You can't miss... more doom and gloom for the magazine industry, but wait there's a color palette at the end of this entry!

Since the design and publishing  classes are taking a trip to Iowa on Friday I thought I would begin my first blog entry with something interesting I found on the blog http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige. UnBeige, according to its authors, was created to entertain and inform design professionals on a daily basis about the world of design. This is done though short articles about various topics that the blog's editors find interesting. For those of you like me that are into political science, it's like Matt Drudge's Drudge Report but for the world of design.

Anyways, in anticipation of our exciting trip, I thought I would share this small piece of news that I found on UnBeige, published last Friday, Jan. 23. Click here to read the article on UnBeige. UnBeige was providing their own commentary on an article that appeared on WashingtonPost.com titled "Design Magazines Find No Shelter From the Slump." It talks about the shelter magazine industry which, not surprisingly, is facing tougher times during this economic crisis. It's a subject, I believe, this industry knows all too well. But what was fascinating about this article, at least for me, was found on the second page.

The writer says that home design blogs are becoming a popular way for people to instantly get compliments on their home decor. Who knew! I had never considered this as an option to the struggling shelter magazine. But it seems like a reasonable alternative, given the nature of the existing industry and the rise of the Internet. Maybe the groups that are pitching ideas for the online publications at Meredith Corp. on Friday could think about the possibility of adding blogs to those respective web sites? I mean, for example, it seems everyone is blogging nowadays in the newspaper industry, from the Columbia Tribune to the Washington Post, to name a few. VOX could even think about incorporating blogging into our own coverage of local events, i.e. the True/False Film Festival. The possibilities for blogging in the magazine industry are endless, and the way the industry is currently heading, it might just be a good alternative to look into. 

Okay, enough with the doom and gloom. I would like to take this moment to share a web site I think is very useful for designers. I would first like to thank Joy Mayer, the design editor at the Columbia Missourian, for introducing me to this awesome web site, called Kuler. Click here. (F.Y.I. this web site may not work on your computer if you do not have Adobe Flash or another program like it). It's a site, created by Adobe, to allow people to create 5- color palettes centered around a certain color. You can also browse other individuals color palettes as well. What is really neat about Kuler is that each color in the five color palette comes with not only the RGB and CMYK values, but also the 6 character hexadecimal code for that particular color. That code can be entered into the Swatches palette in any Adobe program (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.) and it will give you the exact color that Kuler creates. You can create any combination of colors, from complementary colors to shades of color. It's great for situations where you have a color that you want to use for a design, but you don't know what other colors to choose that would make the design jump off the page with your original color. Kuler will help you with that. And with that, I give you a custom color palette creation from Kuler. Click here.