Subtraction

The School of Visual Arts’ MFA in Design Criticism program, run by my friend Alice Twemlow, is gearing up for its second school year starting this autumn. There’s not another program in the country, to my knowledge, that gives students access to a wealth of critical design knowledge on this level:

Create original segments in a radio and podcasting workshop with PRI’s “Studio 360” senior producer Leital Molad and host Kurt Andersen; voyage deep into 20th century design with design historian Russell Flinchum; learn investigative journalism techniques with Change Observer editor Julie Lasky; curate exhibitions with MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli and Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum curator Matilda McQuaid; and find your critical voice with Ralph Caplan, Akiko Busch, and Andrea Codrington.

The core curriculum, which trains students to research, analyze, and evaluate design and its social and environmental implications, is supplemented by the specialist knowledge of more than 40 visiting critics and lecturers per semester. Recent guests include Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review, industrial designer Ayse Birsel, documentary filmmaker Gary Huswit, Gawker.com editor-in-chief Gabriel Snyder, New York Times perfume critic Chandler Burr, author and critic Rick Poynor, and Cathy Leff, director of the Wolfsonian Museum.

More about applying here at the D-Crit site. Also you might be interested in my 2008 interview with Alice.

All told, I think I did a pretty good job of ignoring “Lost” for years, in spite of all the raves and recommendations from friends. Mostly, it was out of self-interest; I couldn’t afford the time investment that another hugely complicated television series would require, especially one that seemed to inspire such obsessive fandom. But now, living with a “Lost” devotee as I do, I find I can no longer willfully ignore the persistent phenomenon that is J.J. Abrams’ labyrinthine television saga. I started watching a handful of episodes here and there last season, and when the show’s sixth season debuted on Tuesday evening I joined Laura on the couch to take in its latest two hours.

Here’s my assessment so far: it’s a superbly crafted entertainment but it executes itself haphazardly. I find myself easily drawn into its fundamentally strong storytelling tactics, but even after watching the best episodes, the momentum of the series inspires no real confidence that the next installment will be any good.

And, frankly, I don’t really get what’s happening. What is this show about? A time shifting island? A fractious fraternity of metaphysically-challenged losers? A just-in-time catalog of bogus belief systems? I have no idea, really, but to the show’s credit it’s all good enough to keep me thinking about it. Herewith, then, are some random notes from a Viewer New to “Lost”

Just clicking through this bevvy of gorgeous and incredibly fun pattern designs from the very talented, young, Argentinian illustrator Gastòn Caba (and others) is just plain joyful. I know everyone thinks I’m all about grids and minimalism and monochromatic palettes and being very serious (okay, guilty), but it doesn’t mean I don’t also find this stuff to be totally great, too.

It’s not as if I haven’t had a point of view on all of this tablet computing device stuff that’s been lighting up the Internets for the past several months, but for professional reasons, I’ve had to keep mum. Suffice it to say, I’m really excited about Apple’s iPad, announced today, and I’m even more excited about what can be done with it.

However. I’m pretty sure that I’m in the camp that believes that this is not the salvation that most publishing companies have been looking for. Not that the device falls short in some way, but rather because nothing can save publishing as it’s been operating for the past several decades. The iPad does nothing to change the brutal mandate that has been pushing publishers to change for these many years; if anything it compounds the imperative.

As a general principle, there’s no way around evolution, and in this specific instance the reality is that there is no direct translation of the print experience to digital media. That is, the content can be translated, but it’s not likely to be as literal as many might expect or even hope. Those looking to the iPad to return us to some semblance of a print-like reading experience are basically wrong, I believe. In fact, lots of really smart people will continue to get this wrong going forward. We’re all still figuring out. That’s the definition of an opportunity.

A small but excellent selection of covers from “the definitive music and culture publication in New York City in the early 1980s.” I’d never heard of it before, but then in the Eighties New York was just an idea and not a real place for me yet. These covers evoke that dreamland of my youth though: gritty, plausibly if not authentically punk, confrontational and exclusive (who the hell were Human Switchboard? Oh, that’s who).

Since becoming a dad, I’ve been able to go out to the cinema to see just three movies in three months. Luckily, at home, the situation is a little better, thanks to Netflix, Apple TV and the new Blu-Ray player that I got for the holidays. Still a general lack of free time makes it hard to see as many as I’d like, and I feel lucky that I get to see any movies, let alone write about them here on this blog. The days of being able to knock out lengthy reviews of the sort that I once did for, say, last year’s “Public Enemies” or 2008’s (still underrated!) “Speed Racer” seem a long way off now.

I still like writing about movies though, still enjoy articulating my thoughts about them, trying to get at the core ideas in filmed media that matter to me. Whether or not anyone really likes them, or whether the generally design-centric audience for this blog finds anything relevant in them, I’m not sure. But writing about shit you like is one of the perks of having your own blog, so I’m going to keep doing it — when I can. I’m just going to have get used to writing more succinctly, and get over the embarrassment of sometimes only publishing my thoughts long, long after the movies have left the current spotlight. Here are three write-ups to get started.

“A painstakingly curated presentation of the best produced and designed iPhone applications…my goal is for this site to showcase new and emerging talent, current talent and represent the best of the best applications for the iPhone for design-minded folk.”

As the sheer volume of available iPhone apps grows beyond crazy huge into the stratospherically absurd realm, I think we’ll see more and more third-party attempts to make sense of the volume, both through hand-picked methods like this one and other, more automated means. 

One of those heartwarming human interest stories that’s completely invulnerable to cynicism.

“In 1998, aged just 14, aspiring young cartoonist Amir Avni decided to get in touch with the creator of Ren & Stimpy, John Kricfalusi. Being a hardcore fan of Kricfalusi’s work, Amir sent him an introductory letter along with a few cartoons he’d drawn, some of which contained relatively unknown characters of John’s. To call Kricfalusi’s response ‘generous’ would be an understatement…”

The letter itself, hand-written and partly hand-drawn, practically hums with warmth; see it in its entirety here. Also, if you’re not reading Kricfalusi’s blog — even if you’re nothing more than a casual admirer of cartoon animation — then you’re denying yourself regular insights into the mind of true artist.

Music. I listened to a lot of it last year. Not nearly as many as lots of people, I’m sure. But I had an Emusic account, an Amazon Prime account and a sufficiently generous credit card limit to supply me with days of listening entertainment — 1,530 songs played continuously over 3.7 days, according to iTunes.

Looking back, I liked a lot of the music I heard, and got reasonably excited about it too. Maybe not as excited as I used to get about music, back when I had a lot more free time, a lot less money, and a mistaken belief that pop music could be useful a framework for living one’s life. But for the first year in many years, I got genuinely enthusiastic about what seemed like a lot of new acts. Maybe it was a subconscious attempt to retain or rekindle youth as I entered parenthood, or maybe it was the fact that a brilliant record label run by a friend from my twenties came roaring back even more brilliantly than it had ever been before, but I found a lot to like when I plugged my earbuds into my iPod last year. Anyway you look at it, there were a lot of good tunes in 2009, and I’d like to share some of them with you.

An entertaining tour of two New Yorkers’ obsession with a little-noticed relic of the mid-Twentieth Century located Queens. “The two Candela Structures — plus a third one that’s now gone — were built as exhibit spaces for the 1964 World’s Fair… The biggest mystery, though, is why these two amazing structures have languished in obscurity for so long. We hope this exhibit will give them the attention they deserve, and that it will prompt someone — maybe you — to help us fill in the missing chapters of their story.” What’s so great about this story is their architectural inquisitiveness; as our world becomes increasingly virtual, it’s refreshing to remember there are fascinating questions left to answer about the real world.

Designer Mike Rundle’s extraordinarily helpful overview of how he creates U.I. elements that evoke real-world materials. He even pulls back the curtain on his own technique by including a downloadable sample Photoshop file, letting readers pull apart a typical construction for buttons.

An appreciation of the legendary Milan-based graphic designer Bob Noorda, a Modernist legend and co-founding partner (with Massimo Vignelli) of Unimark International. Noorda passed away just over a week ago, on 11 Jan 2010, though it’s still tough to find an English-language obituary online. This write-up over at the excellent new mid-century Modern-focused design archive Display is not quite an obituary, but for the uninitiated it makes for a useful introduction to Noorda’s career.

Seoul, Korea studio UnPlug Design came up with this near-genius idea for providing makeshift soccer balls (okay, footballs) to third world children who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford them. A wave-like pattern is printed (or perhaps perforated?) on the boxes in which material aid to these countries is often shipped; once the box is empty of its contents, children and aid workers can follow the patterns to break down the cardboard and assemble the ball. More background and pictures here.

Last week, The Hype Machine, a sort of combination music meta-blog and playlist, published its round-up from the year just ended, including its listing of the top fifty bands of 2009, with each of the fifty slots illustrated by an invited visual artist. If you skip ahead, you’ll see that the indie pop contenders The Pains at Being Pure at Heart came in at number thirteen, and that the illustration was done by none other than yours truly.

An engaging and thoughtful question-and-answer session with the renowned Dutch design studio. Cornell asks for their opinion on a blog post I wrote last April called “Dear Designers, You Suck” in which I addressed the state of criticism in design today — and Experimental Jetset’s response is so different from my perspective and so interesting:

“We’re much more interested graphic design as criticism: the idea that a piece of graphic design is a manifestation of a certain way of thinking, a certain way of ordering the world, and that, by functioning in that way, that piece of graphic design is effectively critiquing the dominant way of thinking, the existing way of ordering the world.”

Read the entire interview here. While you’re at it, marvel at the rest of Cornell’s site to get a sense of why I’m so intensely envious of him: a young, talented, prolific designer with the authorial skills and time to publish regularly on his terrific blog. If only.

Update: Embarrassingly, I’ve gotten Alex mixed up with his employer, Scott Hansen. Sloppy mistake, sorry.

An appraisal of the new transit system map for the Bay Area. “Unlike the notorious 1972 Massimo Vignelli redesign of the New York City subway map, the new BART map didn’t make much of a splash in graphic design circles.”

As the semi-famous default theme for WordPress faces retirement later this year, The Huffington Post takes a look at how it came to be. It’s nice to see its designer, Michael Heilemann, get the credit, but the writer may go a little too far in playing up its importance:

“When Heilemann came to blogging, the Internet was studded with posts that were essentially diary entries, blocks of text with the occasional awkwardly situated photograph. The template he came up with was entirely different — at once elegant and open to innovation. Since its debut, Kubrick has helped change the face of cyberspace…”

A twenty-four point manifesto for independent video game designers and developers. While some points may come across as bromides, the whole thing is written with enough conviction to be a compelling read — and while aimed at one particular kind of designer, it’s applicable to designers of all kinds.

For a kick, also see this contrarian comment posted by one reader. Excerpt: “‘Fun’ is a word with a lot of bad connotations for me.” That’s what you call a hater.

Very illuminating and wide-ranging look at differences in mobile phone usage as a function of region, economics and history.

Hilarious, fictional letter-to-the-future from a decade ago reminds us all what idiots we were way back before Facebook and how our use of Facebook definitely does not make us all idiots, definitely not. Yay Facebook.

Longtime Firefox user interface designer Stephen Horlander offers an update on his continuing work on the browser’s next Windows version. It’s a fascinating peek behind the scenes at how an intensively scrutinized design project balances platform evolution, user feedback, team input and new ideas. It’s well worth a read, as is this wiki page that more formally documents how the user interface is changing with upcoming releases.

When Allan Cole and I released our WordPress theme back in November, we set the price slightly lower than we originally intended, in order to make it as affordable as possible straight out of the gate. But the response was so great that we ended up just leaving it there at US$45 — until now. As a sort of holiday special, Basic Maths is on sale through the last day of the year for 33% off the regular price, bringing it down to just US$30. That’s a terrific deal for a one of the very finest blog themes around on any platform. If you haven’t already got your copy, here’s your chance to get a great deal on it. Click here to buy.

An eye-opening account of how the Santa Claus mythology evolved. I had no idea that the first iconic rendering of Santa Claus was drawn by the same illustrator — the legendary Thomas Nast — who gave us the Democratic party’s donkey and the Republican party’s elephant. Anyway, happy holidays, everyone.

Terrific cinephiles’ site The Auteurs rounds up the ten best of the 2000s, along with twenty honorable-mentions. They’re right to put the brilliant poster for “Funny Games” at the top of the list; its off-kilter close-up of star Naomi Watts is sublime, as is its matter-of-fact typography. See the full list here.

A beautiful, letterpress-printed calendar for the new year from Antonio Carusone in a limited edition of fifty. The year, the days of the week, and the edition number line are all printed blind, and typeset in Helvetica.

Fantastic, insider-y preview of promising movie scripts that the film industry is keeping an eye on. “Compiled every year from the suggestions of 311 film executives, each contributes the names of up to ten of their favorite scripts that were written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with, 2009 and will not be released in theaters during this calendar year.”

Randall Stross digs deeper and finds that despite customer satisfaction surveys that suggest Verizon has a clear advantage, independent research shows that AT&T actually has better data throughput and signal strength than any of its competitors. In fact, design flaws in how the iPhone connects to cell towers — and the device’s massive popularity — may contribute to the poor network experience that most consumers attribute to AT&T.

“AT&T’s besting of Verizon in these tests is all the more remarkable considering the sudden jump in the volume of mobile data that its network has had to handle with the introduction of the iPhone 3G in 2008: approximately 4,000 percent.”

Waiting to hear the alternative arguments…

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve tested a number of online backup solutions, and found them all lacking. Some are disappointingly constructed and others seem feature-poor, but no matter how well they were designed they all share a single fatal flaw: consumer broadband in the United States is insufficient for backing up the dozens of gigabytes that an average user requires.

Still, the fact that broadband is the problem is progress, given my past experiences with backing up my data. I used to find that backup solutions were expensive or complicated to implement — a decade ago, I used the completely bewildering Retrospect and a prohibitively expensive tape backup system to back up my files — or tried to, anyway. The setup was unwieldy enough that I ran backups erratically, at best, and an erratic backup is not much better than none at all.

The evening of next Wednesday, 16 December, I’ll have the honor of being on stage as a guest for AIGA New York’s twenty-fifth annual Fresh Dialogue event, alongside Tina Roth Eisenberg of Swiss Miss, Allan Chochinov of Core77 and Josh Rubin of Cool Hunting. Our mandate will be to cast an eye on the design world through the lens of each of our respective blogs, and to take a look at how social media is impacting the way design is practiced. The evening will be hosted by the design writer, critic and chair of SVA’s Masters in Design Criticism program, the remarkable Alice Twemlow. It’s going to be a blast.

Find out more about the event and register for your tickets here.

From several months ago but still worth a read. The magazine’s music critic Sasha Frere-Jones interviews Greenwood on the quality limitations of today’s dominant music delivery format.

“I’d feel frustrated if we couldn’t release CDs as a band, but then, it only costs us a slight shaving of sound quality to get to the convenience of the MP3. It’s like putting up with tape hiss on a cassette. I was happy using cassettes when I was fifteen, but I’m sure they were sneered at in their day by audiophiles. If I’m on a train, with headphones, MP3s are great. At home, I prefer CD or vinyl, partly because they sound a little better in a quiet room and partly because they’re finite in length and separate things, unlike the endless days and days of music stored on my laptop.”

Though he’s talking specifically about the esoteric world of high-fidelity sound, Greenwood is effectively casting a critical eye on the whole idea of high definition.

“I find this sound quality stuff both fascinating and ridiculous. It’s like the pixel resolution of digital cameras: higher numbers are better, but that discussion always pushes the actual photography to one side, somehow.”

The essence of his argument is dead on: superior fidelity and resolution is terrific but overrated in comparison to convenience. As a parallel example, I couldn’t be happier with my HD-TV and I wouldn’t mind owning a Blu-Ray player one day when the prices are more reasonable. Meanwhile, I’m consuming tons of not particularly high-resolution content via streaming media. It’s the convenience of media formats that matters so much more. And you could re-interpret the idea of convenience as a format’s interface — if it’s easy to use, if it provides affordances commensurate to the needs of real users in actual use cases, then it will win over higher resolution. Actually, it’s the content that really matters.