The following story is reported by our man at the sharp end, Nick the Van (real name withheld for operational reasons!).

Honcho: Why doesn’t the colour printer work?

Designer/Tech: Is it plugged in?

Honcho: Does it need to be?

Designer/Tech: Seriously???

Honcho: You said you installed a wireless network!

There you have it, what more can I possibly add?

I tried to remain calm and impartial but really …

Not only is the fucking CS3 suite preposterously fucking expensive and fucking massive and takes a fucking eon to install and fails to fucking work if you have demo versions of CS3 apps installed which means you have to install the whole fucking thing from scratch* [...]

The BBC often report some good stuff on technology and web sites. As web design is my line of ‘work’, what follows is some comment on a bunch of reports I’ve been meaning to post for a while now.

“According to research from Nielsen/NetRatings, people are buying cutting-edge technology but often don’t understand the terms [...]

... where have you been all my life

Rita is quite an amazingly innovative (really!) illustration/drawing application for Mac OS X. It’s also the work of one guy, Niklas Frykholm, who appears to be sickeningly talented!

It’s incredibly easy to use, has loads of funky drawing tools (hatching, highlights, freehand shapes and ovals), several mad drawing tools [...]

I like Trebuchet MS.

It’s clean, attractive and just looks good.

It’s a Microsoft font which ships with Windows, hence it’s also safe to use for web design work.

Unfortunately, Trebuchet MS has a nasty secret.

It was invented by Vincent Connare.

No problem you think, so what?

Vincent Connare also ‘invented’ Comic Sans.

Ug, ouch!

Designed originally by Rune Söderqvist, for album accompanying Abba The Movie, the cover shown here is the doctored version from Epic UK – the superior original did not have the graduated sky.

Record label butchering aside, the strong graphical style, silhouettes, graduated fills and hard cut out edges looks like it could have been produced [...]