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Tufte's Beautiful Evidence

From edwardtufte.com: Edward Tufte's new book, Beautiful Evidence, is now at the printer and should be available in May 2006.

The book is 214 pages, full color, hard cover, and at the usual elegant standards of Graphics Press. Beautiful Evidence may be ordered now; the book will be sent immediately from the bindery when completed.

The introduction and table of contents are available online.

Posted by Professional Communication Arts Editors on April 29, 2006 10:12 AM

Semester-ending celebration


Graduating seniors Nick, Karen, and Jeff at our team dinner ... sporting new accessories, clothes, and books.


Nick is TBA after summer school; Karen is off to graduate school in Rhetoric & Technical Communication @ MTU; Jeff is off to a new design & programming job in South Carolina.

Posted by Michael on April 22, 2006 6:16 AM

Team Wins Two Awards

The STC Arts team brought home two awards in the 2006 Enterprise Team Awards. We took third in both the Multi-Disciplinary Enterprise Team of the Year and the Enterprise Website of the Year. Go Team!

Posted by on April 20, 2006 2:07 PM

STC Arts alumna "Making a Difference in Africa"

Emily Sterk (STC '05) is the subject of a recent MTU Lode article: "Emily Sterk’s choice to join to Peace Corps was an easy one. 'It sounds a bit trite and clichéd,' Emily said, 'but I didn’t like the idea of going to work for a company just to make money for myself to buy things that I really don’t need. I really want to help people.'

Emily's blog: Runaway Chronicles

Posted by Michael on April 20, 2006 8:24 AM

EXPO 2006


Karen, Nick (both graduating seniors), and Shawn represent us at MTU's Undergraduate EXPO 2006.

Posted by Michael on April 20, 2006 8:13 AM

Design Note from Lynn C.

From our STC Arts Italian correspondent (until she comes home from Study Abroad), Lynn C.: "A school here in Torino was asked to create some products for the upcoming chocolate festival ... the design of the posters as well as the chocolate itself is absolutely amazing!

Ciao.
Lynn

Posted by Professional Communication Arts Editors on April 20, 2006 8:02 AM

Intel chips getting a new, flashy home

Ever since Apple's announcement in mid 2005, people have been both expectant and apprehensive about Macintosh computers changing their processors from IBM's PowerPC to Intels x86 chips. According to an article at news.com Apple would be making a big mistake by changing chip architectures again. But regardless of what the experts predicted, Apple is currently selling their Macs with Intel chips.

The article explains that the main reason for Apple's switch is the growing market for laptop computers. Yes, apple does make some excellent laptops, but the current PowerPC processors, mainly the G5, takes too much power and would not allow Apple's strict performance standards if it were put in a laptop. The heat produced by the chip, as well as the added power consumption would make the laptop heavier and the battery life shorter. Ever since the G5 chip came out and was put into Apple's desktop line of computers, they've been trying -- with no success -- to get the same chip into their laptops. Apple needed something like "a low-power chip, similar to the processor in Intel's Centrino bundle" to keep up in the laptop market.

Most of the opposition to this change comes from developers. Changing the architect of the computer's central brain means that all the underlying programming, as well as all the typical day-to-day programs you use will have to be rewritten. That's a lot of work.

Continuing on as to why some say making the switch is a bad idea... what about those who know enough about computers and architectures to build their own computers with Intel x86 chips on which they can run store-bought copies of OS X? Sure, apple still makes money, but will it make enough on the sheer volume increase of OS sales to subsidize the loss is sales of hardware (desktops and PCs?) Only time will be able to tell us that.

Finally, what about the fact that x86 chipsets are well-known to the hacker world? Will this change of architectures by Apple allow for easily-spoofed operating systems and even more revenue loss? Really, the only way to tell is to watch what changes Apple does in the next few years and see if their profits start falling or rising. There's only hope that Apple's prices will someone lower so that every one who's interested in purchasing a laptop can choose between Dell and Apple.

Posted by on April 9, 2006 2:33 PM

XHTML vs HTML - which one to use?

As quickly as web technologies are changing today, it's sometimes tough to decide to take the extra time to learn the new, cool markup language. Starting back with HTML 3.2 -- codenamed "wilbur", HTML has stalled on version 4.01 and is now no longer being developed by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium.) In the past few years, HTML has been making a shift over to XHTML. For the most part, if you know HTML, you pretty much know XHTML, so why not make the switch and start using the markup language of the future?

Currently, there are two paths that XHTML is going down: 1.0 Transitional and 1.0 Strict. For simplicity's sake, transitional is much more lenient than strict. By lenient, I mean that certain tags and their closing counterparts can be put in the not-exact right place and have them still work. Take for example this line of code that defines a paragraph, makes some text bold and the text at the end of the sentence bold and italics. Also note that with XHTML you're not using <b> and <i> for bold and italics.

<p>This is an example of <strong> a line of some text written in <em>XHTML</strong></em></p>

This code creates:
This is an example of a line of some text written in XHTML.
It passes XHTML 1.0 transitional validation but would fail XHTML 1.0 strict validation. The difference between these two are simply where the closing tags are placed. The bold (strong) tag is opened, then the itallic (em) tag is opened, but then the bold tag is closed before the itallic tag. For XHTML strict, the tags must be closed in order as shown below:

<p>This is an example of <strong> a line of some text written in <em>XHTML</em></strong></p>

main difference between HTML and XHTML


In HTML, not all tags require a closing tag -- such as the img tag. In XHTML, all tags must be closed no matter if they have a separate closing tag or not.

HTML <img src="htmlimage.jpg>

XHTML <img src="xhtmlimage.jpg alt="more information" title="xhtml image">

The other main benefit of XHTML over HTML is the fact that you can "legally" inbed XML right in the markup - no need for a separate XML file.
Some great tutorials on making the step from HTML to XHTML can be found at W3Schools, WebMonkey, and Free Webmaster Help.

Posted by on April 9, 2006 1:27 PM
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19th Century Wood Typeface

From a flickr photostream:

flickr allows for sharing public photos tagged with typeface, printing, graphic design, and other communication categories.

Posted by Professional Communication Arts Editors on April 8, 2006 11:33 AM