We recently redesigned the Portrait Gallery of Canada’s website, including a flash exhibition of fascinating collection highlights. Happily, our work was mentioned in an article about the Portrait Gallery in today’s Globe and Mail. The Portrait Gallery doesn’t yet have a new physical home, but we’re pleased that people are noticing its new virtual home.

You can find the Globe and Mail article here. And you can find the Portrait Gallery of Canada website here.

It’s an old and tired tale by now - the employee who gets fired/harassed/suspended etc. for blogging.

But this case, involving an NCAA basketball coach being reprimanded for comments he made on his blog about the way his league is run, is of interest to me because it brings up the issue of blogs and sports, which is an intriguing topic.

Of course the most famous sports blogger, possibly the most famous blogger period, and certainly the richest, is Mark Cuban, (http://www.blogmaverick.com/) the billionaire owner of the NBA’s powerhouse Dallas Mavericks. Cuban made his billions (5 of them, if I recall correctly) by selling his audio/video streaming operation (the world’s first) called Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999. Cuban has always ‘gotten’ the web and he has been a tireless advocate for free speech, blogging and other progressive web initiatives ever since. He also posts regularly and answers many comments himself, something few billionaires and no other sports team owners do. (His post on the corporatization of YouTube was a killer: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/12/27/ripping-on-gootube-again2/) So, good for Mark Cuban. His team might even win the title this year, if they can get past the amazing Captain Canada and his Suns. (My money’s on the Suns.)

Another NBA blogpost that really knocked me out was this one, by former Raptor and current Milwaukee Buck, Charlie Villanueva: http://www.cv31.com/myjournal.html. This post was written last year by a 21 year-old NBA rookie who had just scored an amazing 48 points in a game, the most by a rookie since Michael Jordan, I believe. This post on his blog is not some typical ghost-written prefab pap nor is it sports journalism. It’s one young NBA player’s honest outpouring of feelings about an incredible experience he had just had. I loved it. I also found it indicative of the generation gap around blogging because I tried to imagine veteran sports stars sitting down and putting their feelings out there this way and it was inconceivable. (Barry Bonds: “So then I got another shot of ‘the clear’ and stepped to the plate…”)

It also made me think back to Ball Four (1970), the hilarious book by Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton that was the first ‘exposé’ of the life of a professional athlete, with its booze and hookers and juvenile hijinx. Bouton was excoriated by many (tho his book was a bestseller) for breaking a taboo that kept players’ realities shielded from their adoring fans. Of course the journalists were complicit in this, too. These days, things have changed, and the Internet has a lot to do with that. Just take a look at this behind-the-scenes video on YouTube from NBA draft day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QibGO_QKzQE. The average Joe wasn’t privy to this kind of thing in the days of Harold Ballard. (Just imagine what that behind-the-scenes footage would have revealed…Yikes!)

Then there’s the Raptorblog, (http://www.raptorblog.com/) which has been a furious hotbed of Raptor fandom for many years. (If you notice a certain theme, here…yes, I am a huge Raptors fan). Apart from the high level of critical discussion on this board, which sees itself as able to deliver much more informed and knowledgeable writing than do the basketball writers for Toronto’s daily newspapers, it’s interesting to note that the moderator of this blog just took a job at MSN.ca as a senior sports editor. Another example of how blogging is a good career move.

When I think about it, as much as I like the new dynamics that have made sports more transparent, on some level I do long for the good old days too, when sports heroes were heroes to their fans even if they were pricks in real life. I remember when I was a young boy, my dad wrote a fine book called Babe Ruth and the American Dream (Random House, out of print). I went out with him on some of his research trips and got to meet several hall-of-famers who had played with Ruth, including the likes of Frankie Frisch, (The Fordham Flash) and kindly old Harry Hooper (who had been on the 1927 Yankees, widely considered the greatest baseball team ever). It was awe-inspiring. And although my father’s book made no bones about Ruth’s coarseness in person (imagine MeatLoaf with a bat) it also highlighted the incredible respect and love that he engendered among Americans of every race and class. It’s hard to imagine anything like that today - in the era of OJ Simpson and Kobe Bryant, of Terrell Owens and Mark McGwire, of season-long player’s strikes and endless testing of the free agent market. Maybe Gretzky was the closest thing to Ruth we’ve known in a long time. Now if we can just get The Great One to blog…

I like to consider myself somewhat of an environmental fellow. I’m not perfect, but I try. I recycle whenever it’s available, I ride the bus, and if I didn’t live on the 9th floor I might even compost! I think if everyone put in just a little bit of extra effort every year, we’d begin to see a huge improvement in the environment. So what can the Print Industry do to improve its impact on the World? Again, with a little bit of effort in your paper, ink and varnishes, you’d be amazed how easy it is to create eco-friendly publications!

There is a broad range of environmentally-conscious papers out there, but you have to work with your paper supplier and your printer to get them. The first thing to note is that the term “recycled” no longer means an enfeebled sheet of brown, speckled paper! Domtar’s line of 100% recycled paper has a brightness value as high as any virgin fiber and there’s actually surprisingly little fleck in the sheet. Unless you told someone that it was recycled, I’m not sure anyone would even notice! Personally I find a little fleck gives the design more character.

Almost all inks currently used today are petroleum-based. So along with your Summer trips to the cottage, ink is getting more expensive; not to mention the storage and disposal of these inks can be very hazardous to the environment if not done properly. Soy inks have been around since the 80’s, and while they are still not widely available, they are better for the environment. Soy-based inks make recycling paper easier, aren’t as hard on printing presses, and the colours available are brighter than oil-based inks. There are a few disadvantages, one being availability, the other being price. However, with the newspaper industry quickly adopting the new soy inks, it won’t be long before commercial printers start to offer it on a mass scale.

Nothing looks better on a page than a nice satin varnish. When done right, a varnish can really highlight elements on a printed piece and give it a level of professionalism that is simply breathtaking. The problem with varnishes - like ink - is they are based on oil. While very nice to look at, they can have a negative impact on the environment. I won’t say *never* do varnishes, but you should work with your printer to find out how they store and dispose of varnishes, and if you could get the same effect using an aqueous coating which - as the same implies - is water-based.

Whenever you take something and make something else - trees into paper, oil into ink, and both of these items into printed material - it’s important to be conscious of the impact that will have on the environment, and if there’s anything that can be done to lessen this impact. Working with your printer, paper supplier and client/designer will put you on the right track. Thanks to advances in environmentally-friendly printing, you can choose to use all soy inks printed on 100% Recycled, Bleach-free, Chlorine-free paper that is made by a WINDMILL-powered paper mill. That’s right, it CAN be done! With Google now adopting solar power, even web design will someday be green! Given the amount and methods of communication expanding more and more rapidly, I think it’s good to take a step back and examine what impact all this will have on the environment.

Hi there! I’m the “new” guy here at 76design (even after only a couple of weeks, I’m actually not the newest!). They hired me because I’m apparently good at putting boxes on pages, and text in those boxes. Wait…no…that’s a terrible thing to say. How can I put this in a more romantic light?

I take a blank, untouched sheet of paper (Domtar Titanium is currently my favorite, much to the ire of pressmen everywhere. Sorry, but I just love a tight weave…and that sounded very sexual, didn’t it?) and on this blank sheet I am responsible for conveying all of the ideas, opinions, and facts that needs to be presented through the use of type, layout, colour, space, illustration and imagery. I create something physical that you can see, feel and even smell. Now while this can be true of anyone who has ever lasered something from Word, my challenge is more involved than your everyday piece of paper. In my field, I have to fight the most terrifying enemy known to marketers: Apathy. I’m trying to provoke an unconcious, emotional response in whoever sees so much as the front cover. When you pick up a well designed publication, you want to read it. The greatest compliment a Print Designer can ever receive is when someone who has no interest in that particular subject matter is quietly skimming through the printed pages.

So what’s so great about this print stuff, anyway? Aren’t we supposed to be reading everything on computers now? In the 1970’s, the Palo Alto Research Center (responsible for the modern GUI, credit where credit is due) was convinced that by the 1980’s our society would no longer use paper. More than three decades later and I think we’re using more paper now than ever! Are we just getting more wasteful? Or is there something to it? The fact is, as much as our digital inventions have made our lives easier, people still live in an analog world. Studies show that people don’t read the web, they skim through it. Jakob Nielsen, internet guru, has done studies that show only 16% of people actually read the web like they would a book. In fact, if you’re still reading this, welcome to the 16%! (Actually, his study was done in 1997 before the advent of blogging, so I would guess that number may have increased slightly, depending on the website’s purpose).

But is one better than the other? As someone who’s being doing almost all web work for the past three years, I can pretty confidently say that there isn’t. Both web and print have their advantages and disadvantages. The challenge is to know those advantages and disadvantages, and how to use each one effectively (Printed newsletters are dead, long live blogs!) Once you have a clear idea of what you are trying to accomplish, then it’s just a matter of literally putting that idea on to paper!

So I guess that’s what I do here, I use the printed word to make people as passionate about the material on the page as the person who wrote it! (Is that more romantic?)