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letters<br />
respond<br />
Contact d. Get issues off your chest.<br />
Send letters to dialogbox@digitmag.co.uk<br />
Please note that personal correspondence cannot be entered into.<br />
32 d<br />
Money matters<br />
Cheers for a great guide to the<br />
UK design industry as it stands<br />
(<strong>Digit</strong> 84) – and, more<br />
importantly for me, give me the<br />
chance to leave it around on<br />
my desk open on the page with<br />
the average salaries list for my<br />
boss to see. Now I’ve been<br />
given an instant raise to my<br />
rather meagre salary. Well<br />
done!<br />
Joan Smith (not my real name)<br />
Love the pictures, hate the type<br />
I have just received my first copy of <strong>Digit</strong> magazine.<br />
First impressions were really great. Just the sort of<br />
things I want to read about. But reading it gave me<br />
a headache. The typeface used for articles is far, far<br />
too small.<br />
Your designers should review their typographic<br />
study notes on readability. If newspapers and books<br />
were printed using type this small no one would buy<br />
them. Designers need to remember that the majority<br />
of the population do not have the acutely sharp<br />
sight of a 21-year-old. And not everyone reads<br />
magazines in bright daylight or in studio conditions.<br />
Even if you are young, try reading <strong>Digit</strong> as you<br />
travel home tonight on the moving top deck of a<br />
number 74 bus or in the soft-lit lounge bar .If you<br />
are older than 40 you will struggle. If it’s a struggle,<br />
then you’ll surely give up. Although you can see<br />
the individual words OK, scanning the lines and<br />
digesting the information is hard work. Because<br />
you are concentrating on the act of reading, the<br />
pleasure of reading is greatly diminished.<br />
After a few short articles I gave up and just<br />
skimmed through the magazine. This is a shame.<br />
Such a good thing spoilt by poor typographical<br />
design.<br />
Michael Hailstone<br />
d: We’re sorry that our choice of typeface is spoiling<br />
your enjoyment of <strong>Digit</strong>, but we’ve not had <strong>com</strong>plaints<br />
about it before. Our choice of the size of typeface <strong>com</strong>es<br />
from a desire to provide our readers with a wealth of<br />
information on every page without getting in the way<br />
of the luscious artwork that we know you’re equally<br />
interested in. Imago is one of the most readable fonts<br />
at any size – and too make it larger would leave us<br />
with room for less words or smaller/less pictures.<br />
This is not a choice any of us would like to make.<br />
One giant leap into 3D<br />
I was grateful for your article on 3D software for<br />
illustrators such as myself, as I’ve been trying to<br />
get into 3D for some time – but with little success.<br />
I think my work would really benefit from some<br />
true 3D elements as it’s always been kinda sci-fi.<br />
I’ve tried many different packages, including the<br />
‘learning editions’ of most of the 3D tools used by<br />
top effects <strong>com</strong>panies on big-budget Hollywood<br />
movies, and generally ended up more befuddled<br />
than Mr Magoo. They seem to speak a different<br />
language to the rest of us and the interface is<br />
beyond convoluted.<br />
Following your advice though, I checked out<br />
Strata CX and while the language is still arcane,<br />
the tools were a lot easier to learn - so cheers!<br />
Dennis Dissen<br />
d: Sometimes it does seem that the language used<br />
by 3D applications was devised by a particularly secretive<br />
old maths teacher, but it’s often necessary as 3D is by its<br />
nature more technical than 2D design, animation or video<br />
production. Perserverence is always the best way.<br />
A Vue to a kill<br />
I will never buy your books again because they are<br />
expensive but most of all you fuck people over by<br />
telling them there is great software on the CD like<br />
Vue D’Esprit but once you have bought the book<br />
it is only for Windows and not for Apple and this<br />
is false advertisement. Put it on the cover that it<br />
is only for Windows and not this sneaky shit that<br />
you first have to buy the book so that only then<br />
you can look inside the book to find this out.<br />
Thanks for nothing.<br />
Dennis Dissen<br />
d: For every free piece of software that we give<br />
away for free with the magazine, we always get a few<br />
<strong>com</strong>plaints that it doesn’t work with any platform that<br />
you care to mention. As flaming responses go though,<br />
this one is a classic.<br />
To be serious though, a quick look at our <strong>Digit</strong><br />
CD pages would have informed this reader that both<br />
of the full packages we offered on <strong>Digit</strong> 83’s CD<br />
were for Windows-only. Why? Because that’s how<br />
the <strong>com</strong>panies behind them made them.<br />
Oh well, we hope the six free full-size, royalty-free<br />
images; Aardan animations; Kempt Flash game – oh,<br />
and the fantastic creative magazine that <strong>com</strong>es with<br />
the CD – is enough to keep Mac users satisfied.
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