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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

Marketing & PR

Printable Maps of the U.S.

The National Atlas provides “reference and outline maps of the United States that you can print or use online. The reference maps display general reference features such as boundaries, cities, capitals, major highways, rivers and lakes, and terrain. Outline maps showing county boundaries, State boundaries, capitals, or other basic features are also available.” The maps are provided in color, as GIFs and PDFs, but will apparently print out nicely in grayscale.

Are you the GuideMaster?

Both Draftsman and GuideMaster from AV Bros. look to be very useful for users of Photoshop when the need to create horizontal and/or vertical grids arises, which is damn near every project. Draftsman creates selections within your document, while GuideMaster places guides. I just downloaded the demo versions of each to tinker with them and have been pleasantly surprised. There are a couple of features I would like to see, namely I think Draftsman should provide the option to output as vector objects instead of selections. Also, I think it should mimic Guidemaster’s functionality which allows the designer to use percentage-based values (one third, a quarter…) in addition to the currently supported fixed values (24px). I need to do a bit more testing, but one, if not both should prove to be a worthwhile investment.

Design and Web Books

While I don’t have much time to actively participate in the Designers in House List, to which I subscribe, I enjoy reading many of the threads. One recent thread from a while back, titled “Your favourite web design book” served as a reminder that I should update my list of Web and design-related book recommendations. It’s been quite a while. So, here is a brain dump of the tomes on my bookshelf and ones that should be. The list is by no means comprehensive – I would love to hear your recommendations!

Items without a rating indicates that I do not own the book, but believe it is worth attention due to recommendations from other Web-type folks, or that I hold the author in high respect due to their other work and contributions to our industry.