One example is a photorealistic subway map I just designed for the cover of my department’s newsletter.

The job was relatively easy…it took me several hours worth of work to figure out how to do it, but with these steps it’s something you can do in less than an hour, shuttling back and forth between Illustrator and Photoshop…

1. Get a transportation agency’s subway map as a PDF.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) makes a high-resolution PDF of its system map available.

PDFs, it often turns out, preserve layers. Open your PDF in Adobe Illustrator, and you should find the original layers are editable. (If yours aren’t, sadly you’ll have to consider hand-deleting the original text.)

From there, you can customize the map, replacing stop names with your own text — in my case, faculty and grad students’ names, research themes, etc. (The MBTA, like many transport authorities, uses Helvetica as its typeface.)

2. Apply brushes for a slightly worn look.

Save your file and open it in Photoshop. Use a large charcoal paper brush with the opacity set low. Important: anything that you want to appear on the “paper” of the map should be done before step 3. In my image above, you may be able to tell I incorrectly applied the brush after step 3, giving the appearance more of dirty glass than of worn paper.

3. Create the illusion of perspective.

Save the Photoshop file and open it in Illustrator. Experiment with Illustrator’s rotate tool (Effects > 3D > Rotate) to find a 3D perspective you like.

4. Apply the “tilt-shift” trick.

Save the Illustrator file once more and open it in Photoshop. Follow this separate tutorial on creating the illusion of tilt-shift photography, which gives images with good depth of field the illusion of miniturization, or more precisely that your eyes are just inches away from a set of objects. The tutorial above walks you through making a central swath of the image in-focus and the rest out-of-focus, just as things appear when you look at them up close.

And that’s it! Did that work for you? Leave questions in the comments.

Today I finally had a free morning to really sort through these issues.

1. When I tried to submit Feedburner’s podcast feed, I would get the message “It appears the feed has already been submitted.”
2. That was a problem because the podcast was not listed in the iTunes podcast directory
3. iTunes is notorious for not responding to requests for help, though I can’t blame them

(There were also problems with converting our podcast feed to XML and discovering that Feedburner now requires a Google account, but that’s not for now.)

After rooting around a dozen different help forums, one thing was clear: the only way to resubmit a podcast feed so that iTunes doesn’t think it’s a duplicate is to change certain key XML data. Though no one in these forums knew so, it turns out that you can change this data within Feedburner itself:

1. Log in to your feed
2. Click the Optimize tab
3. In the sidebar under Services, click Title/Description Burner
4. And within that, tweak the description of your podcast

I went an extra step and changed more, since all of that “Optimization data” is actually what shows up in your podcast feed’s XML. So I added geotag info, a new image, and selected the SmartCast and SmartFeed options….all the more to make it appear different from the previous version already submitted to iTunes.

The podcast should be on iTunes sometime next week. And though I hate to wait for it, this email I just got was so very sweet:

Dear Podcast Owner

Your podcast feed, [ http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MITCMSColloquium ] was successfully added and is now under review.

Sincerely,

The iTunes Store Team

Why?

Because I almost never read their posts.

Why?

Because their headlines really stink.

I suppose it doesn’t surprise me that creative writers gloss over an essential part of getting people to actually read their work—namely, by choosing a good headline. I’ve written terribly uninformative headlines myself. But I almost never read lit blogs now simply because I have no idea what I might be reading.

The main thing creative writers need to get past, when it comes to blogs, is that the title is not part of the post. The title is almost always going to be viewed alone, especially when it comes to RSS feeds, so it needs to stand on its own two serifs.

Let’s compare the headlines of blogs I read a lot and lit blogs that I now read rarely:

Well-written headlines

From Wonkette:
“Rudy’s Son Sues College For Cutting Him From Golf Team”
“Pennsylvania’s Beauty Queen/Fake Job/Cigar Store/Car Sex Scandal”
“Obama Lies About His Foreign Language Skillz”

From Slashdot:
“Mars In 3D”
“The Death of Nearly All Software Patents?”
“Researchers Face Jail Risk For Tor Snooping Study”

From Brain And Consciousness Research:
“Aggressive preschoolers found to have fewer friends than others”
“Magic is the trick to understanding the mind”
“Team creates touch-based illusion”

Poorly-written lit blog headlines

From the Sycamore Review:
“A day in the life of a week . . .”
“The cinema of the theatre of the absurd”
“Show your working”

From Bookninja:
“I get to go to Vermin!”
“Since you asked (or not)”
“don’s fountain of health”

Even McSweeney’s:
“Way back when”
“Amazon vs. everybody else”
“High fashion out of fashion”

Since I’m not one to bitch without a follow-up suggestion, if you yourself have trouble writing good headlines, here are some great resources:

• Writing Effective, Attention-Getting Headlines and Titles on Your Blog
• Great Content… Bad Titles – How to Let Your Blog Go #4
• 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work