I Designed a Mixtape for Me

Sophia LorenWhen I think back to some of the earliest graphic design impulses I had as a kid, I think of mixtapes and the hours and hours I used to spend manually compiling them for friends and for my own enjoyment. The only design tools I had at my disposal were a set of rapidograph draughting pens, a can of rubber cement, an X-acto knife and a surfeit of free time. Without the benefit of scanners, Photoshop or even press-type, I’d painstakingly hand-letter the track listings and sometimes create elaborate illustrations for the covers, doing my best to approximate some kind of professionally designed end product, even though I had then only a vague understanding of what graphic design really was.

It was a primitive process but it was also enormously satisfying, because it was a very personal kind of design. There were no other stake-holders involved, no clients or committee members, just me. I was responsible for the product from end to end: the songs were mine to choose and sequence, the title was mine to author, the presentation was mine to art direct. I’m sure they’d cause me no shortage of embarrassment to look at now, but at the time, I pored over them for hours, admiring and critiquing my own work endlessly.

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What .Mac Lacks

.MacA few weeks ago I complained about Apple’s faltering .Mac service, how it was causing my system to lock up and, in general, how it appeared to have lost the devoted attention of the management team at Apple. And then last week Apple unexpectedly upgraded the baseline storage available to .Mac subscribers from 250 megabytes to a full gigabyte, added new features like .Mac Groups for helping friends and families communicate and share files, and introduced a new, more fully-featured revision of its Backup utility.

All of which is great news, but as an effort to reinvigorate the .Mac offering, it still strikes me as somewhat meek. Raising the storage limit to a gigabyte, while laudable, is basically playing catch-up to where online Web storage stood a few years ago. And the other improvements, while not offensive, still don’t do what, in my estimation, should be done: turning .Mac into a fully-fledged Web 2.0 offering.

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