Marketing Special: Sony humiliates Microsoft at E3

You don't have to love gaming to read this article (but seriously.. why don't you love gaming?). In case you didn't know, E3 is the biggest gaming show of the year where the big 3 companies, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft show their games and hardware. Considering that Microsoft and Sony are launching their new consoles at the end of the year, this was going to be a massive deal this year to see who brings in the fans. Sony however humiliated Microsoft at such a level, that marketing teachers are likely to use this example in their college and university classes. It was that bad.



Microsoft had their conference a few weeks back and received a massive backlash, so they were under massive pressure to perform. They didn't mention policies such DRM, which is to stop used games (or only do it once after their original backlash), you have to connect online once every 24 hours even if you are playing a single player game, and having a Kinect mandatory to be on when you are gaming. In light of PRISM and Microsoft being the first company to go along with selling out their information to the government, you can see how this unnecessary feature of the Kinect always being on is.. suspicious. Now as you can see in the video above, Sony had a decent event until the end, where they specifically stated everything Microsoft did wrong, that they would do the opposite. I have seen a lot of E3 events, and I have never heard a crowd chant one of the console publisher's names, or that high amount of cheering and hysteria. Microsoft made some silly moves to make a console for publishers rather than consumers and tried to hide those facts during E3 by only speaking about their great games instead, however Sony basically reminded everyone at the end of their show.

This was just hit after hit, as afterwards essentially every gaming media and (even non-media) went in Sony's corner and started bashing Microsoft even more than when they first announced those features. There was a whole issue and a twitter campaign to stop Sony from doing DRM called #PS4noDRM which even CNN picked up at some point before E3 when Microsoft first announced their features. Sony execs responded with "very happy to see how passionate our fans are".. so an answer that says nothing, they waited until E3. Sony originally did not specify much and basically Microsoft started talking about all the features. It may have been that Sony wanted to implement some type of DRM feature but they let Microsoft go first, saw a monumental negative backlash and basically used that to completely rip them apart in the biggest gaming conference of the year. With Amazon on facebook for pre-orders showing a 17-1 ratio in PS4's favor over the Xbox One and even general non gamers on my news feed on facebook knowing that Sony humiliated Microsoft at E3, this is showing to be quite a massive deal. Microsoft execs also did a terrible PR jobs in different interviews where they further angered the fans.



This video launched right after E3, Sony basically trashing Microsoft even more and making it that much more humiliating. After two days, the 22 second video already hit over 8 million views.

Speed Panting 12: Gears (Concept Art)

Hey guys, here's a quick update a new speed painting from me. I tried out concept art for the first time.. Well in my website I did have a concept art done 2 years ago, but that was looking at a reference and changing it "a small amount". This character is part of a world and story that I have had in my mind for about 8 months, but I was too scared to start concept art until now. Why not try concept art in a speed painting video where people can see you fail so many times over and over again? Well that was my way of thinking... Also my friend Ted also pushed me to start concept art instead of just talking and thinking about doing it. Below is the video, and below that there is a brief explanation of the main character Gears. Hope you guys enjoy it!



So the character's name is Gears. He is a normally goofy and at times quite idiotic, though he is also incredibly sarcastic and very provoking when he fights. Gears however is a genius only when it comes to technical aspects such as building or creating things in general. He also always goes on adventures with his partner Monkey (yes, the monkey's name is monkey...) Gears also uses gears (yeah...) that he puts around his body, and they speed up when he fights to give him both more speed and power.

Bayern Munich, Champions League winners 2013, Kings of Europe

Yes.. yes this has absolutely nothing to do with design, illustration, web development or anything in my field and went against everything I said I would talk about. How can I do this? Well it's my blog, I can do what I want.



Beautiful. Just wanted to share with everyone because I am happy. I suppose if we tie this into the world of design, is that even though you should love what you do, you should also have a passion for other things and not always focus everything on your work. Your brain needs other distractions. My other passions for example, are football and long walks on the beach.

Adobe CS7 to be on Cloud only

In case you haven't heard, Adobe is no longer supporting their physical Creative Suite. From CS7 and onwards, everything will be cloud based. You pay 20$ a month, at least for the first year. I'm unsure if they will raise it afterwards. This marks a huge step forward for Adobe and the response at the moment seems mixed. Obviously people who used Cloud before are happy while others preferring physical copies feel the opposite.

I myself am not happy by this move, but then again this depends on my personality. I get enjoyment out of having physical copies of everything, not to mention I feel that if I am paying for something, it's mine.. not mine as long as I pay monthly. The idea of paying every month for years then one month being unable to do so, they drop the programs for you. This doesn't sit too well with me, but again this is a personal preference and many likely disagree with me. I also think that people who have spent 2,000$+ on buying the entire suite will have to start paying 20$/month like someone who will buy it once it comes out, certainly a nice "fuck you" message back to the community who has supported and bought the company's products for a while.

In a recent Adobe interview, one of spokespersons stated that they aren't doing to stop people who steal the program or to charge people more. However for me, there is a simplistic reason why they did it for the few that haven't quite figured it out.

Apple marketing to Designers without the hardware to back it up!?

I am pretty frustrated but before I talk about it, like any story lets start at the beginning. I was in school and it was about time I bought my own computer, or rather laptop/macbook. Now if there is one thing about our professor who suggested a Macbook over a laptop, is that the man loves his Apple products. They certainly are stylish, look good, simple UI and the hardware is made to be utilized very well. And in the beginning, there weren't any issues. We were just starting to use Photoshop and Illustrator, two fantastic programs I still use. When I started designing or illustrating, everything was dandy. First of all, I never used the word dandy to describe things before. Second, throughout the near 4 year relationship between me and my Macbook, something changed...

Things got s l o w... Photoshop got slower, and I also started using Adobe AfterEffects. Now Photoshop didn't just get slow because my Mac got slow over time, I simply needed to make bigger illustrations which obviously meant the size also got bigger. For those that don't know, I love illustration and it's the simple road towards getting better... you need to make bigger illustrations so you can zoom in and be able to illustrate the small details which help push your final piece to the next level. It's the usual process for an illustrator. Now I use 300DPI for my illustrations and sometimes have to go down to 200DPI or 250DPI because my Mac cannot handle it. I asked one of the best illustrators in the world on CGhub how big his file is for a certain illustration, and he responded to 890DPI. So my current piece cannot handle 300DPI a lot of the time because sizes get too big, and yet he is using nearly three times that amount. This is just some perspective to show you far behind the "modern, new" Apple hardware is behind what is required.

Which brings me to my main point. Apple is targeting their Macbooks to designers and developers... It's like a bad joke, they are essentially trying to sell their hardware to the group of people who need the best piece of equipment possible, yet they are painfully behind in this department. A major problem is also the customization options are incredibly limited (ie. 2 options), which means you can't even improve your Mac that much if you want to. They have Macbooks that sell them with 4 GIGs and the most they can upgrade it to is 8 GIGs, while many laptops can be upgraded and bought with 16 GIGs. Processors and graphic cards, Apple is also painfully behind other laptops that have stronger and newer pieces. I know what some of you are thinking, after time computers get slow. I make sure it's not. And my HD is also just halfway full, as I keep much of my other work at a separate HD drive to save space on my Mac. So it's not due to age, not to lack of size, or porn (some of you were thinking it). My Macbook is just slow when it needs a good processor, graphics card and RAM, which happens with large files on Photoshop and sometimes when I am using AfterEffects. I am going to be using Cinema4D soon as well, and I don't even want to imagine how that's going to go.

At the beginning of 2013, I upgraded my RAM from 4 to 8 GIGs of RAM. I called up the store asking them the price of upgrading the MAC, and he said it was 400$ to replace it. He then offered me another solution which cost 130$ where another company makes RAM for Macs so they are compatible with Apple's hardware. Things have gotten a little bit faster since then but still not good enough, which is why I will be replacing my hard drive with something much faster which will hopefully make my Mac more tolerable using these two programs. It is already ridiculous enough that Apple charges far more than they should but at the end of the day, that's their marketing strategy. What does piss me off however, is charging that much for old hardware that's not up to standards and market these old computers to designers and developers? They need to properly upgrade the Macs and not just to 8 GIGs, but at least give us the option of being able to put 16 GIGs. The processors and graphic cards are also old now, much newer and better versions are needed. I would have switched to PC a long time ago if I wasn't so used to Macs now. I am waiting until Apple releases a Macbook that is up to date with technology so I can buy a second one, because this hasn't been the case in quite a few years. You've gotten old, stale, and offering incredibly overpriced products that were around 5 years ago Apple, time to catch up.

Fontsquirrel, font website with free licensed fonts only

So if you are like me a lot of the time when you search as a designer, for fonts, you just want a free font. You don't want to go to the process of figuring out if a font is free or if it costs 40$ to use it. Well, there is the perfect website for this at Fontsquirrel.

Like many other font websites, you can search a font by name, category or the popular/recent fonts. However, you won't have to go through the hassle of figuring out whether a font is free or not if you're looking for free fonts only. It works like all the other font websites and has a filter for free fonts only, so why the hell wouldn't you use it?

Speed Painting 11: Gentleman (Psy)

Here's a new speed painting for this month, based on a new music video by Psy, called Gentleman. Hope you enjoy it as usual!