The 2004 Creativepro.com Gift Guide

Sandee Cohen, Bruce Fraser, Sharon Steuer, Ben Long, Brian P. Lawler, Eric J. Adams, Pamela Pfiffner, John D. Berry, Molly W. Joss, Susan Glinert Stevens contributed to this article.
The great thing about being a creative professional is that the work we do and the lives we lead embrace so many different kinds of creativity: making art, perusing design, listening to music. So when I asked regular contributors to creativepro.com to suggest what they’d like to give or received this holiday season, I was prepared for anything.
Sure enough, some responses were expected — digital cameras and flash drives — and others unexpected — massage chairs and TV zappers.
Read on.
Eric J. Adams: The Massage is the Message
I’ve been spying those $800 massage chairs at Sharper Image –- try one if you haven’t, they are a bodily revelation.
If you’re looking to give a poor-person’s equivalent, consider the HoMedics SBM-200 Therapist Select Shiatsu Back Massager.
This $98 gizmo fits on most any office chair and moves up and down your back with a massage mechanism that kneads tightest knots along your spine. The unit features three programs — for full, lower, and upper back — along with three speeds. A programmable hand control unit lets you customize your massage on any single spot.
If there’s one gift that every computer user will appreciate, it’s a portable USB drive, available for as little as $9.99 for 32MBs of storage. These key chain-sized wonders are great for mobile computing – providing instant back up in case your notebook is lost or stolen, and particularly useful for artists who want to transport large files from office to office. A number of companies make them, including venerable Lexar.
For the very special techno-geeks on your list, it’s time (if they don’t already have one) for TiVo. The company’s TCD540040 Series2 40-Hour Digital Video Recorder is available for less than $200. Among its many features, the unit records television shows for later viewing at your pleasure.
The Series2 has two USB ports, offering home network users the ability to stream photos and music to their TiVo, or send programs from one TiVo to another. And a Digital Music Player and Photo Viewer lets you enjoy your MP3 music and digital photo collections stored on your computer.
For the nostalgic boomers in your life, Bob Dylan’s new autobiography “Chronicles, Vol. 1” is a revealing look at an icon of the past four decades. The master poet and mysterious recluse speaks candidly about his life, art, and times.
And if you’re looking for a CD that almost anyone can enjoy, check out Ray Charles’ last album, released just after his death, “Genius Loves Company.” The album includes duets with Norah Jones, Anita Baker, Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson and other music superstars. A wonderful tribute to a true American genius.
John D. Berry: Book ‘Em
Give books! There’s no better reading.
Admittedly, I have a personal interest in some of these titles, but note that most of the Mark Batty Publisher trade editions are available at a 30 percent holiday discount until the end of this month.

“Newspaper Design edited by — surprise! — me, with a foreword by Roger Black;
“Afrikan Alphabets” by Saki Mafundikwa;
Tart Cards” by Caroline Archer;
“This is Not an Atlas” by Warren Hutchinson & Nick Foster;
“Japanese matchbox art of the ’20s and ’30s” by Maggie Kinser Hohle.

Also in the form of a book, and also close to home (designed by me, written by my partner Eileen, and highly if non-dispassionately recommended):
“Stable Strategies and Others” by Eileen Gunn.
Sandee Cohen: Out to Sea
This holiday season I’m all wet! In preparing for my yearly teaching trip to Hawaii, I want EVERYTHING from Waterproofcases.com.
With a waterproof case for my digital camera I can take really good underwater pictures instead of using the silly disposable camera I bought last year.
I also want a waterproof iPod case with waterproof headphones so I can swim laps in the pool listening to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.
And I will probably send a few of my friends iSight cameras as I’m tired of just talking to them using iChat and want them to see how my exercise and fitness regimen is going.
Bruce Fraser: Titanium Transporter
If you don’t already own a USB Flash drive — one of those little solid-state drives that are only slightly bigger than a USB plug — it’s time to join the 21st century and get one (once you do, you’ll wonder how you managed without one).
I like the Cruzer Titanium USB Flash Drive from SanDisk. It’s fast (15MB/sec read, 13MB/sec write), and virtually indestructible thanks to the titanium-coated casing.
Susan Glinert: Turn Off the TV!
For those creative professionals who find noise pollution as offensive as air pollution, I offer the Numero Uno Spectacular Gift of the Season: TV-B-Gone. For only $14.99, you can be free of the incessant, annoying, irritating, head-pounding drone of television! Just aim the little darling (it hangs on your keychain) at the offending machine and click. It turns off the television instantly. I got to zap the revolting medical yammer in the doctor’s office and the equally dismal tooth decay video at the dentist. Not recommended for use in Sports Bars populated by aggressive customers.
My second favorite Gadget of the Year is my Sharp Zaurus 760. This little clamshell PDA is not sold in the US, although you can purchase via Dynamism, Japan Direct, and a few other places on the Web (search for Zaurus). If you buy from these places, they will convert the unit to English menus at no charge, but it only took me 10 minutes to do it myself after reading the information at the Zaurus Users Group Web site.
This adorable PDA looks just like a laptop that shrunk in the wash and it does just about everything. It holds my address book, calendar, and to-do lists. It does Internet and email (via a CF card), lets me read e-books, watch movies, play games, and listen to music. I can use it as a drawing pad, spreadsheet, word processor, dictionary, image editor, and IRC-chat companion. It synchronizes with Outlook and can beam files around via infrared. Most people won’t care, but it has a built-in Japanese/English translator that renders one language into another, more or less accurately. Well, it gets the idea across and usually gets a laugh, too.
What the Zaurus doesn’t do is crash — the Linux kernel is stable and invisible, although you can fool with it if you are a Linux buff. I have had the unit for six months and I have yet to reboot it. My Pocket PC PDA requires rebooting about four times a day and gets about four hours of useful work on the battery. The Zaurus’s battery lasts a whopping 11 hours — almost enough to get me from Atlanta to Japan. The unit has both a CF and SD slot–carrying around a couple of gigabytes on this tiny machine is a kick. Nice VGA screen, too.
My third choice is a Windows OCR package. A number of years ago I fooled around with some OCR packages and decided that it was faster to type in the text rather than to correct the truly abysmal output. This year, I had a chance to try Abbyy FineReader 7, and I have to say that this is one impressive OCR package. It’s phenomenally accurate and very, very smart. Among other things, it recognizes text in 177 languages and can spell-check 34 of them. FineReader also reads scripting languages and science formulas, such as C/C++, COBOL, Fortran, JAVA, Pascal and simple chemical formulas. The program integrates tightly with Microsoft Office, letting you send the output directly to Microsoft Office apps such as Word and Excel. You can also save the output directly to PDF as either text, images, or a mix of the two.
The program’s intelligent batching makes tedious OCR tasks a little more bearable. For example, FineReader can detect the gutter on a two-page spread and split the single page into two. The top of the line product is expensive ( $299.99), but if you need OCR, this is the one to buy.
Molly W. Joss: Pantone Plates to Pressure Points
Pantone tableware (also available at Fishs Eddy): “Based on colorful sample plates used by traveling china salesmen in the 1940’s and 50’s to show the variety of color available to restaurants, hotels and country clubs. ”
I think this stuff is so kitschy-cute, but any piece is a great collectible item and the mugs could be used for corporate give-aways to clients.
Because I’m a paper addict, a gift certificate or cool paper selections from any of the following paper supplier online catalogs:

An Epson photo printer — I bought one of these this year for about $100 (the Epson Stylus Photo R200) and have been having such fun with it editing and printing digital photos.
A gift certificate for a hand massage, or what the heck, how about suggesting that management bring in a massage therapist once a month or so in 2005 to give the design staff hand and foot massages? If you really want to give somebody a fantastic massage experience, spring for a Thai massage gift certificate.
Brian P. Lawler: Cameras and Cards
For digital photography enthusiasts, storage is the thing. 256 MB CompactFlash cards from Best Buy are currently selling for $40 after rebate, a “best buy” in my book. And, Costco sells similar cards for about $50. For those who need more storage, B&H Photo in New York has several brands of 1GB CompactFlash cards for $100 or less. This is a major change since last year when these cards cost $300 or more.
For those with an appetite for taking lots of high-resolution images, the FlashTrax from Smart Disk is a great gift. Not only does it provide field storage and viewing capability in the gigabytes, it will also play slide shows on a television set in either NTSC or PAL formats, so when you’re traveling the world, you can share your digital photos with the gathered multitudes.
And, FlashTrax doubles as an MP3 player. Load your MP3s on the FlashTrax, plug-in the headphones and beebop through your photo safaris.
On the high-end of consumer/prosumer digital photography are both the popular Canon EOS Digital Rebel, currently well under $1,000 including the lens (after rebate), and Nikon’s stunning D70, with lens, that is selling for just over $1,000 now in the photo-electronics bazaars. Both of these cameras take wonderful digital images, provide high resolution for large prints, and have features galore — including completely manual operation for those who want to change F-stops and shutter speeds without the intrusion of electronic elves.
Ben Long: Our Comical Culture
“Understanding Comics,” by Scott McCloud. Although it’s ostensibly a book about comic book “literacy” the book provides in-depth discussions of the underlying psychology of iconography and how the visual literacy popularized by comics has produced a sophisticated visual vocabulary. Presented as a giant comic book, the work is a valuable aid to graphic designers, or anyone else who communicates visually for a living.
Pamela Pfiffner: For Art’s Sake
Much of what’s been mentioned by other contributors — new camera, printer, art books — is on my short-list, too. Great minds, and all that, eh? Or just over-the-top marketing?
I’m slightly tempted by the first all-digital “box set” for the iPod era, The Complete U2, available exclusively from iTunes. As I’ve been following the band from the beginning, I have the albums already, but this collection contains lots of rareties. Plus, the idea of a box set sans box intrigues me.
I’m not going to fall for the Special Edition U2 iPod, though. Think I’ll just ask for a fourth generation 20 GB vanilla model.
And if I do get a new iPod, then I definitely want some external speakers. You see, my friends all seem to gravitate toward my back patio to socialize and we need a “boombox” to play music during warm summer evenings. I’ll take either the Altec Lansing InMotion speakers or the Harman JBL On Tour speaker system.
The must-have DVD for me this year is the fascinating documentary “Andy Goldsworthy Rivers and Tides,” about the British artist who creates installations out of nature itself. You see how creating great art requires equal parts inspiration, patience, and frustration. Any visually inclined person will be moved by this.
Speaking of inspiration, the main thing I’m giving myself this year is a membership to the just-opened Museum of Modern Art in New York — and I’m taking myself there this weekend to check out the new building. A gift that exposes your loved ones to great art and design is a gift that keeps on giving. A national MoMA membership is only $60, but look in your own backyard, too. Regional museums need your support more than ever.
Cindy Samco: Pictures in my Pocket
I’d like a small digital camera that I can carry with me everywhere I go. I’m finding time and time again that I see something while I’m out and about that I want to snap a picture of for later reference. I was in a Japanese restaurant last month and fell in love with the overhead lighting. I wanted to reach into my purse and pull out a small camera and snap a few pix. But alas, I have a larger SLR type camera (that I love!) but it’s not very portable.
This little camera doesn’t have to have to be a big mega-pixel thing. Most of my serendipitous snaps are not destined for printing. However, inspiration happens when you least expect it. I want those moments captured when they happen. I’m hoping my gift-giving partner (are you reading Eric?) sees this and clicks on one of these possibilities:

Sharon Steuer: Music to my Ears
I finally bought an iPod (actually Sandee Cohen’s OLD iPod!) so I now get the fun of it all as I join the pod-centric universe…
Gadgets for iPods (for folks who have iPods) are great gifts. The Monster iCarPlay adaptor means that your CDs won’t get stolen from your car (ours just did!) and considerably lightens the load for vacation car trips. And of course beltclips for the gym, remotes for controlling the pod without taking it off your belt-clip, and gift certificates for iTunes (so you can get that Gloria Gaynor single!).
And since you can’t get an FM tuner to attach to your pod, you may want to get what I got myself for a present – a solar-powered AM/FM headset radio. Of course if you have some money to spend and it’s for that special someone there are the big-ticket items, like digital cameras or brand-new iPods… A new gadget is always has better technology and will be much appreciated — and you may become the recipient of the cast-off!
PS: Don’t Forget our Authors!
Many of the people who write for creativepro.com are also published book authors. Here are some of this year’s highlights: