University of the Arts – Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design
Twenty years ago, in April 1989, Central School of Arts and Crafts (est. 1896) and Saint Martins College of Art (est. 1854) merged into what is now called Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (CSM).
On Monday, I went to a panel at the college’s Cochrane Theatre, celebrating the 20 years since the union. Geoff Fowle, former director of the Graphic Design course, hosted the panel of graduates from the last 20 years, who discussed their experiences before, during and after studying at CSM.
After the panel, we were invited to a reception with Geoff and other members of staff and alumni, which lead to some interesting discussions. While sipping our drinks, my tutor asked my opinion on the university website. This was a very thought-provoking question and I wanted to share my ideas here. [click to continue…]
Mashup Albom Cover 2.0
Times have changed and designs too. It is time to update the cover design I’ve made for the different mashup tracks on my iTunes collection. [click to continue…]
“I didn’t grow up buying every book I read,” said the English born Mr. [Nick] Gaiman, 47. “I read books at libraries, I read books at friend’s houses, I read books that I found on people’s window sills.”Eventually, he said, he bought his own books and he believes other readers will, too.
Neil Gaiman decided to give away one of his books free online (initially for a month), as a “celebratory birthday thing” for his blog’s 7th birthday.
You can vote and help him choose which one its going to be on his site.
At the same time, NYT publishes an article on how HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site.
About a month ago Lawrence Lessig announced that the last of his books is now free to download (and remix).
After a productive and valuable conversation with my publisher, Random House, they’ve agreed to permit The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
On January 1st, Charles Sheehan-Miles decided to give the electronic version of his book, Republic, for free.
No more sample chapters, partial books that end in the middle, none of that. You can download and read the complete book. Share it with your friends, email it, do anything you want with it except sell it.
Here’s why: the biggest challenge most authors face isn’t online piracy. It’s not people out there diabolically copying their works and distributing them for free. In fact most authors (including yours truly) suffer from a different problem entirely — no one has ever heard of them. After all, literally hundreds of thousands of new titles come out every year, and only a few hundred writers in the entire United States (if that many) actually live off their books full time. So, by giving away the book, I hope more people actually read it.
Chris Anderson wrote about it at the time:
For the vast majority of authors, being read is actually reward enough. How to turn that recognition into a living is a whole other process, and not necessarily one that depends on the traditional book industry to deliver. Good thing, too, since it so rarely does.
I think 2008 is a good year for electronic book publishing. Let’s see what it’ll do for other media publishing..
BTW, a nice feature is that you can search in most of these books (and many more) in Google Book Search.
Since iTunes 7 went to the public, mashed up with Cover Flow, I’ve been obsessed with finding the covers to most of my albums. It actually started to annoy me when I didn’t have the covers.
The biggest problems is the collection of mashup tracks that I’ve got. I don’t know how I got them but some of them are really good (Radiohead with Sneaker Pimps for example). And for the most of them, I don’t know who created them.
So I decided to group them all together and create a logo and album cover to clarify that these are mashups.
The logo was inspired by iTunes symbols for Shuffle and Repeat.
During the design process, I had the vain idea that it will become the international recognised symbol for mashups. Yes, Recognised all over the world for what it is.
So in order to help me achieve it, and organize your library – you can download, use and share it if you like. Oh, and mash as well.
[Download files: album, gif or eps]
