Old Fashioned Journalism for the New Age of Professional Graphics

[Editor's Note: Jon Peddie Research acquired VEKTORRUM Group on July 1, 2010. Subscribers to VEKTORRUM Executive Report now receive Jon Peddie's TechWatch for the remainder of their subscription term. On September 17, 2010 VEKTORRUM.com was renamed GraphicSpeak and given a new web address: GFXSpeak.com The following article, updated September 27, 2010, explains the recent history and background of this publication.]

GraphicSpeak: A Site for Graphics Professionals and Related Disciplines

By Kathleen Maher
Editor-in-Chief and Publisher

Welcome to GraphicSpeak (GFXSpeak.com). As we continue to expand the coverage of the former Vektorrum website to include more areas of computer graphics we believe are of interest to our readers, we realized we need a name offering us more latitude. We came up with GraphicSpeak, a variant on Graphically Speaking, a frequent section for hardware and software articles in our TechWatch publication.

As many readers of this site already know, it represents the evolution of reporting in the CAD field over the last twenty-five years or so (but who’s counting?). When desktop CAD was young all those many years ago, the CAD magazines we worked for often covered new advances in filmmaking, rendering, analysis, photo imaging, graphics hardware, game development, scientific visualization, desktop publishing … you name it. That’s because the CAD field was part of the larger graphics revolution and the people who were moving from drawing boards to computers, from paper to digitizers, and from office chaos to networked communication and collaboration (and often, chaos) were vitally interested in all aspects of computer graphics. They recognized that advances in one field would have an influence in all areas of computer graphics. But, perhaps just as important, a lot of these early adopters and pioneers were in the business because they loved graphics in all its forms.  They took up engineering and architecture and drafting because they thought and communicated visually.

We don’t think anything has changed all that much. We believe that the professionals who work with computer graphics in CAD, imaging, scientific visualization, 3D modeling and animation, and all the amazing fields in between are primarily visual thinkers; they are interested in advances in all areas of the industry. GraphicSpeak will look for and report on information that’s useful and, we hope, entertaining for CAD professionals and everyone who has an interest in computer graphics.

A Bit of History

By Randall S. Newton
Managing Editor

When such industry newsletters as CADCAMNet, Engineering Automation Report, A|E|C Automation Newsletter, and its predecessors were founded nearly a generation ago, unbiased information on engineering and design technology was hard to come by, especially for managers and executives. The vertical magazines serving the various professional disciplines covered software as a side issue, if at all. Specialized publications filled an important need.

Eventually print magazines started covering technical graphics software, but for the most part they tailored their reporting to the needs of their advertisers or offered coverage that was too general in nature. The subscription-based newsletters filled an important role, providing unbiased, specialist information to a targeted audience.

The Need Has Changed

Today information scarcity is not the problem. Instead, technical professionals and their management teams are coping with two major trends: an Internet-based information deluge and the failing response of print media. The close of CADCAMNet in December 2009 and the launch of this web site in early 2010, originally called VEKTORRUM.com and its accompanying newsletter VEKTORRUM Executive Report, (VER) was my response to these trends.

VEKTORRUM Executive Report fulfilled the subscription obligations of CADCAMNET. When Jon Peddie Research acquired the Vektorrum Group, it replaced VER with TechWatch.

GraphicSpeak is the web-based extension and amplification of the tradition of journalistic excellence and state-of-the-art insight found in the newsletters that form the ancestral tree of this website. The rich archive of articles from CADCAMNET and its predecessors will be posted at GraphicSpeak over time, freely available to all. The web site will carry advertising, a departure from the subscription-only business model of TechWatch. We are strongly wedded to the journalist’s tradition of a “wall of separation” between editorial and advertising. That’s why we contract our ad sales to a third party who has no influence over what we write.

Some of our reporting will appear first in the newsletter, and then made public on the web site later (specifically, our quarterly coverage of financial results from the public companies in this industry). We believe this dual approach—subscription-only and free access—is the best way to both cover the industry and make a living. You should understand our training and our ethic is very much about “the separation of church and state” when it comes to journalism. We will be simultaneously grateful to our advertisers and unflinching in our coverage of ALL industry players. From a cold, hard business viewpoint advertising-based journalism exists to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. We will do that by making GraphicSpeak a must-read experience. The current editorial staff have all been both complimented and cursed in boardrooms around the world.

Chase the Pixel, Track the Vector, Seek the New

The mission statement at Jon Peddie Research is simply “We chase the pixel.” Before being acquired by JPR, the Vektorrum Group shamelessly borrowed their words to say “We track the vector.” Now that the two companies are united, our coverage will follow all aspects of professional graphics software and hardware, with an eye to what’ s new and important.  Those topics include—but are not limited to:

• Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) and Building Information Modeling (BIM)
• Electronic Design Automation (EDA)
• Digital Content Creation (DCC)
• Photo, video, and cinema automation
• Manufacturing design and engineering, including Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
• Process and power plant design and operations
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
• 3D Printing in all its forms, including Additive Manufacturing
• Technical illustration
• Fashion and apparel design
• Consumer packaged goods design and engineering
• Web 3D
• Augmented reality
• Mobile graphics technology
• Virtual worlds of a professional, technical nature
• The hardware it takes to run all these applications