Elsewhere

Mycrocosm from M.I.T. Media Lab

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:22:23 -0500

“A Web service that allows you to share snippets of information from the minutiae of daily life in the form of simple statistical graphs.”

L.A. Time: The Porsche Kitchen for Men

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:14:27 -0500

Slideshow look at an aggressively sleek, modernist kitchen designed through a collaboration between the sports car manufacturer and the cabinetry manufacturer Poggenpohl.

Illustrated Typography on Dark Backgrounds

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:45:55 -0500

Seemingly odd criteria for collecting design samples, but the result is surprisingly coherent. And frequently gorgeous. A caveat to anyone who would get carried away with this technique: it’s pretty much the founding principle behind black velvet paintings.

New York Mag: First Look Inside JetBlue’s New Food Court at JFK

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:57:56 -0500

The airline has been busy renovating the iconic Eero Saarinen-designed terminal at JFK and plans to open it later this fall. The food promises to be very good… or at least, it won’t give you air sickness before you even leave the ground. Which is saying a lot for eating at the airport.

Adobe: Peter Hall on Architecture as Interface

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:57:47 -0500

Examples of interface displays on the huge scale of real buildings. “What if the building could respond, in real time, to the movement of people, the weather, or the whims of bystanders or behind-the-scenes artists?”

Dear Adobe

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:40:52 -0500

Clever tool for submitting and perusing short gripes penned to the graphics software company we all love to hate.

Assistance in the Procurement of Bachelor Party Services

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:00:40 -0500

Todd Levin hilariously ponders the difficulty of finding ‘entertainment’ for a friend’s bachelor party. “In an effort to do proper diligence in researching this kind of specialty service, I decided to draft a questionnaire to help me screen any potential candidates for bachelor party entertainment.”

GQ: Interview with Aaron Sorkin

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:24:44 -0500

The screenwriter is out to promote the forthcoming, 10th anniversary re-issue of his fantastic, under-appreciated “Sports Night” series on DVD. Regarding his more recent, failed series “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” he says: “I made too many mistakes. I would give anything to go back and get another bite of that apple. Basically, to use a sports analogy, you can have the best team in football playing the worst team in football. But if the best team in football throws four interceptions, they’re not going to win.”

Speak Up: Dear Lulu

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:33:45 -0500

Armin Vit reports on a student-produced test book for the online, print-on-demand system Lulu. Its pages include photographs in CMYK, RGB, grayscale and half-tone, line and pattern tests, type specimens at varying sizes, and even crop marks — all so that designers working with Lulu can get a sense of what its digital presses are and aren’t capable of. Best of all, anyone thinking of using Lulu can purchase their own copy.

Merlin Mann: What Makes for a Good Blog?

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:18:32 -0500

A list of nine best practices. One of the smartest: “Good blogs are the product of attention times interest.”

NYT: Palm, Once a Leader, Seeks Path in Smartphone Jungle

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:59:26 -0500

Jon Rubinstein, a veteran of Steve Jobs’ current reign at Apple, is trying to reinvigorate the former PDA and smart phone leader, notably with today’s release of the Treo Pro.

Tru Blood: Synthetic Blood Nourishment Beverage

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:05:30 -0500

Mildly clever marketing campaign for HBO’s forthcoming “Tru Blood” vampire drama.

Anti-Populism and Indie Antiquity: Whit Stillman

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:16:26 -0500

An excellent interview over at the Spout blog with the director of two of my favorite films. One of them, “Metropolitan,” became available for viewing at Hulu.com as of last week. The other, “Barcelona,” is well worth queuing up at Netflix. Via Vanderwal.net.

Typographic Research

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:37:50 -0500

My friend Rob Giampietro, formerly of Giampietro + Smith, teaches a class at Parsons called “Typographic Research.” Each student publishes at least three times a week to a a blog of the same name, resulting in many posts full of beautiful stuff.

Radiohead’s “House of Cards” Video Translated into Lego

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:20:29 -0500

In case you had missed it, the band released the source code to their unconventionally animated music video some weeks ago. This rendition uses that source code as physical choreography for Lego blocks, animated via stop-motion photography. Really beautiful.

Washington Post: Why NBC’s Olympic Coverage Doesn’t Mention Who Designed the Bird’s Nest

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:07:55 -0500

“During the fantastic opening ceremonies, as well as many hours of broadcasting this week, I never heard NBC mention the stadium’s architects, the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron… If a story concerns a building but not its design per se, then journalists generally assume that their audience has no interest in knowing who designed the building, especially if the designer is not well known. Design authorship is usually considered factually irrelevant.” Sniff.

National Geographic Map of the Day

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:33:06 -0500

Once a day, a zoomable map from their archives depicting an historical news event or milestone, accompanied by a short article and a related trivia question.

Hands-on Review of New BlackBerry Bold Phone

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:20:44 -0500

BlackBerry’s 3G response to the iPhone looks much nicer, but I’m not sure it breaks any paradigms.

Why Apple Doesn’t Create ‘Concept’ Products

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:47:21 -0500

“Although Nokia and Microsoft gave us an endless supply of concept products over the years, they haven’t produced, for example, anything like the TiVo, the iPod, the iPhone, OS X, the iTunes App Store, or created brand new user experience paradigms, transformed calcified markets, captured the imagination of people, and so on. They didn’t have the organizational and intellectual discipline to go from concept to product.”

SimpleBits: Use the Best Available Ampersand

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:39:16 -0500

Dan Cederholm proposes a simple and clever solution for specifying ampersands in CSS. Also includes visual chart of some of the “more interesting italic ampersands available as default fonts on Mac and Windows.”

Boing Boing: How to Buy a New Car without Getting Screwed

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:09:44 -0500

A six-minute primer on avoiding dealer treachery. I may actually be in the market for a new car soon.

Edward Tufte’s Critique of iPhone Interfaces

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:53:11 -0500

In which the authority on information visualization discusses “computer administration debris” and his maxim “to clarify, add detail.”

Otl Aicher and the 1972 Munich Olympics

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:53:57 -0500

Holy moley. A treasure trove of iconic, exquisitely designed posters, tickets, stationery, pamphlets and more Games-related collateral from a modernist master.

NYT: Rolling Stone to Switch to Smaller, Rack-Friendly Format

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:28:58 -0500

“Gary Armstrong, chief marketing officer for Wenner Media, pointed to Vanity Fair, which has lower overall circulation than Rolling Stone, but nearly three times the single-copy sales. With a standard format, he said, it should be possible to raise newsstand sales significantly.” Probably a smart but nevertheless a somewhat sad economic decision.

Jean-Louis Gasée on MobileMe, Synchronization and “Launchpad Chicken”

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:59:30 -0500

Insightful if not conclusive commentary on what went wrong with Apple’s shaky launch of the MobileMe service, from a veteran of Apple. Gasée accurately characterizes seamless synchronization as an underestimated challenge, but lets Apple off too easily, in my opinion. They had more than just the lead up to MobileMe to get synching right; they also had the several years when they were running nearly the exact same service as .Mac. And it was hardly seamless then, too.