The only downside is that  our engineer now wants new business cards with ‘high lord of Photoshop’ as his title. I keep telling him to take the ‘freaking genius’ title and be satisfied.

By the way, the tech support issue that we solved is regarding our new Beauty Box Photo plugin, a fast, easy skin smoothing tool for Photoshop. There is a conflict with Apple’s ATI video card when you are running Photoshop CS5 and OS X 10.6.4. The solution to the crash is to upgrade Photoshop CS5 to version 12.0.1 and make sure Beauty Box’s ‘Use GPU’ switch is turned off.

regards -debbie

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Here are my favorite two:

Antique Icons

Realistic Icons

With over 80 to choose from, which are your faves?

We had two terrific models participating in the shoot, which took place at Jim’s apartment. Towards the end of the day, his fluffy cat got curious and investigated the scene. I don’t think that cats need skin retouching but maybe we will come out with a fur smoothing product.

Molotov Cupcake got a little indignant when we booted her from the ‘set’. The model got a little mock indignant when Jim proclaimed that the cutest shot all day was of the cat!

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 Beauty Box is the ‘plastic surgeon’.Around the holidays, we received a great compliment about Beauty Box from customer Ross Webb. Beauty Box is our new skin retouching software for video...  2010 is already a ‘beauty”.On the heels of a wonderful customer email from 2009, I’d like to show you my favorite email from 2010. Never mind that the year...  Beauty Box: Make everyone look beautiful.And we’re back. Digital Anarchy is once again making plugins for After Effects and Final Cut Pro. Our first new product is Beauty Box 1.0,...

A few days ago, I posted an ad in the Talent section of Craigslist. The captcha that I had to fill out, ‘discontented bacon’, was geekiness to its max. More on what this talent ad was for in a few days… we’re excited.

Yesterday I registered Digital Anarchy for a new Twitter name and the captcha that came up made me giggle. The term ‘the overusing’ perfectly describes how Twitter is often handled.

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 2010 is already a ‘beauty”.On the heels of a wonderful customer email from 2009, I’d like to show you my favorite email from 2010. Never mind that the year...

I had a chuckle over this letter but before I could write back, I noticed a second email sent 20 minutes later by Tom. The title was ‘After careful review and strong black coffee’.

Thanks Tom! You get one of our cool Anarchist tshirts as ‘thank you’ schwagg for making me smile before MY coffee kicked in.

By the way, turns out that Tom hadn’t unwrapped the 3D Invigorator plugin from its ZIP file, which is kinda like a tupperware container. You can read about how to install for Windows on this page and Mac installation on this page. Try out our 3D Inivgorator plugin, which is a Photoshop 3D plugin for making 3D logos, by going to the Demos page.

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It’s simple: We order Chinese food for lunch.

If THAT method doesn’t work, then we spend more time at the lunch table and talk over ideas. The more people at lunch, the longer the meeting seems to take. This question made me think about an article I read recently on PsyBlog, ‘Why Groups Fail to Share Information Effectively.’

“In 1985 Stasser and Titus published the best sort of psychology study… They found that people trying to make decisions in groups spend most of their time telling each other things that everyone already knows. In comparison people are unlikely to bring up new information known only to themselves. The result: poor decisions.”

The reasons? “1. Memory. Shared information is likely to be more memorable in the first place, so more likely to be brought up by someone… 2. Pre-judgements. People make their minds up to varying degrees before they have a group discussion… 3. Anxiety. Before a meeting people are unsure how important the information they know is, and are also anxious to be seen in a good light by others in the group.”

It’s an interesting result. Maybe the best way to run a meeting of many attendees is to give out a list of talking points that are common knowledge. That limits the mastication. WHAT WORKS FOR YOUR COMPANY?

For Digital Anarchy, everyone at our company has a specialized area of responsibility (bulging and overloaded, but special). Without each of us there, there is unique information that is not contributed. Even so, sometimes I am tempted to just look at fortune printouts and see where fate brings us. It’s the anarchist in me.

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Michael Maller emailed us regarding his recent purchase of Beauty Box. This is our new skin retouching software for video footage in After Effects and Final Cut Pro. Michael had some great things to say about the subtle effect that Beauty Box provides when smoothing away wrinkles, blemishes and other skin issues.

Michael didn’t realize he’d become an ‘anarchist in training’, replete with an official t-shirt, from giving the compliment. We really appreciate hearing from him (and you) because comments, questions and even complaints are what improve our products.

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A pretty standard support email that we receive is from folks who can’t find their serial numbers and need that information resent. Super simple. Occasionally I receive a support email from someone who we can’t find in our serial number database. This generally turns out to be a bogus request but every once in a while, I am positive that the customer is sincere and we bend the rules.

In John’s case, he had bought version 2.0 of our popular Primatte Chromakey, an Adobe Photoshop plugin that masks out greenscreen photographs. He contacted us asking for a resend of the product and serial number, but I couldn’t find him in our Primatte database. He was so cool and patient and sincere that after some back & forth, I decided the mistake was on Digital Anarchy and issued him a new Primatte serial number.

This was his response:

I asked John a little about himself. He is is a photographer who shoots primarily portrait & portfolio without the benefit of a studio. He uses our Primatte software because “I can set-up stands and a green screen background at a park or other location and then using Primatte, I can put the model anywhere in the world or use any background that I want without having to transport everything with me.”

Thanks John Gunmann. You’re a great memory to end the year with, and exactly why I work here at Digital Anarchy. ;)

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Here at Digital Anarchy, we are always available to find your old serial number or resend you an installer. Our records are quite good and typically we can go back seven years, to the company’s beginnings, to find your information. This customer service is especially important since we don’t ship our products on disk but instead provide digital download.

This week, I received an email from a customer who had purchased our Backdrop Designer product — a cool Adobe Photoshop plugin that makes muslin-esque textures for digital backgrounds — in 2005 and needed to reinstall. I located the customer in our Backdrop Designer database, updated his serial number through our new system, and sent off the info. I was extremely delighted to get this positive email back from Ron.

Better yet, I love the name of Ron’s company, Running Dog LOIC, and his title, which is Top Dog (of course). I’m always on the lookout for interesting people and names since everyone at our company takes on errr, evocative titles. Mine is Controller of Chaos and our president is the CEA, or Chief Executive Anarchist.

It’s great to see other people making a point to enjoy their working life. And it’s wonderful to get a compliment before I am through my morning coffee. Thanks Top Dog, oops, Ron. ;)

Have a great weekend! -debbie

ps: This post co-stars my dog, who I think is a Rottie-Chow mix.

This is one of the reasons we hand fill orders. It’s not uncommon for someone to forget he already owns a product. It’s also not uncommon for someone to think she bought the product when really she only downloaded the demo. This was the basis of two different support calls last week.

(By the way, I feel this theory should extend to cheesecake. I should be able taste its sweetness just thinking about eating cake, and therefore save myself the calories.)

Royalty-free cheesecake served up from www.freefoto.com. Cool stuff on that site.

I emailed the customer and he said that he couldn’t remember if he owned the product and was under a deadline. I resent his product info and refunded the new purchase.

From Roger, the customer mentioned:

Many software companies provide automatic downloads for their products. You put in your credit card digits and in maybe two minutes, the product is downloading to your desktop. Digital Anarchy is one of those companies that has a delay in sending out products. Sometimes that delay is only a half hour, while other times you have to wait a couple of hours until our office is open.

The downside is that you may need to wait a few hours to get your goodies. The upside is that we comb through orders along with other emails to make sure your service goes smoothly and you are only paying for what you really need. You can read more about our support policies here.

regards -Debbie

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Recently I designed a logo for our new CarToonIt! Bundle, which gives a discount on the purchase of ToonIt! Photo. This product bundle is our Adobe Photoshop cartooning software that now also works in Apple’s Aperture.

The CarToonIt! logo was pretty easy to make because I based it off our existing ToonIt! logo. But that short design process made me think about my design revisions for the ToonIt! logo, which happened over a few weeks’ time, and I thought it would be fun to post some of the iterations here. Enjoy!

My original concept sketch:

First comp put together in Illustrator:

Next comp done in Photoshop:

A revised Photoshop version:

And the final ToonIt! logo:

regards -Debbie

Here’s the result with the ToonIt! defaults rendered out of Photoshop:

Here is the original photo:

The only post-plugin editing that I felt was necessary was airbrushing out the nose ring from the girl’s face. Sometimes you will have to make little edits just because a detail that looks fine in the original photo simply doesn’t translate into black outlines and color fields. If you have a nice source image to start with, then this will happen infrequently. Try it yourself with our free ToonIt Photo demo!

regards -Debbie

(above, image from the article) Written in a very humorous style, this article is about a freelance writer who has difficulty and some mild schizophrenia about managing all of his jobs and tasks. Sounds like…all of us.

The Wired writer, Chris Hardwick, begins his article by saying: “I am a freelancer. My services are available to anyone at any time. In a former life I was probably a whore… Don’t get me wrong; in this economy, I’m grateful for the work. But without any kind of 9-to-5 structure, it’s a lot to keep track of.”

Hardwick spends the article (and six weeks) evaluating three different time-management books. His thought was that these books and their productivity systems are more relevant to people with full-time jobs rather than someone who is a juggler.

At the close of the Wired article, the writer’s summary is: “[I]n retrospect, it makes sense that I found it easier to cherry-pick elements from each and stitch together my own wearable cloak of efficiency… Look, freelancers are “free” because they take risks—they don’t like being told what to do. That’s both exciting and daunting, because you have to police you. The trick to being both manager and employee is getting leverage on yourself. Still, joining any one of these time-management cults full-on seemed too much like getting a real job. I prefer to swipe the best ideas and ignore the rest.”

Our company, Digital Anarchy, is a small one. We hand-fill our orders and the president is one of the folks who answers the phone. Everyone is a full-time employee but each person carries many roles and juggles many projects. And as with most of our customers, many of whom are freelance photographers or artists, we don’t abide by a 9am-5pm work life. Digital Anarchy is an around-the-clock job.

So this article really spoke to me. I was a freelance artist before coming to DA and often feel as if I am still working multiple jobs, though it’s all for the same company. I take copious scribbly notes on paper, which makes me feel like I am accomplishing something simply in the tracking. I make checklists and am careful to include a few recently executed tasks, just for the satisfaction of immediately crossing them off. I duplicate my lists to a calendar and digital note system to remind myself of the most important stuff.

Do I need a targeted productivity system? Maybe. For me it really comes down to where my head is at when I sit in front of the computer and what fire is burning. Often I find that just keeping Facebook closed and my cell phone ringer off are enough to be productive. ;)

How do you keep yourself on track?

regards -Debbie

We still do want to hear your thoughts and see you in our Digital Anarchy tshirts. Enjoy our blog’s new look and let me know what you think.

regards -Debbie

A month ago we set out to change this AnarchyJim blog. It was hosted by our website host using their proprietary software. While the blog was functional, it really wasn’t more than that.

We had our web host move our website to a new server so we could support the implementation of a new cool WordPress blog. That migration broke our website and our store — whoops — and the vendor was able to fix the website but couldn’t manage to fix the store — whoops again.

We have wanted to make some changes to our Create store for a long time now. There have been some difficulties with processing non-USA addresses, and sometimes our store would ‘forget’ to notify us of a purchase. Our web vendor started off as a wonderful company but five years later, they seem pretty apathetic about fixing things and worse, they won’t give their customers any real information. But business affiliations are often like relationships: Sometimes you need to hit a really bad spot to realize that it’s time for a change and a clean break.

So we made our escape from a relationship gone bad. It took many long hours and a couple of frantic business days, but we have a new site/store vendor. So far, their support service has been excellent though I am, of course, comparing that to our old host. And here you and I are, reading this post on our new WordPress blog.

This experience makes me think about how service has changed since technology lost its borders and how maybe it should change again in view of this faltering global economy. If our previous host had been more honest with us or willing to work hard to fix their mistakes, then we would most likely have stayed with them. Old habits die hard in relationships. But their service was poor and we left.

This is exactly why here at Digital Anarchy, we strive for excellent and quick support service. We don’t always succeed at first, but we admit our mistakes and fix the problem.

regards -Debbie

Excuse me, to a REAL blog system. Until now, we’ve been stumbling along with the blog capabilities provided by the hosting company for our website. The UI was obviously designed by a programmer and overall it was just impossible to customize. So here I am, typing into a pretty interface and id’ing all of old posts. It’s fun and exciting and inspires me to write more, like spending more time in your family room once it’s been space cleared. Please enjoy!

regards -Debbie

Sometimes our ‘anarchist’ t-shirts take matters into their own hands, er, arm holes and wind up in the most interesting locations.

Just recently in August 2008, at the Burning Man arts event in Reno, Nevada, USA.

In March 2008, experiencing the sunset over Masada near the Dead Sea in Israel.

So… where have you gone with your Digital Anarchy t-shirt? Let me know…

regards -Debbie