Latest Tweaks

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PG is looking forward to a day when he has absolutely nothing to say about TPV and its new look.

He thinks it’s just about finished.

Per a comment from Harald, the number of Recent Comments featured in the sidebar has been increased to eight, which should make it easier to scan for interesting comments that have appeared since you last signed on.

If you see anything else that’s not working right, you can drop a comment here or use the Contact button on the top toolbar to send PG an email.

5 thoughts on “Latest Tweaks”

  1. If you are happy, PG, I am happy. Honestly, I’ve been happy with it for a while now.

    I do doubt that you’ll ever run out of things to tweak, however…

    • I certainly can tweak forever, but, unless something is broken that affects the visitor experience, I’ll slow things down a bit, WO.

  2. Design-wise, I think you’re there. Or close enough. “Perfection is the enemy of good” and all that. And that’s coming from me, a once-proud perfectionist. A short anecdote to illustrate…

    When I was a young art director in L.A. in the late ‘70s, I used to drive myself—and those around me—nuts with my need for perfection. We had just created the first issue of our adult swimming magazine (not that kind of “adult,” but for anyone interested in fitness swimming). And I was excited to “go on press” for the printing of this inaugural issue with its gigantic web-press run of 5,000 copies or so (about the minimum a web press can do).

    When an art director goes on press, he or she gives the final OK to “start the count” after some adjustments are typically made to ink levels and such.

    So there I am, telling the pressmen to adjust the black this way, and the cyan that way, and, hey, what’s that spot on page 26? So we went back and forth like this until the press suddenly stopped. I asked the closest press worker, “Hey, what happened?” And he replied, “your run is over. Job’s done.”

    Stunned and confused, I said, “Whaddya mean the run is over? I haven’t approved everything yet.”

    He just grinned and said, “Kid, you’re just being a perfectionist. It was good enough a long time ago. You’ll learn.”

    And so I did.

    • In ancient days, I worked for a large advertising agency in Chicago.

      At the time (and maybe still) Chicago had a lot of very large printing companies.

      For my general education, I accompanied the senior art director to the press that was going to produce a zillion copies of a dog food advertisement.

      Later, I learned that this was a press for perfectionists with big budgets.

      The premier quality at that time was obtained via curved metal plates. After the first short trial run, the art director was dissatisfied with the look of a sky at sunset. The fixing process involved dismounting the plates and, under a large magnifying glass, a color guru who worked for the press delicately grinding down some of the dots on two different plates. The art director had approved a proof of the ad the day before, but this one was not quite right.

      Then we had another test run and the colors were better, but not perfect. So, there was another dismount and more delicate grinding in the same spot with some additional grinding around the main problem area to make certain there would be no discernable color change between the tweaked spot and the rest of that corner of the advertisement.

      Finally, the art director was satisfied and the press started cranking out zillions of copies. When I compared the first version of the ad with the final version, despite the fact I knew exactly where the changes were made, I couldn’t discern any difference.

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