I have been tweeting for a while now, My first tweet was in September sometime. I am about to do my 100th tweet, sometime in the next day or two. Some would call it a milestone  I know that it points to my procrastination.

I have some good convos, have found some intersting folks but seriously the majority of tweets are a waste of effort. I followed Guy Kawasaki and eventually unfollowed him because he bores me. I unfollowed a number of people for various reasons and am not sure why I bother following others.

Here are the things that I gain from twitter.

1. More people reading my blog because they are following me.

2. Information that I read because the people I follow link to it.

3. Communication with “friends” I have made on Twitter.

But I spend way too much time reading pages and pages of inconsequential stuff for a few gems and nuggets. I am not sure if the ratio of effort spent justifies benefit received.

Heres why I am not going to dump Twitter. I figure its a good way to communicate with those that are interested in what I am up to. What I am not going to do is post links to every site I visit, post inconsequential stuff like what I am having for lunch, or how badly I need a coffee infusion..

I will tweet the things that are important to me, like milestones on my journey, Updating folks on my latest blog posts, If I find something awesome on the net I will link to it. I will never link to a link I posted to something else because seriously thats just offpissing. (It’s the reason I unfollowed Guy Kawasaki and the 15 alltop links he posts daily)

Twitter does have potential, Potential to swallow up hours of your life when you could be doing something productive.

I tweet at twitter.com/guymclaren If you want to keep informed about My Journey around South Africa and subscribing to the RSS feed on pedals.co.za is not enough, follow me. If you want to get my thoughts on politics, the web, or any of the other crap I write about just subscribe to my feed here.

I don’t know who took this photo. I would happily credit them, I received it in an email this morning and felt it needed sharing.

Coming or going

I shot all of these photos through the window of the plane. I am placing them here not neccessarily because they are awesome photos but more as a record of what life looks like up high and from the seat of an Emirates aircraft.

Natures abstract painting.. Sunset

Flying away from the moon

The alps from on high

Dubai from the sky

Dubai Airport

Plane landing at Dubai

On the runway

incoming plane, to land in Dubai

I am going to list a number of fonts below. What I am hoping some of you will do is send me a screenshot of the fonts as viewed from your computer with the details ie: Windows Vista Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20080915 Firefox/2.0.0.17 Flock/1.2.6 You can get that from Help and About in your browser.

Read more…

I needed to design a desk calendar for a customer and started doing a few experiments. We are printing 500 of these for HIQ in Nelspruit. I thought about doing a few for myself as well. So the experimentation had to do with the paper grammage.

The tent fold calendar assembled

You can design your own Calendar for your desk by doing the following. You will need a printer that can print borderless on A4 or you will need to make your calendar a little smaller. 170g card works but is rather light and flimsy, 300g card works best. The problem with 300g card is that most printers are not able to handle that thickness board.

Design Layout

Basically the tent fold calendar is an A4 page with 3 folds and glued at the one end. I made mine by doing the design in four parts. two 105mm panels, a 20mm glue lip and the balance of the card as the third panel.

I did a 6 month calendar on either side and surrounded them by graphics, including logos.  I then added all the public holidays and a 2010 calender to the bottom panel. You could leave this blank but I figured a calendar for the following year and a list of public holidays and school terms would be more useful.

I printed this on 170g photo paper, cut and folded them. As you can see they work. The ones we are having done by the printers will be on 300g board.

For those of you that are interested here are the prices for printing and artwork.

Sheet print

Print up to 50 at  R 39.91 each (excludes artwork) add R 300.00 once (This is on 170g photoboard)

Print 100   R 2390.00 Lithoprinted on 300g Board artwork included

Print 200  R 2740.00 Lithoprinted on 300g Board artwork included

Print 500 R 3420.00 Lithoprinted on 300g Board artwork included

5% discount for payment with order.

I am calling on all tweeter to help remove the scourge of the magpie advert. Do not sign up and start sending them. To all that receive these horrible spammy tweets, Unfollow the culprit after a warning.

Its sad that nothing remains inviolate from the spammer community.

Guy McLaren was in England for four days this year.  It’s not much time but I got to a few places. Here are some photos I took while in England.

Whitehall London

Tower Bridge

London Underground

Thames Beach, a day in the sun.

Historic Southampton

Southampton Pyramid

Romsey Station

Pall Mall and the sports car

Grey, white and blue

London eye

Farmhouse in Hampshire

Stately home, hampshire

behind the pub

River boats

High street in Hampshire

Bridge and waterfront property

So do I, but I don't advertise it on shop fronts

Telephone and bigben

Anarchy at Buckingham palace

Buckingham Palace

Buckingham Palace

Somewhere along the way I read a book about design for non designers. I would give you the ISBN and all that stuff except I can’t remember where I put the book. Mind you it was a few years ago that I bought the book. The main concept was CRAP design.

Contrast is not just about Colour but fonts and more. When designing something you need to look at the contrasts, The harder the contrast the better. If you are using too many fonts on a page, you are diluting the power of contrast. Think about it. If you use two different script fonts that are similar, Are you creating a contrast or are you diluting your message?

Repitition is about repeating the design elements. Repetition gives the design flow and focus. It also makes it more pleasing to the eye. Repeating a header font with a contrasting content font makes the document easier to digest.

Alignment is very important. Align your design elements so that they make sense. Use alignment to create focus and to give the document substance. Alignment allows you to steer the person where you want them to go.

Position allows you to group ideas and thought. If your design elements are in the wrong position it can make or break your document.

I will discuss each of these elements of design in more detail. One item at a time so as to make them easy to understand. I will draw pictures and show you how just one of these elements will improve your design and how using all four you can create dynamite newsletters, documents and even adverts.

Czar in action

This is Czar, Czar came to live with us under false pretences. Czar’s family broke up. Mom (Bunny) and Dad (Doos) got divorced, Doos moved to America and Bunny moved to a townhouse complex. Czar went to live with a family (unknown people) that kept him outside when they were out. They went on holiday and left the security company to feed him.

Czar is a neurotic animal, He suddenly locks up in fear and will not climb the stairs but the worst is Czars fear of lightning. Czar panics and during a storm he escaped from the new home and the SPCA called Bunny, You see Czar is chipped.

She asked if we could look after Czar until the new family came home from their holiday. That was two years ago. Czar destroyed my lounge curtains in the first week, We were out when a storm hit. He was left indoors with the other children, Likkerish, Freddy and Diamond. I was pissed at Bunny as I had not been warned by her about this particular issue.

Majestic and beautiful

I should have sent Czar away then, but I felt sorry for the quivering lump, and tried to work around his fears. When we go out we tie the curtains up in stormy weather, We keep him out of the bedrooms. I have never seen a dog moult like Czar does.

Alert

Last year during storm season we went on holiday and got housesitters in, For the sake of this story, we will call them dumb and fucking dumb.  They were given instructions and yet I got home to 3 sets of ripped curtains.

I considered finding Czar a new home, but once again he was reprieved. On Friday we popped out to the shops, Czar was left outside for the half an hour. He escaped from the back garden when some lightening came up, Broke into the house in my daughters bedroom shredding the curtains in the process.

Relaxed

Czar needs more attention than we can give. He needs a home where he can lie at the feet of some one all day long. He needs a home where there is always someone home. Czar is gentle, he is calm and good with animals and children. He is a damned fine watch dog, He just however is an indoors dog, not a farm dog. Czar has woken me on 3 occassions when the bad guys were still on the driveway. I would not recommend babies and toddlers being around him, because he shows an unnatural fear of the demon toddlers that we seem to have visit us.

If you can give Czar a home, please call us at 013 745 8337.