I’ve been so caught up in the Holidays and the winter quarter beginning that I haven’t had the chance to brag about the upgrades to the Dustin Marson Design studio. So, i’m going to do that now. First of all, in late November actually I invested in a printer and digital camera which will make life easier and more affordable for my design projects. I bought the Lexmark X85 color inkjet printer, which is also a scanner, copier, and fax. It works wonderfully. It doesn’t load regular paper real well, you have to use heavy stock paper or glossy paper or else it won’t load the paper correctly, which is fine because I only use high-gloss paper anyway. I have been a big fan of Epson printers for a long time and it took some major convincing to get me to buy the Lexmark, in a way i’m glad that I did. As for the camera, It’s a Canon PowersShot 2.0 Megapixel camera. I realize 2.0 megapixels is pretty weak, but my budget would only allow this camera. It’s a good buy though, it’s very small and takes pretty nice pictures. They turn out a little too dark for my liking but i’m doing some tweaking and Photoshop can usually take care of the problem. Then, as a Christmas gift to myself I decided to ditch Windows and return to the Mac world. I started out on a Macintosh, a 60MHZ Performa 6100 actually. I switched to the PC laptop seeing that the Adobe and Macromedia design software on eBay was cheaper for Windows than it was for Mac, probably because the Mac software is in higher demand since every real graphic designer knows Macs are better (Adobe is coded better for Mac and so it runs better on Mac) and plus Macs are just cooler anyway. So on a high-interest Apple Loan I invested in an iBook G3. It’s a wonderful replacement to the Dell Inspiron laptop I was on before. Not only is it about 10 lbs lighter (hehe) it’s so much faster and it’s running Mac OS X (system 10) which is great. There’s a picture of the computer and of my system 10 desktop below. And then of course I had to fork over the money for the Adobe and Macromedia design software. Got them at pretty descent prices off of eBay. So now i’m up and running on a higher powered platform so hopefully that will make life a little bit easier for me. And hopefully it will breathe a little life into my design. I’m seriously considering a complete re-do of the website real soon. I have some good ideas in mind. And now that i’m getting more comfortable in Flash, it’ll probably be an all-Flash site. If you’re not sure what flash is, it’s basically when you go onto a website and there’s all kinds of motion going on. It’s a vector-based web design program which is what most of the really advanced looking websites use, rather than HTML (the old fashioned way) which is how this current website is designed. We’ll see what happens. Right now i’m looking at a pretty busy quarter of school ahead. That’s all for now, folks. Seeya next time.
