ZacParker.com
Design. Music. Art. Portland.
March 27, 2007 at 10:26 am · Filed under art, design, development, music, video
Adobe has finally announced the release of their updated and re-branded version of their Creative Suite line of products. Now go buy that new MacBook Pro you’ve been putting off, because the whole suite runs natively on Intel-based Macs, unlike it’s predecessors. This from Adobe’s website:
The Adobe® Creative® Suite 3 family offers you choice — in the combination of creative tools you master, the design disciplines you explore, and the richness and scope of content you create. This revolutionary new release includes six editions, each combining tightly integrated, industry-leading components that enable you to handle virtually any creative task.
Together these six editions of Creative Suite 3 address virtually every creative discipline and empower you to work more efficiently with your creative team; collaborate more closely with developers to produce engaging experiences; and serve your clients, your business, and your creative vision more easily and effectively than ever before.
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March 26, 2007 at 12:13 pm · Filed under music, portland
Jona Bechtolt of The Blow, is the one man band YACHT. He is kicking 
off his mini-tour this Friday at Berbati’s Pan, which is leading up to “THE MOST EPIC CD RELEASE PARTY OF ALL TIME. ON AN ACTUAL YACHT.” on 5/05, also here in Portland. I can’t tell you how excited I am for this party, and even more so, his new CD, I Believe in You. Your Magic is Real. If you haven’t heard YACHT yet, check out this new track from the aforementioned upcoming album. Jona is entering a whole new world.
If that’s not enough to convince you to pre-order his new album, check out his MySpace page for another cut from the new album as well as a couple of remix tracks from other works. While the album isnt set to release until May, I heard a little rumor that if you pre-order now, the album may be shipping as early as this week.
March 25, 2007 at 12:53 pm · Filed under design
If you are a reader here in Portland, you may already be aware that I am on the hunt for a job. Anyone else may have already assumed that for whatever reason, or may have had absolutely no idea, nor cared in the slightest bit about my state of employment. No matter what the case, I am indeed looking for a job. I am willing to purchase an iPod nano (PRODUCT) RED for the person who refers me to the job I get hired to. I have created a new page detailing exactly how that works, here.
For simplicity, the content of that page is as follows:
Taking a page from Tijs Vrolix, I am looking for a job, and am willing to compensate the person who finds me that perfect job. How does this work? You forward me job postings, and if I get hired, I will send you an iPod nano (PRODUCT) RED upon the receipt of my third paycheck. Why the (Product) Red? Because Apple contributes $10 from the sale of each (PRODUCT) RED nano to the Global Fund, to help fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. How can you trust me to follow through on my promise? I guess it’s just that. I trust you to send me only the most fitting job openings, and in return, you trust me to keep my promise of sending you your nano.
What kind of work am I interested in? I am looking for an entry level position with a company whose main focus is media of some sort. Ultimately, I am looking for a position as a junior designer. I have previous college coursework and plenty of experience. I am simply looking for that foot in the door to get me started and build up my portfolio. While pay is certainly important - I won’t work for free, or even close to minimum wage - location is even more so. I live in inner NE Portland, Oregon, and don’t care to work outside of the city limits. That means no Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham, or Tigard etc… More important than either pay or location however, is the job. Before telling me about a job opening, think if it will be worth your while. If it is not a job that meets the above specifications, or does not match my skills, the chances of me getting hired for that position are slim, thus making your chances of receiving the free iPod quite slim. If you know the specifics of the job, or the employers, and know that it is not a good job, or healthy work environment, please do not send me those openings either.
After reading the above, you would like to submit a job opening that meets these specifications, then please download and read over my CV/Resume. If you still are certain it is a good fit, forward the opening to me at zac@zacparker.com
Download:
Zac Parker CV (PDF)
Thanks a million for your referrals!
March 24, 2007 at 11:51 am · Filed under music, portland, video
Subterranean Blog, those somewhat lovable ‘MTV in an indie-blog disguise’ cats, have posted a video of some live Shins material. I didn’t notice at first, but the video is them playing inside the Crystal Ballroom to a crowd of zero, during the day. Perhaps sound checking before their show here? Or maybe just getting some footage for the sake of having some video to toss around. What do you think? Either way, we’re damn lucky to have some of the world’s greatest bands living here in our big little city. Looks like the video footage for A Comet Appears is at the Crystal as well, except at night with all the fancy lights going, yet still without an audience. I’d post the videos here, but since they are MTV, they have some sort of confounded, evil, embedded player that I don’t really care to try to steal from. Call me crazy but I just hate getting sued. Ruins my day, every time. Did anyone here in Portland or anywhere else around the world get the chance to see them? Here tickets sold out at an incredible rate, and scalpers were selling them for as much as 75 bucks a pop.
March 24, 2007 at 10:20 am · Filed under design, tutorials
As you may or may not have noticed from following my posts, BittBox is one of my favorite spots on the interwebs. This last week has seen not one, nor two, but THREE posts regarding seamless vector patterns. They begin by sharing a seamless vector star pattern. A pretty simple and cool pattern that is a great addition to anyones illustrator pattern swatch.
If you are looking to beef up your swatch with even more patterns, they released another 5 seamless vector patterns on Thursday. This set contains two circle patterns, a diamond pattern, and two more star patterns. Also in that article is a reference to a great vector program called InkScape, which blows Illustrator out of the water when it comes to tracing, and best of all, it’s free!
The most recent post about vector patterns, is certainly my favorite. Instead of just giving them to you, or showing you how to make them, The Power (and ease) of Patterns in Illustrator shows you what to do with them. The author shows you how to warp them, use them as a stroke, fill objects and create a pattern from a path. A really powerful tutorial that picks up where most other tutorial websites leave off.
Have you made any patterns? Show us how you have used and implemented them in your designs. Post/discuss here!
March 23, 2007 at 4:49 pm · Filed under blogging, design
The lovely folk at TutorialBlog had the pleasure of releasing their first WP theme this week. Their first theme entitled Tuut, is a dark theme with a pleasantly barely-there seamless background pattern and big easy to read post-date buttons. All in all it is very simple, lo-fi and quick-to-load, yet attractive and uncluttered feeling. A success, if not a mind blowing first release.
Their second and third releases both came out on Wednesday the 23rd, and are titled CityScape and ShinyThings, respectively. CityScape is a slightly more graphic intensive theme, yet just as dark as its predecessor. It features the well known ‘thick stripe’ style background, and some big shiny LED looking buttons for the comments. The header graphic is as you may have guessed: a cityscape. ShinyThings makes me feel like I’m wandering through a ‘made for the internet of today’ version of one of my favorite childhood boardgames, Candy Land. Everything is butterscotch yellow, and hard candy grape. More or less a colored version of CityScape, this theme gets rid of the header image and replaces it with a simple yellow bar behind some purple text. It looks better than I make it sound, I promise. A bright, easy to read, and easy to navigate theme.
Have you got some new themes you are working on? Have some favorites that nobody knows about? Love these ones? Hate ‘em? Post/discuss here!
March 23, 2007 at 2:48 pm · Filed under music, portland
Bridging the Distance: A Portland, Or Covers 
Compilation, being released on April 17th, is a great reason to actually BUY a cd this year. This 19-track compilation features Portland bands such as Dandy Warhols
, The Thermals
, The Joggers
and Chris Walla
(of Death Cab fame) covering classic bands like Yes, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Heart, Skynard and The Boss. Not only do you get 19 never before released tracks of Portland goodness, but it all goes to benefit p:ear, a non-profit group here in PDX that “builds positive relationships with homeless and transitional youth through education, art and recreation to affirm personal worth and create more meaningful and healthier lives”. Get this album the day it comes out. You won’t regret it, and someone else other than a fat CEO will benefit from it. Tracklisting after the jump…
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March 23, 2007 at 1:59 pm · Filed under art, design
I’ve noticed a large trend these days towards using hand-made elements in design. I saw this begin more on the digital ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ side of things, but watched it slowly make its way into design, marketing and advertising. These created by hand elements range from small bits of pencil drawn swirls or sketches blended into something largely digital, to pieces that have been drawn nearly entirely by hand, and then colored, touched up or turned into some sort of montage in Photoshop. Computer Arts has some great articles on this trend, and how to make sure you don’t get left behind. Their tutorial titled Hands-on Design exemplifies one of many ways of implementing real world art into digital design. To learn how to create your own hand drawn font, check out this article that makes it easier than no-bake cheesecake (creative intuition not included).
Hand created graphics are seen in nearly every aspect of the digital world now, from small web graphics like my own current header image, to national television advertising, like “Email Pants“, A commercial for Sprint/Nextel, music written by Chris Kennedy. Sure, there is still plenty of room for design that is created from rough sketch to finished product strictly in photoshop, or on your illustrator artboard, but traditional methods of art and design are coming back and being reinvented in a huge way.
March 21, 2007 at 7:58 am · Filed under music, portland
The Decemberists are kicking off another national tour starting tonight with two nights in a row at Loew’s Theater in Jersey 
City. Quite unlike them not to play a kickoff show here in Portland. This doesn’t surprise me one bit though. Before their first Capitol Records release, they were certainly a favorite here in town. However, with the increasing glossy, made-for-the-radio sound that began to unfurl in their last Kill Rock Starts release, Picaresque
and their major label debut The Crane Wife
, they have lost a large portion of their fans here, and an even larger portion of their respect. While Portland seems to wholly embrace all that is local, original, and independent, it takes just one release that sounds like its a move towards writing for mass consumption to fall out of favor. Perhaps that is the reason behind The Decemberists
move to entirely skip Portland on this tour. Sure, they are playing Edgefield Winery, which is tactfully billed as being a Portland show. Edgefield Winery is not in, or really all that near Portland. Nearly an hours drive. Way to stick it to your old pals, Decemberists. Stick to places where you can earn the love of your rock radio listeners, advertisers, and corporate sponsors, and absolutely, by all means, stay the hell away from anywhere that might earn you some respect from the people who sent you from basement shows to billboards. You’ll be playing the House of Blues
in no time.
March 18, 2007 at 2:59 pm · Filed under design, development
Posted Friday at BittBox, there is a great article on how to find quality freebies by using Google’s indexing feature to search within quality sites such as Digg, TutorialBlog or Smashing Magazine, which often contain links to quality material, as opposed to spending hours sifting through tons of crappy ‘clip-art’ or other low-quality media before finding what you are REALLY looking for. A BittBox reader inspired by the article created this tool, which more or less automates the search method described in the article, though searches a total 25 social media sites, and specific blogs. The Google Social Media Search tool created by illovich allows you to search for any type of downloadable media such as vectors, PSD files, code snippets, buttons and whatever else you may be looking for. Do you have other ideas for great ways to find quality downloadable free media? Post them here!
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