Our good friend Mordy Golding, over at Real World Illustrator, has come up with a technique for creating a license plate in Illustrator, sucessfully thwarting Illustrator's lack of an explicit embossed text effect. License plates, hmmm? Perhaps Mordy is anticipating that hanging out with the likes of Deke will inevitably lead him to a life of petty crime. (Actually, he was apparently inspired by another beloved rapscallion, the incomperable Bert Monroy, who originally did the project in Photoshop on his Pixel Perfect show.) Check out Mordy's results:

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This week's dekePod, Stealth 'Shop, The Virgin Histogram, features a photograph of one of San Francisco's most infamous (and I think wonderful) pieces of private artwork, a great towering anatomically enhanced robot by Nemo Gould.

In the Conclusion to my video, I say, "Or go to my personal site, deke.com, which also contains the uncensored robot photo. And yes, that whole phallus thing, I was not making it up. It's quite evident." That's my way of saying, be forewarned before proceeding. Read more » 

One of the dirty little secrets here in dekeVille is that the some of the files for the One-on-One series have been around for a long long time. Oh, not that Deke hasn't rewritten things a neurotic number of times (he has. . . he has because he cares, and. . . because he's mildly insane) or that we haven't converted the files to whatever the current version of InDesign (we have, we have because we need to practice with the new stuff anyway). But many of these files were like houses taken down to the foundation during rennovation gone amok, but then rebuilt on that same foundation (only to realize the foundation needed to be fortified).

We realize our files are old when InDesign starts going haywire, and in our case, text wrap has been one of those telltale areas where the cracks start to show. In fact, last year, Deke and I were complaining to Michael Ninness (InDesign PM at Adobe) about how they'd taken out the ability to see custom text wrap frames, and he's all, "We did not. What are you mildly insane people talking about?"

So, we sent off the file, and the upshot was, it was, like, a CS3 document that started out life as an InDesign 2.0 file. Myke and his team didn't really have a solution for our problem (well, cut-and-repaste helped) other than to say congratulations on submitting the creakiest legacy files ever observed in the wild, but he did show me this cool trick for seeing your document's history. Simple, just open the file, hold down the Command (Ctrl) key, and choose InDesign > About InDesign (or the Windows equivalent, you know the drill) and you get this scarily revealing window (shown here with the info for one of my current projects).

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