johnfitzgeralddesign

Right now I’m working with a client to fine-tune their yellow/orange-coloured logo. We’ve got something we’re happy with on screen, but achieving it on print is quite a bit trickier.
Most of the usual tricks- matching to swatches, speccing a Pantone ink, etc work well for volume printing but are an unlikely prospect with a small local printer.
Also, the yellow/orange shade is a tough one to get right in print.We’ll see which of my range of options work out- we may have to be realistic and choose a shade which is more ‘flexible’.

Watched Die Another Day on arrival in Norfolk. Bond at Christmas is a bit of a tradition. Now, every Bond film stretches credulity a fair bit, but I thought this one was sillier than usual (think car chase round a hotel made of rapidly-melting ice in Iceland, where the cars don’t show a scratch!). It was worse for it.

Just had a new hard drive fitted to my nearly-new Macbook, after the original one suddenly died. I feel a mixture of emotions:

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | A police state? Crying wolf wont protect civil liberties

Here’s what I think:

 A couple of dangerous assumptions here:

1. We used to have far fewer protections for civil liberties, so we shouldn’t complain about the present situation

2. New technology allows new intrusions to civil liberties- we should intervene in new ways because we can

I also think the writer is wrong to put (fully justified) anxieties about automatic and compulsory state collection of personal information (id cards, DNA databases etc) and the more questionable libertarian right to smoke in a public place in the same boat.

Where does this assumption that collecting reams of personal data for no immediate use has some kind of benefit come from?

I think the writer is quite right to say that the debate on civil liberties should be nuanced, and that both left and right can get it wrong by being too shrill. However, he then goes on to muddy the waters with some of his own faulty logic…

Travelling by train from London to Vienna and back. All quite exciting, save for a few gripes: had to stomp round Gare de l’Est in search of a cash machine at 10pm last night (thought I’d get a good value exchange by waiting ’til I got to euro land…) The night train from Paris to Munich was pretty grim- no couchette on the cheap ticket! Slept in 5-minute snatches. Not feeling too shattered though.

On the train from Munich to Vienna, discover that Deustche Bahn have given me a ticket from Hanover to Brussels (odd since I go nowhere near those places!), and omitted to give me any tickets for the bit from Munich to Vienna and back. The German ticket inspector gives the closest he can come to a ‘bof!’, but the Austrian one demands that I buy a new ticket. A bit of a pickle as he can’t take cards and I’m 40 cents short- a good samaritan fellow passenger very kindly chips in. Swings and roundabouts- the ticket inspector’s zeal balanced by my fellow passenger’s kindness.

On balance, though, I’m really glad I’m traveling this way- a great chance to watch the world go by, and to get on with things- have had some very productive fettling with the HSC visual identity.