Saturday, April 26, 2003

ephemera: another place to get lost

alaska_brochure.jpgGraphic Design from the 1920s and 1930s is David Levine's collection of travel-related ephemera. Levine says he's been collecting this stuff since 1992, when he lived in Prague.

I agree with him that some of the best design ever was done in Europe in the 30s and 40s -- though I think graphic design in Europe and the US during this time reached levels not seen since. I can spend hours happily going through graphic design examples on this site and others, for example, but can't say the same about spending time going through, say, coolhomepages.com or any other collections of graphic design over the past ten years or so. Not that it's bad -- it's just boring.

But I might have a different opinion of it all in ten or twenty years. Who knows? All I know is I tend to get my inspiration from designs from the first half of the 20th century rather than from any other time period, and this has been true for about three or four years now.

Right now I'm very frustrated because I got a good start on the layout of an ebook we're publishing -- decided on the heading fonts, got the style the way I wanted it, the right leading, the right margins, etc. etc. A good start. Then Word crashed and not just crashed, but corrupted the frelling file to boot. It's very disheartening to have to go in and recreate it all -- kinda dropped me right out of the zone I was in all afternoon (I had to process the illustrations that are going into this ebook -- took some time because I had to do stuff like get rid of moire patterns and crap like that).

Anyway ... [/blah blah blah]
posted by lee on 04/26/03 at 09:00 PM
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Monday, April 28, 2003

Odds & ends & life is war

I was curious about this site, which purports to be an unbiased evidence-based compendia of consumer health and drug information dedicated to empowering blah blah blah: DrugDigest.

Mainly because I was curious about what it had to say about SAM-e, which I take for a couple of weeks when my osteoarthritis (knee) flares up. I take it because I friend suggested it when nothing except massive doses of aspirin alleviated the pain and I did not want to be on any of those expensive pharmaceutical drugs they've cranked out for osteo.

SAM-e is the ONLY thing that works when my knees get really painful, and it work fast. It's expensive, but I usually only have to take it for a couple of weeks and it usually keeps the pain at bay for a couple of months at a stretch.

But this site doesn't really give much helpful information. It cites some studies, but not the conclusions. It hedges worse than my AMA-entrenched doctor. Maybe, but. It has links to sites which no longer exists (such as the FDA's adverse event report site). There are no freshness labels on the info, so no way to judge if it contains the latest available findings. The experts are a bunch of pharmacists and one MBA. (Why he ranks as an expert, I have NO idea.)

The whole site is owned by Express Scripts, bills itself as pharmacy benefit management company. So my guess is the drug/herb info site was built to make it look like there is a there there for the health insurance member sites -- all of the info is canned stuff, and there are NO rare conditions, such as Wegener's Granulomatosis, dealt with. Ah well.

TODAY WAS LOVELY
Maybe I'm wrong about the dogwoods being late; maybe they were early last year. They're starting to show signs of opening. The wildflower seeds I planted a bit ago are growing, and I have some plants to get into the ground and I was itching to get outside.

But I'm also working on something that interests me: making a ebook to sell on Puppet Press. It's a digital reprint of a book (Life is War) that did very well when it was published, written by Tony Anthony, and is a book that is aimed at veterans with PTSD. Or anyone that's endured a trauma. So the content interests me, and what I'm really looking forward to do is creating the surrounding "marketing" webpages -- but I can't get to those until the ebook is at least ready for editing. So even though I was itching to work in the garden this afternoon, this was consuming me.

Meanwhile, I ALSO really really want to do the spring cleaning. I started to yesterday, and have a lot to go, and I WANT to do it, but have been working on the ebook and didn't want to stop.

I need about four more daylight hours in a day.

I'm just glad winter seems to be finished.
posted by lee on 04/28/03 at 05:30 PM
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