Showing only Notes + Links tagged design
I’ve never commented on the NYT before; that was kind of fun.
This guy’s like: “Oh god, can I Like this photo of people dying in Haiti?” and all of the Old People on the NYT are freaked out and suggesting new words, such as APPRECIATE (Marco: “because it’s better to APPRECIATE people dying it Haiti, right?”), and RECOMMEND or INTERESTED (wonder what that icon would look like?).
Also this is my favorite comment:
1. You don’t have to click on the Like button.
2. Instead of clicking on the Like button, you could have written something in response to the article’s posting.
3. You could have just done nothing — no one really cares about your opinion on their Facebook page posting.
4. Who cares?
5. Get a real job.HAH. People are the worst/best.
Hah is right.
Hey, ‘Friend,’ Do You ‘Like’ My Sad Story? — NY Times
I recently “liked” a story about five people dying in an explosion in Connecticut.
I didn’t actually “like” the fact that five people had died in a terrible accident. Technically, I didn’t even “like” the story — I found the reporting and writing informative and the narrative engrossing, but not the contents of the piece. On Facebook, however, the only option I had to tell people I had read the article was to either add a comment or press the little “like” button that appears at the bottom of everyone’s status update.
The same act of “liking” something applies to the Web site Tumblr. Several weeks ago, when I visited a friend’s Tumblr Web site, at the top of the page sat a series of photos from the devastation in Haiti. There were images of dead bodies, of toppled buildings and of a child crying in the street. Yet below all of this there were a series of tiny icons with people’s names saying they “liked” this set of images.
You can also find these strange juxtapositions on Google Buzz and on the fan pages of Facebook.
Although these calls for approval have been around for a long time on social networks, they can still be jarring and confusing when this terminology is used in the wrong context.
(via infoneer-pulse)
I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.
Edward Tufte, who has been appointed by President Obama to “help track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds” as part of the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel.
Tufe is being nonchalant, but this is great news. Not only for design-nerds but the general public too.
(via iA)
Built to Last, Built to Decay: Authentic, Self-Reflective, Relationship Building Books in the Age of the iPad
Craig Mod, who clearly gets it, has written (and designed) an excellent piece on the future of publishing:
I propose the following to be considered whenever we think of printing a book:
- The Books We Make embrace their physicality — working in concert with the content to illuminate the narrative.
- The Books We Make are confident in form and usage of material.
- The Books We Make exploit the advantages of print.
- The Books We Make are built to last
The result of this is:
- The Books We Make will feel whole and solid in the hands.
- The Books We Make will smell like now forgotten, far away libraries.
- The Books We Make will be something of which even our children — who have fully embraced all things digital — will understand the worth.
- The Books We Make will always remind people that the printed book can be a sculpture for thoughts and ideas.
Anything less than this will be stepped over and promptly forgotten in the digital march forward.
Goodbye disposable books.
Hello new canvases.
I like the distinction between formless and definite content in relation to a container. I highly reccomend reading the entire piece, which also talks about opportunities for “definite” digital content that are presented by the iPad. The only point I might debate and expand on (not because Craig is wrong, but because he is not taking into account certain possibilities*) is that printed books should be “built to last.”
While digital distribution makes sense for high-volume, formless, ephemeral publishing like news and tweets, the fact of the matter is that digital content can exist indefinitely, distributed across millions of hard drives, but a printed object exists in one place at a time and eventually disintegrates.
I’ve saved a lot of links on the perpetuity of digital information but never created a standardized tag (perhaps I should use: forgetting?) so it’s hard for me to dig up references or even make sense of it. However, I recently read an article from a couple months ago called Our Digitally Undying Memories by Siva Vaidhyanathan, reviewing Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age that impacted me a lot:
The technological proliferation of the last 40 years has given us remarkably cheap information-storage techniques. Our powers to remember have shifted the default (for digitized information and culture anyway) so that forgetting is the accident or exception, Mayer-Schönberger asserts. We have moved so quickly from forgetting most of our stuff (or at least rendering it hard to access) to remembering most of it (and making it easy to search) that we have neglected to measure the effects of the change. Just because we have the vessels, we fill them. Then we engage with networks of data communication that offer so many disparate elements of our lives to strangers and—more important—people we would like to know better.
The thought of print as something that goes away reminds me of a hilariously conspiracy-theory-esque Gawker post analyzing the strength of staples used to bind The New Yorker versus The New York Times Magazine:
Could it be? Is the New York Times magazine perfectly calibrated to totally self-destruct before the next week’s issue (and ads) arrives?
Reached on Friday, a Times spokeswoman asked about reader staple angst denied everything. “I’ve never heard it,” Diane McNulty said. “In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never heard that.”
If we expand our idea of what a book is, a novel can be printed on newsprint and bound with staples, so can a blog. The new distinction is about formless vs. definite content and object vs. screen. All of these design and production options can—and should—apply to the future of books.
The fact that books can get ripped, left out in the rain, smudged with food, given to a friend, bought from a used bookstore with a stranger’s marginalia, thrown away during a move, or left to rot in someone’s dank basement is a design advantage—or, at the very least, something for the creator to take into account.
I love finely produced books**, where the designer has shaped the experience I will have with buying the book and reading it. But designers who consider books-of-the-future as important for being physical objects need to also think about redefining what a book is and how we interact with it. What paths might a reader take that deviate from the standard: author —> printer —> bookstore —> reader?
There is magic in the kind of second-hand interactions (decaying, annotating, sharing) listed above that doesn’t exist in the same way on a digital level. When the Microsoft Zune announced a feature called—wait for it—squirting, allowing you to wirelessly share songs from your device with others nearby, Steve Jobs had something brilliant to say about the artifice of digital relationships and interactions:
Newsweek: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
In World Building in a Crazy World, Jonathan Harris writes:
Human needs that have to do with authenticity, self-reflection, depth of communication, and real relationship-building are especially poorly answered online (at least currently). Maybe these needs cannot be answered online and require physical contact in all cases, but my sense is that they can, if only we design the right worlds to encourage and support them.
The content of books is one of the most authentic ways that we get to explore these things—as DFW said, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being”—but what about exploring meaning through the design of books? What about designing books to be kept or shared, protected or beat-up, resold and then shared and resold again? In Objectified, a designer from IDEO (can’t remember exactly who it was) talked about sustainability as such:
“Most things I’ve designed are now in landfills.” I have to ask myself, “Would you be comfortable having designed this product if it washed up on a beach?”
Jumping again, but there is a parable that a Buddhist looks at a pile of trash and sees the trees and minerals that the garbage objects were originally made from and also the flower that will grow out of their decomposition. Maybe I’m getting too specifically into this crazy idea of growing, decomposing, circulated books as interactive art objects, but these design considerations can be subtle too. How can we harness accidental design? How can we create objects that take on a second life beyond their content? What happens next? What I’m really talking about is designing objects, and how we’re only moving into increasingly exciting territory. And, yeah, I’m really freaking optimistic about the future of print everything.
* I admire that the article is very focused, because there are infinite possibilities. My method of thinking and writing tends to be expansive, sprawling and often (because of this) indigestible.
** I have three of the seven books that Craig highlights as excellent examples of print and can vouch that they are, in fact, excellent.
“Extreme Makeover, Weiner Edition: RKS Redesigns the Deadly Hot Dog”
This is kind of brilliant and absolutely revolting.
I don’t really eat hot dogs, but it freaks me out to think about food as something that is manufactured and designed. Even worse, this redesign was prompted by over-zealous safety experts who are worried that cylindrical shaped, esophagus sized hot dogs are a choking hazard to children. “When it’s wedged in tightly, that child is going to die.” says Dr. Gary Smith, former chairman of the AAP’s Committee on Injury, Violence, and Poison Prevention. This, unfortunately, is not a joke.
Food—mostly excluding food packaging—is definitely one of the areas where lack of design* is the most appealing option**.
(via Fast Company, redesignrelated)
* Hot dogs, being a man made creation (*shudder*), are designed objects, but they are so utilitarian that it’s arguably more natural not to think about them as “designed.”
** Except to children? Think: Rugrats Mac and Cheese and Gogurt
Just listened to Alissa Walker’s interview on Humble Pied about “ignoring your job title.”
It’s the same idea that had me all excited about Gabriel Orozco’s show at the MoMA.* He doesn’t feel constrained by the collective consciousness definition of what an artist can be, or I, at least, don’t get the feeling that he’s trying too hard to create capital A-R-T. Either way, the joy is evident and in the breadth of the work there is clarity.
Like Alissa says, whatever you do becomes your body of work!
* and now that I think about it, this is the same reason that I get excited about anything. Maybe it’s also why I like reading writing about writing, I can’t find the quote, but somebody said that the business of a writer is living life, if that connection makes sense at all.
Was up late last night collaborating with the JBP crew on cramming all the major art fairs, museums, some nice galleries + shops, a Taco Bell, and TWO zoos onto the back of Jason Polan’s—awesome!—hand drawn map that we’re handing out this weekend at the fairs. 8pt font to the rescue!
Oh, and jenbee is making me blush:
This is the back of the printed version of our opinionated map + guide to the 2010 NYC Art Fairs, painstakingly, logically and gorgeously laid out for us by the if-I-wasn’t-so-goddamned-principled-I’d-pluck-him-out-of-undergrad-and-give-him-a-fulltime-gig Casey Gollan.
Copies will be exclusively distributed in our nifty Art Fair Survival Kits, which we’ll be distributing to a few hundred fortunate fair-goers. Assembled in our rather handsome and reusable totebags, our kits will include this map, a swank city guide from Daily Candy, primping materials, things to eat (popcorn, for instance) and other surprises. And also: plenty of room for all the art-fair related things you’re bound to accumulate during your travels.
We’ve also got an online version of our 2010 NYC Art Fairs map here — less visually delightful, sure, but highly useful! (No popcorn though, you have to find us in person for that.)
(via jenbekmanprojects)
I’m sort of confused why Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace website is a crappy rip-off of Apple.com. But I’m willing to bet that Apple’s lawyers let it slide on account of this ad.
Find the cracks in the wall.Tibor Kalman, New York, June 1998. He continues, “There are a very few lunatic entrepreneurs who will understand that culture and design are not about fatter wallets, but about creating a future. They will understand that wealth is means, not an end. Under other circumstances they may have turned out to be like you, creative lunatics. Believe me, they’re there and when you find them, treat them well and use their money to change the world.” (via bobulate)
My opinion of the olympics is generally in line with @joehewitt, who tweeted: “All hail the power of marketing convincing people they need to suddenly care about these obscure, dull sports once every 2 years.”
But, at the closing ceremony of the winter olympics, 20 giant “Zygote” touch-responsive glowing bouncy balls—based on open-source software—were released into the crowd. How cool is that?
An interview with Kentridge wherein the artist comments on his own responses; these appear in blocks of white that interrupt the original interview.
Abbott Miller and Kristen Spilman of Pentagram have designed a gorgeous book to accompany the William Kentridge retrospective at the MoMA. I had the chance to see Kentridge speak about his work and the opera he is working on a few weeks ago and found that he is all-at-once academic, inspirational, and hilarious. Did I mention the work is beautiful too?
The Pentagram designed book, above, honors and accentuates the work in a variety of ways, but I was particularly taken by the design of this interview that was later revised and annotated by Kentridge. After one lecture it’s not like I know the guy, but to go back and comment on his responses seems so delightfully like him! I’m glad to see it executed so sharply in terms of design.
YOU KILLED MY MOTHER CHOIRE. JUST LIKE THE INTERNET KILLED PUBLISHING.
A Conversation with Paul Ford, Web Editor of Harper’s Magazine | The Awl
All kidding aside—and there is a lot of kidding—this hilarious conversation between Chore Sicha and Paul Ford, (who has proven himself to be one of the brightest minds in online publishing, and whose taxonomized website Ftrain.com has been blowing my mind since a very long time ago) is really intelligent, interesting, and ridiculously fun to read.
Last week at 20x200 HQ I had a really interesting conversation with David about how people react to and share things on the web (new retweets vs old retweets, liking vs favoriting, rating by stars vs emotions, etc). That discussion led to talking about redundancy (e.g. reblogs, old reweets, where content gets copied over and over) and then to the general merits of having structured data.
When using blog oriented content management systems like Movable Type, a lot of repetitious information gets inputted in a non-systematic way. E.g. coding a link to a pop-up image into a text field, rather than uploading the image into a field designed for that specific type of image and having the system take care of the rest in a standardized way. The problem is that it’s not just difficult to write a custom CMS that covers all your needs, but also to find out what your needs are, anticipate future needs (lots of my job at 20x200 involves going back in time and filling in blanks or adapting unstructured data into the logical new system), and create a system that strikes a balance between total lack of structure and too-rigid-to-function. I half-joked that every single person should be required to write their own CMS.
I think some of the most compelling web content today is “bespoke” meaning it breaks out of the boring “text and images slopped into a pre-packaged template” and features posts which are still organized in a linear way, but designed individually with respect to the content. This seems to break away from rigid/templated/database-centric design, but I find that Ford’s Ftrain.com and Harpers.org, which don’t have custom designs for every single page, are equally—if not moreso—compelling. They evoke a sense of bespoke-ness not through a decorative custom design for each page, but through a handcrafted and thoughtfully considered taxonomy of their contents.
This is all a roundabout way of getting around to saying that Ftrain.com was the first time I realized that though one CMS may fit all, the magic really happens when an author takes publishing tools into their own hands. After experiencing Ftrain, I promptly went out and bought a book on XSLT, which I never read and am still too intimidated to tackle. I don’t even know if it’s still a relevant technology, but the point is that years later the idea is still not out of my head!
Paul Ford on the hierarchy of Ftrain.com:
Many people come back to Ftrain over a course of months of years before the structure makes sense, and then, they tell me, it suddenly makes perfect sense. The structure is an essential part of the site. So if you like the writing, but are put off by the structure, know that other people have felt your pain, but that sticking with it might reward you. Might.
Ftrain is a hierarchy. Any given page has one or more of parent, children, and sibling pages, and every page lives somewhere in the hierarchy.
The front page is the very top node of the hierarchy, and everything branches out from there.
On the front page are all the pages flagged for release on this day, or, if there are none, the most recent piece written.
If you use Mozilla, a recent Netscape, or Opera the wonderful “Site Navigation Bar” feature will also allow you to quickly race around Ftrain’s hierarchy.
You can also navigate chronologically, by following the “Navigate by Time” links at the bottom of the page.
Ftrain is this complicated because it has over 1000 separate nodes, all of them connected to one another in some way, with something like 700,000 words between them, and all extensible. It was designed to make it possible to tell stories over time, so that a piece begun in one year could be resolved in the next, just like it happens in life, but with the added satisfaction of narrative completion.
I think the navigation is an okay, but imperfect compromise between the technical and the prosaic, and will continue to develop it.
Time and time again I am hit with pangs of guilt when dashing off notes + links containing words like “bespoke” and “carefully considered” to my off-the-shelf solution that is Tumblr, but they have truly created a set of tools that make it sufficiently stylish and effortless to capture ideas. I have ideas for some changed or additional features for interacting with my specific type of content which extend beyond the scope of Tumblr, but who has the time or knowledge to code these dreams into existence?
Me? I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no. But it’s a good reminder that it’s time to brush up on my programming.
Threw together a bunch of images from the /tagged/maps and /search/maps pages of Notes + Links yesterday while brainstorming for a project to map a journey. I was really happy to be able to find instant images + backstories on lots of these images, some of which I remembered only vaguely. It was a good reminder of how useful this site is, but also how incomplete it is. During the presentation, I kept remembering things that I like but never posted and thinking, “AHHH I have to add that before I forget again!”
The plan is to take my collected personal data (5 Year Diary, Foursquare, Last.fm, Mousetracks) and do something-to-be-determined that makes it more interesting or at least less sterile.
If I had to compare my spending on books to one of the states of matter (solid, liquid, or gas) it would probably be gas, because my book-buying consistently expands to fill my bank balance. What I mean to say is that I just bought We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion by Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris and it’s amazing. You can look at spreads from the book online and also play around with the wonderful application on which the book is based.
