Let me start from the beginning, I have been using an old version of Microsoft Office Word 2004 for Mac for almost as long as it’s been released. Being a graphic designer, pretty much the only thing that I need Word for is to open Doc files and paste them into InDesign or other text editors like TextEdit or TextWrangler. Shelling out $130 or more for the luxury of text editing just seems to be unfathomable. After all, I live in Rockland County near New York City and that $130 really needs to get spent on rent, or perhaps something more fun than a word processor.

Recently I’ve been running into more and more issue opening up .docx files. Therefore, I decided to give OpenOffice.org a go several months back and try to save the $130. I’d used Open Office for Mac in the past, but it needed to be run out of a Linux window and was a clunky nightmare as a result. Let me just start out by saying the current version of OpenOffice.org 3.4.1 is awesome and a vast improvement!

I’ve recently been involved with a website based in the Blogger/BlogSpot CMS platform. The project required taking tons of old content originally printed on paper and transferring the digital files to Blogger. I initially started copying the files into InDesign to lose all of the excess code bloat and then pasting the resulting text into Blogger’s compose post dialog box. Simple enough, but a lot of the text needed to be reformatted once I brought the stripped out text into Blogger. It was going to be way too time consuming to reformat everything.

Therefore, I took the lazy way out and just started posting it straight into Blogger from OpenOffice.  Following this production method, I noticed right away that the Blogger Theme I was using was displaying some minor code bloat in the site’s post snippets. Well we can’t have that, so I reluctantly went into the HTML view and deleted the bloated code out of each article. It was still faster than re-typesetting everything, after all.

Last night, though, I pasted an old article out of Microsoft Word 2004, which I opened just out of old habit. I was surprised at how much more code bloat seemed to be getting carried over to blogger from Microsoft Word.

So I decided to conduct an experiment and share the results with you fine readers. Both of the examples below used the same exact Word Document. One example copies the document’s text directly from OpenOffice.org into Blogger. The Other copies the text Directly from Microsoft Word 2004 into Blogger.

An illustrated example of the amount of code bloat that is retained when a Word 2004 document is copied and pasted into an HTML text editor

An illustrated example of the amount of code bloat that is retained when a OpenOffice.org document is copied and pasted into an HTML text editor.

I think the results here, really speak for themselves and once again, Microsoft sucks! I’m starting to sound like a broken record. There is simply way more code bloat being produced by Microsoft Word than a OpenOffice.org text document. I found this to be pretty interesting, and useful information (I know I’m a total nerd). I only wish I could further this comparison experiment with Word Perfect, iWork and Microsoft Office X. Based on my statements above, there’s obviously no way I’m going to purchase any of those programs. If any of you readers happen to take an interest in this and want to conduct your own research with these other programs, I would love to see the results, please post them below.

Distinctive Collection Luxury Real Estate Branding ad for Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty.

Working for a real estate company in the Northern Suburbs of New York City certainly gives you the opportunity to market a great deal of luxury homes. A big part of that, though, is convincing the area residents that you understand their needs. Here lies the importance of a luxury branding campaign. Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate currently uses the Distinctive Collection brand to accomplish this.

The above ad was designed with the sole purpose of increasing brand awareness of the new Distinctive Collection Brand. The luxury market and need for an unimpeded prominent logo resulted in a rather simplistic ad design.

The copy for this ad concept was written by the Art Director. Since Distinctive Collection is a relatively new brand I felt that it was only logical and important to include the word “New” in the text. But, how is that accomplished? After some image research for luxury interiors I decided that I really liked staircases for a luxury real estate brand. With that direction and after a bit more brainstorming I came up with “Reaching New Heights in Luxury Real Estate.” A slogan that I felt was simple, to the point and not too kitsch.

It was decided that the first staircase I used for this project just wasn’t luxurious enough. So it was back to iStock Photo for another image search when I found the photo that was ultimately used. It’s perfect for luxury, wrought iron railings with a curved staircase concealing and baby grand piano. I can’t think of a room too much more luxurious than that!