A new year…

…and little to no snow. This Michigan winter has been…interesting. I have a remote control snowmobile (thank you inlaws!) and not a lot of room to play with it. But winter isn’t over so things could potentially change. The worst bit of weather we’ve had was one morning of freezing rain – which meant I had to carefully chip away a few mm of ice from around the car and then drive very carefully. It then promptly got warmer and turned into a few snow fluries. I miss mountains too now that I think about it…

[30 minutes after posting it is now snowing…we’ll see if it sticks.]

A brief thought on Photoshop CS3 Beta

The ubiquitous Photoshop icon, the eye, is not on the tool palette. [begin update] And yes it’s been missing since CS…but it didn’t really strike me until the CS3 beta at just how profound it’s missing is to me. John Nack at Adobe has the reasoning behind the new icon. I like the font being used. [end update] Oh and CS3 is definitely on my upgrade list. Perhaps I should cut the leadership at Adobe some slack. (See my “Waiting for Adobe” post). But they better make sure that Illustrator is just as useful. Perhaps with multiple page handling? And Acrobat – please make sure that in your haste to address enterprise markets you don’t forget us designers and creative folk. Good looking PDFs are important. And are probably more useful then generic server produced PDFs. InDesign – I’ve always felt the XML handling was a bit…under executed. And it would be neat to have built-in support for database publishing…I know, buy one of the several 3rd party plug-ins available. I’m just saying that that kind of functionality would be really nice to have built in. But I see good things coming out of Adobe and I am excited that they let the general public get a peak at it’s flagship product. The transparency makes me hopeful that the Macromedia acquisition wasn’t just to get rid of a competitor but to build better products in the long run.

So tell us about your new job…

Michigan Public Health Institute was started by the Michigan State government as a non-profit organization to study and create programs in regards to public health issues. This is good in that MPHI is not government (although it closely works with government) and can easily adapt and change in comparison to typical government bureaucracy. I work in the Interactive Solutions Group (ISG) as a graphic designer. ISG provides technology-aided solutions for information problems (think training and education). Previously ISG and MPHI outsourced all their graphic design. They now want to bring the design in-house to reduce costs, improve information control and to remove “layers” between end clients and the ISG.

So what do I do?
Amazingly enough this graphic design position covers everything thing from web design to print with a healthy dose of multi-media design thrown in. Basically its very wide ranging. What I really love about the position is that I can have a positive influence on something more important (and life helping) then say, the latest annual report. Annual reports are important, but at MPHI I can help with public health issues. That’s pretty cool in my book.