Sherry

Whilst mooching around at one of my favourite browsing shops at the weekend, I discovered a beautiful children’s book.

‘The Black Book of Colors’ is, as the title suggests, completely black. On each page it describes a colour in a non-visual way. Referring instead to taste, touch sound and smell it paints a mental picture that we can all identify with.

“Yellow tastes like mustard, but is as soft as a baby chick’s feathers”

The pages are written both in braille and visible text, and the illustrations are embossed and glossy so they can be ‘seen’ by both sight and touch.

Poetic, sensory and descriptive, this book has a wonderful way of discussing colour with sighted and non-sighted readers alike, tackling a concept that can be very difficult to explain to children who are born blind.

Author: Menena Cottin
Illustrator: Rosana Faria
Translator: Elisa Amado
Publisher: Groundwood Books (28 Jun 2008)
ISBN-10: 0888998732
ISBN-13: 978-0888998736

Following the sad death last week of the legend that was Steve Jobs, I wanted to write about something he always championed. No, I wont be writing about the exciting new products from Apple or partaking in the endless debates about the quality of their products.

As we all know, Apple started life as a tiny company in someones garage; you need to plant a seed in order for it to grow. Things are not great at the moment with regard to the economy, a million young Britons are out of work and prospects for many others is grim. But yet in the face of this across the UK a growing number of us twentysomethings, fired up with a new spirit of entrepreneurship, are using their laptops to start their own businesses.

I read stories of these young entrepreneurs, people like Jamal Edwards sbtv.co.uk who set up his own internet TV site age sixteen and who so far this year has made over a hundred thousand pounds, (the site is pretty cool as well).

This makes me think to myself “What do I do to make myself stand out from the crowd, am I making the most of my evenings and weekends, what more could I be doing to further my learning or become better at what I do?”

In the words of Steve Jobs “Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to loose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

So go out there and be proactive in your greatness and if you are already great, be greater.

Every now and again you see a money raising initiative that stands out. This is exactly what I thought when I saw ownacolour.com – a new website launched by Dulux in collaboration with Unicef. The premise of the site is that there are 16.7 million colours available to purchase, representing the number of individual colours on a smartphone display. All you do is select an available colour of your choice for £1, name it and say a bit about why you chose it. You also have the option of buying the colour as a gift. It is a pretty simple idea (which could be easily criticized for being a reinterpretation of pixel advertising), and if you click through the already sold colours you can read the reasoning behind peoples purchases.

While slaving away in Photoshop, for nearly a whole morning, trying to figure out the correct sums and measurements for a grid (occasionally using a calculator), I thought to myself, there must be a quicker, easier way of doing this, without all the sums and calculations. So when I got home I went on the search for a time saving method or technique. On my hunt I found a few templates that people had pre-made, which weren’t really perfect. Then, after a bit more digging around, I found the exact tool I was looking for. GuideGuide. It’s a simple, but brilliant tool.

GuideGuide is a Photoshop plugin that with a click of a button creates rows and columns, margins and midpoints. Saves a lot of time, and no more headaches or calculators. I really don’t understand why this isn’t already part of Photoshop.

GuideGuide is available for CS4 and CS5 only

You can find GuideGuide here http://www.cameronmcefee.com/guideguide/

I know you’re not meant too but I’m judging these books by their covers and it seems like the stories within will be textured, intricate and carefully crafted. Considering they’re some of the greatest classics in print that’s probably accurate. The individually designed clothbound covers have been created for Penguin classic collection by Coralie Bickford-Smith and have inspired me to check a few more novels off the list of must reads, starting with Tess of the D’Urbervilles.