by the invention, dissolution and recombination of genres and their boundaries (Wallace, 2011). Modernists sought to find new forms to express their understanding and vision of modernity. Paul Cézanne is often regarded of the founding figure of this revolutionary movement of the early twentieth century (Wallace, 2011).

http://www.articons.co.uk/cezanne.htm

“All things, particularly in art, are theory developed and applied in contact with nature. Painting is not only to copy the object, it is to seize a harmony between numerous relations”. Paul Cézanne

Four criteria to describe modernism includes aesthetic, self-consciousness or reflexivity; simultaneity, juxtaposition or ‘montage’; paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty; and ‘dehumanization’ or the demise of the integrated humanist self, as explained by Eugene Lunn. Some  examples of modernism include the Eiffel Tower, Charlie Chaplin movies and works from Pablo Picasso (Wallace, 2011).

Modernism is “the moment at which art stops making sense” (Wallace, 2011, p. 14).

Postmodernism implies a current relationship with modernism; the prefix refers to a period stretching from the early 1960’s through to the present (Wallace, 2011). The term is often used to denote a condition of contemporary culture (Wallace, 2011).

Avant-Garde

The term ‘avant-garde’ translates to advanced guard (Hollis, 2001). Its first use as a cultural term is associated with French socialist Henri de Saint-Simon (Wallace, 2011). Avant-garde artists were seen as crucial members of the elite that would lead societies into future transformation (Wallace, 2011). The movement gained momentum in the nineteenth century gave rise of innovative art while challenging the values of the establishments (Wallace, 2011). This movement was characterized by the desire to rupture tradition and attack the institutions through fragmented, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions and the interaction between random findings.

http://web.presby.edu/writingcenter/newsletter/avant-garde.html

Salvador Dali was a key artistic in the avant-garde movement. He was a master of surrealism, which took the avant-garde movement to a whole new level.

The avant-garde movement disappeared when people began to market, sell and ultimately approve of the work and the artists. Andy Warhol was the last of the dying breed and the movement died shortly after they did. The avant-garde movement roughly ended around 1970.

Avant-garde is clearly distinguished from modernism by virtue of the latter’s determination to undermine the institution of art (Wallace, 2011).

Design

The foundations of modern art were laid by the avant-garde movement (Hollis, 2001). The internet has had a major impact on the transmission of ideas to large audiences all over the globe (Heller, 2003). The principles of modernism and avant-garde are visible in current design (Hollis, 2001). Traditionally, words and the alphabet were used symmetrically in a hierarchy of importance (Hollis, 2001). Current, designers often push boundaries to shock their audience and create higher visual interest. Modernism and avant-garde movements influenced design principles in our postmodernist era.

By Katie Solon

Useful Links

These links offer information on artists and movements.

http://www.artmovements.co.uk/home.htm

http://seacoast.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/fre320/avantgarde.htm

http://web.presby.edu/writingcenter/newsletter/avant-garde.html

References

Wallace, J. (2011). Beginning modernism. New York, NY: Palgrove Macmillan.

Hollis, R. (2001). Graphic design: A concise history. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson.

Heller, S. (2003). Merz to emigre and beyond: Avant-garde magazine design of the twentieth century. New York, NY: Phaidon Press Limited.

Biography:

Mark Boulton is the creative director of Mark Boulton Design and co-founder of Five Simple Steps Company.Mark is known to be a designer,an author, a speaker. The goal of Five Simple Steps is simple; to publish ‘must-read’ books for the web professional written by world-renowned authors or leading thinkers in their field. He is currently living in Wales, he is a husband, dad and uncle.

Mark started his company based on a bunch of tutorials posted on a blog several years ago he continues to update his blog till this day. He wrote an article called, ‘Five Simple Steps to Better Typography’. It was a five part series and presented some simple facts about typography that he felt needed to be addressed, particularly on the web. Two months later that site was growing fast and had doubled its traffic. After the growth of his blog Mark decided to make a book from these blog post and named the book A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web. Soon after a pdf was released and it went for sale in February 2009 and sold 3,000 copies in the first fortnight. The positive feedback for the book was overwhelming.

Soon after the success of the pdf a paperback was released although only about 1500 all of them have now sold except for several dozen. Since the book was such a success Mark started to work with other authors and wrote another popular book called A Practical Guide to Designing Grid Systems. Mark continues to improve his business till this day.

What’s Being Done:

There is a variety of work that Mark Boulton and his company does, it ranges from Web designing to online branding here’s some more detail

• Audience and User research – Finding out about the people going to be using the site so they can find out what features to include and which ones not to

• Information Architecture – Is organizing how your website will be structured, and how users find what they need, it is an important key to the success of any design project

• Interaction and User Interface Design – Using techniques and tools such as paper or HTML prototyping to make sure your design is true to the medium.

• Graphic Design and Art Direction- Deep understanding of traditional design practice applied in a relevant and appropriate way.

References

Mark Boulton Design(2012) Blog. Retrieved from http://markboultondesign.com/blog/

Mark Boulton (2012) Retrieved from http://www.markboulton.co.uk/

Mark Boulton Design (2010) Retrieved from http://www.markboulton.co.uk/

 By Mohammad Alghathami

EARLY HISTORY

According to Newspapers, Canada, 2012, a news-sheet was published daily to chronicle the activities of the Roman senate as far back as 69 B.C. Dubbed Acta Diurna, which translates to acts of the day,the one page paper is believed to be the earliest form of a continuous newspaper.

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News bulletins are known to have been printed in China prior to the 13^th century, but it was not until Marco Polo’s journeys to the Orient in that century that the court gazettewas introduced to Europe. The term Gazette, a particularly popular name today for newspapers all over the world, is said to have been coined in Italy, where accounts of the status of the various wars taking place were printed on a news bulletin that cost the reader a gazetta, a small coin used in Venice in the 16^th century.

In Germany, where most news bulletins had been single sided news sheets (broadsheets) the newspaper came into being around the 1500s, quite some time after the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press (1440-1445). The main topics for news in those days were battles, disasters and royal announcements. By the 1700s newspapers had sprung up all over Europe, but the concept of a free press was launched primarily in England, not long after 1688, when representative government came into being (Newspapers, Canada, 2012).

TOWARD THE NEW WORLD

With the new colonies building up in America, news publications became an important part of the communications systems over the vast areas being settled. Freedom of the press did not immigrate along with the English colonists, however. In fact, most newspapers had to hold licences in order to operate and stood to lose printing privileges if authorities felt they overstepped their boundaries. The first recorded newspaper publishing in Canada, was the Halifax Gazette, on March 23, 1752.  This was soon followed by the Quebec Gazette, which has survived to the present day as a weekly publication known as Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph and is likely the longest running newspaper in North America. (Kesterton, 1967 as cited in Newspapers, Canada, 2012).

In  the Americas, the newspapers, which contained mostly government announcements and some foreign news, were more or less sponsored by the government so went along with whichever officials were currently in office. It was not long before the publishers rebelled. In 1833, the penny press was introduced as a newspaper for the working population. Thriving on the lurid and sensational, the press was directed at the common man. Advertising became a necessity for the small newspapers to survive (Newspapers, Canada, 2012);  at the same time, publishers came to realize that not sensationalism but timely reporting and honesty in the news were the elements  necessary to win the public’s trust and patronage.

MORE  RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

In the mid-nineteenth century, the invention of the telegraph meant that wire services started up in the United States. The job of this new technology was to gather and distribute news items from all over the world to newspapers all over the country. The system soon grew to encompass the globe and newspaper subscribers were able to get current news daily or weekly from outside their community and even outside their country.

In Canada, the newspaper went through terrific changes at the beginning of the 20^th century. With the phenomenon of two World Wars, a depression and a massive amount of changes in industry and technology, the French and English newspaper circulation by 1989 tallied 5.7 million subscribers. After the recession, the figure dropped considerably and today stands at 5.3 million (Newspapers, Canada, 2010). Digital newspapers began to crop up on the Internet, when, in 1996, the New York Times launched its first electronic newspaper.

http://battellemedia.com/media/images/images/flake%20ex%202-tm.jpg

In the UK, the Guardian followed suit in presenting its first digital edition in 1999.  Soon, most newspapers in the U.S, UK and Canada had digital reporting as well as the published offline news services. The content continued to change and grow until the electronic newspapers included a huge array of images, advertising, forums and readers’ opinions. (mediaspacesolutions.com/blog,2012). Newspapers have come a long way from a single page of news on daily community happenings to a digitally manipulated communication system that spans the world (Lapham, 1995).

References:

Media Space Solutions.com/blog, (2012). Evolution of Newspapers starting with size changes. Retrieved from http://web.mediaspacesolutions.com/blog/bid/120001/Evolution-of-Newspapers-Starting-with-Size-Changes

Simply Zesty.com/Social Media. N.d. The evolution of newspapers and the internet through the years. Retrieved from http://www.simplyzesty.com/social-media/the-evolution-of-newspapers-and-the-internet-through-the-years/

Newspapers, Canada, (2010). Retrieved from http://www.newspaperscanada.ca/about-newspapers/history-newspapers

Kesterton, W.H. (1967), A History of Journalism in Canada. McClelland and Stewart Limited

Lapham, C. (1995) The Evolution of the Newspaper of the Future. Retrieved from http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1995/jul/lapham.html

Among the many reasons to buy e-books are the convenience, the savings, the value and the “try before you buy” promise that comes with each download. You can use the services from any one of your sites and locations; your own home, your laptop, or Personal Computer, your iphone, Palm Pilot or Blackberry. In fact, you can download and store them all in one transaction if that.  is what you wish to do. Even though the e-book is relatively new to the world of digital text its popularity is growing by leaps and bounds. Technology has produced a great product with the potential to involve millions in the pastime of reading (mobile-apps-games-knoji.com, n.d., Ezine Articles, n.d.).

By Majid Al Mualla

 The digital or electronic book is a digital replica of actual writing from the original author. Manuals and other technical documents were the subjects of the first e-books so the target audience was limited (mobile-apps-games-knoji.com, n.d.). Still, when the first e-books appeared on the web in the 1990s their impact on readers everywhere was swift and powerful.  The new concept that this technology represented was book accessibility for everyone.  Digital files could be downloaded or the reader could buy a CD that features an electronic book encrypted on the disc.  This meant that it was now possible to choose to read books by your favourite authors without having to pack around a bulky hardcover or risk the chance of loss. E-books by the hundreds became part of the digital library you could store on your personnel digital assistant (PDA) or laptop (Ezine Articles, n.d.).  New technology and new models are being introduced, still, the three most dominant e-reader tools are Kindle, by Amazon; PRS-500 by Sony and Cybook Gen3. Books can also be read on IPad, recently put out by Apple (mobile-apps-games-knoji.com, n.d.).

The chief developer of ebooks and the culture that makes them endure is Adobe Acrobat. The PDF formats that Adobe offers are compatible with all types of storage units, including PCs, laptops and, in recent, years, digital phones.  Ebooks can be accessed, transferred, printed and sent by e-mail from any electronic storage source, and best of all, they can be retrieved easily whether the addressee is flying, cruising or travelling by train. Advances in digital technologies have made it possible for readers to have instant access to thousands of books and possible for authors to present those books to the reader in a variety of exciting and innovative ways.  Digital reading through the concept of e-books has put a whole new meaning into book-reading, and a whole lot of books into the hands (or eyes) of readers (Ezine Articles, n.d.).

September, 2003, ACLS History e-book project celebrated one year online. The project was launched with a 500 book library on History.  This month, 275 additional History books will be added to the project.  The project now has over 160 institutions subscribing and plans to add many “born digital” books to the source in 2004 (humanitiesebook.org, 2003).

October of 2003, a new white paper was published online. The paper, by e-publishing specialist, Nancy, Lin was named “Report on Technology Development and Production Workflow for XML Encoded E-Books,” and was shown on the History E-Book Project Website (humanitiesebook.org, 2003)

Second Quarter, 2010, the sale of e-books ( electronic books)  outsold hardcover print books on the Amazon.com site- an outstanding accomplishment in the e-book revolution (Amazon, 2010).

Interesting Links

http://write2publish.blogspot.ca/2011/04/why-ebook-market-share-is-important.html

http://ebookreader.com/

http://www.ereader-direct.com/?gclid=CMyy-5SrtrACFaYaQgodPUXM8w

http://worldlibrary.net/

References:

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-History-of-Electronic-Books&id=401958

http://mobile-apps-games.knoji.com/ebook-itshistory-pros-cons-and-developments/

http://www.humanitiesebook.org/heb-whitepaper-1.df