I switched to Mac in November 2008 and have given it some time to see what change it brings. Surrounded by Mac fanatics means hearing no objective statements whatsoever. Mac is heaven and everybody should know. For five years I’ve sported a Sony Vaio laptop single processor which has worked remarkably well. It got a bit slow but until the end it could compete with most pc’s I came across. I was always amazed by how slow most pc’s are and how well mine was holding up. Anyways, the screen gave away and the hard-drive just died one day. I’ve given Mac a spin the past months and I must say I’m very pleased with it. Its intuitive and slick design gives you the impression just working on it is already an artistic expression.

I must say I expected it to be way more powerful than what I was used to but I think my expectations were a little too high. Multitasking is going well but it is nowhere near the perfection most Mac’onites claim it is. It does get stuck once every while, the little colored circle nothing near to completely absent, the heating system has a mind of its own with sudden stretches of intense ventilating, some keyboard shortcuts have rather weird effects sometimes, etc. My SuperDrive broke three months after I bought it and takes all inserted DVD’s for a crazy clicking rattling spin which requests a complete hard stop (yes, pulling out the battery). I’m waiting for some larger design projects to be done so I can bring it back to the store (one year guarantee, right?).

I still wouldn’t go back to a pc … ever. There’s plenty of things I love and didn’t know were on it. ‘Inspect element’ in Safari browser is one of the greatest inventions ever (does it exist in other browsers, too?). And the lack of need for security measures is refreshing as well. Although I’ve just installed some free antivirus thingy it doesn’t bother me with popups every second. ‘Finder’ is a good experience with the column view. It does make file searching a lot handier, especially together with the very fast real-time search option which seems to be rather slow in Vista. And I’ve had fun with the speech commands telling my Mac to ‘tell me a joke’.

Enough of that nerd talk. It just works, this Mac thing. But it ain’t heaven. Maybe a little cloudy, but not heaven.

Her breakthrough came with the cover art for the 2006 release Under The Iron Sea by the britband Keane (btw, what happened to their good taste when choosing artwork for their new album?) The artwork she created almost got as much attention as the album itself and put her in the spotlight of the design community. Traditional patterns which remind me of those Russian dolls you can stack into each other make for a very clean and Ikea-esque style (I remember her saying in an interview she’d turn down offers by Ikea because she hates corporate stuff – anyone know which interview this was?). She’s recently created some designs for Marimekko which are gathering quite a following. I wouldn’t mind putting the large prints (see end of post) up on my wall, would you?

Studio On fire have some great printing skills. Apparently they have their own Letterpress which is quite amazing seeing the enormous cost of these machines. Here are some recent stationaries they’ve done. Mostly, their work consists of brand printing for other designers which explains the amazing artwork they get to handle. No boring bad logo crappy text business cards here. Beastpieces.com?is where you can follow their latest.