January 2012
17 posts
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How Do We Identify Good Ideas? →
Jonah Lehrer has a great piece on why “creative geniuses” still have failures (Dylan’s Down in the Groove or Steve Jobs’s hockey-puck mouse). Quoting Nietzsche:
Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration … shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker...
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“A book ought to not only document its contents but actually perform or enact its...”
– Prem Krishnamurthy of Project Projects on the format of the book in this great interview from Triple Canopy.
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The Rise of the New Groupthink (or, in praise of... →
I absolutely loved everything about this piece from Susan Cain in The New York Times on the importance of solitude in the creative process. If I were to describe how I feel in a paragraph, it might be pretty close to this:
[T]he most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re...
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Flying Solo →
Counterpunch has a profile on jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. If his last name wasn’t enough to make me like him, he’s also from Allentown, PA and I’ve played his new album, Rio dozens of times since it released earlier this year. I especially liked this part where Jarrett discusses the limitations of the piano:
Rio opens with a squall of dark chords, pounding against each other,...
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“If you are implying you cannot express yourself when you are working for money,...”
– Photographer Nick Knight (via)
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2011 Annual Report Poster
In 2009 and 2010, inspired by Nicholas Felton’s annual reports, I tracked various data from the year to assemble into an annual report that charts interesting statistics from the past twelve months. Now in its third year, my reports continue to be a popular piece in my portfolio so I’m excited to present my third, the 2011 annual report poster.
Keeping in the tradition started...
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“Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1)...”
– C. S. Lewis, in a letter to Sarah, his godchild, on 3 April 1949 via Stan Carey (via bobulate)
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“Concentrating, focusing. Think about what the word means. It means gathering...”
– —William Deresiewicz in a lecture he gave to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2009 called Solitude and Leadership.
Read the entire thing. So, so good. I think I’m using this as a guide for the new year.
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“I have tried to cutback my noise and output. Trying not to make noise just...”
– Year End Notes from You The User
This was a goal of mine last year.
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December 2011
27 posts
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“He was a poet, and he exhibited me many of his poems. I remember many of them....”
– From Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
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The Table →
My friend Sarah Handelman publishes an interesting zine called Not French Cooking. In her words, Not French Cooking is:
[A] zine published by Sarah Handelman that explores relationships with and through food. Inspired by Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the series addresses ideas surrounding health, nourishment and culinary-based relationships. Each themed issue...
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Top 10 Albums of 2011
Is it just me or was 2011, a great year for music?
The Family Tree: The Roots - Radical Face
Bon Iver - Bon Iver
Barton Hollow - The Civil Wars
Young Love - Mat Kearney
On Fire - Peter Furler
Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes
Vice Verses - Switchfoot
El Camino - The Black Keys
Strange Mercy - St. Vincent
Civilian - Wye Oak
Honorable Mentions: Mylo Xyloto by Coldplay, King of Limbs by...
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Merry →
Seth Godin:
You can’t be merry by yourself.
Sure, you can be content, happy, possibly even delirious. But merriment requires a group, and that group is almost always a group you can see and touch, one that’s sharing the same molecules of air, face to face.
The digital revolution continues to get deeper, wider and more important. But it has made no progress at all at...
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Merry Christmas! [The Christmas Song - Owl City]
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“Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and...”
– David Foster Wallace (via)
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This Space In Between
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A man, a ball, a hoop, a bench (and an alleged... →
I absolutely devoured this profile of Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) from 2008 that John Gruber posted on Daring Fireball earlier this week. There is so much to glean about craftsmanship, the creative process, collaboration, and respecting your audience—just the things I think about most!
The profile centers around Teller’s exploration of a 100 year old trick called involving a simple...
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“In 2011 I learned that emotion is at the heart of every decision we make. From...”
– Aaron Walter, from A List Apart’s What I Learned About the Web in 2011
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What I Learned When I Started a Design Studio →
Khoi Vinh looks back at the design studio he co-founded ten years ago and the lessons he learned in the process. These are valuable insights for any designer looking to strike out on their own, but I especially enjoyed this last bit of wisdom:
Even then, what I had already learned running that business was that saying “no,” was incredibly important, that turning down bad clients and bad...
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Central Park North
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Lessons according to salt →
Terrific essay from Liz Danzico using salt as a metaphor to give some insight into work and life:
Today, I still think of salt as enormously instructive. Think about the classic white shaker on every restaurant table. Most of the time we look right past it or ignore the invisible flavor in the small packets stacked next to the pepper. But stop for a moment, and consider salt’s history and...
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WatchI absolutely loved this short talk from type designer Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler & Frere-Jones. One-half of arguably the most prolific type foundry of the current generation, Hoefler has spend the past two years preparing their entire collection to be used on the web. Taking a much more philosophical approach, Hoefler views typography as a design system that must be altered and refined...
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The Consumption Beast
And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that’s just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It’s unstoppable, it’s uncorkable. There’s no way to make it end.
If we could just—just stop. For one year. If everybody could stop publishing their poems. No more. Stop it. Just— everyone. Every poet. Just stop.
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“I almost believe there is no New York; there is only a set of projections, and...”
– Related to the last post, Milton Glaser talks about New York, his iconic I Heart NY logo, and what it means to be a New Yorker.
I love this bit he adds at the end:
The thing about New York is, it’s based on the idea of change. It is the most mutable of places; its strength comes out of...
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Manhattan
Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Eh uh, no, make that he, he romanticized it all out of proportion. Better. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Uh, no, let me start this over.
The forgoing of his traditional white-Windsor-set opening...
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I'll be Home for Christmas - A Christmas Mix
Since 2006, I’ve been making little Christmas mixes and sharing them on my blog. Continuing that tradition, this year’s mix is called I’ll be Home for Christmas and is now available for download. It’s a diverse mix of old and new songs from a variety of artists and is perfect to listen to while decorating the tree, sipping eggnog, and wrapping gifts.
Download...
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“We could accumulate hundreds of thousands of images throughout our lives but...”
– The Never Forgotten House by Joanne McNeil, on memory, nostalgia, and childhood.
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“An interview really should be a surprise, an excursion into unexpected terrain.”
– —Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris on the art of the interview. He goes on:
This is the thread that has animated and connected his documentaries, which have specialized in both upending received wisdom and finding the humanity behind it. And it’s the question that has connected Morris, the...
November 2011
26 posts
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“Being authentic in your thoughts and voice is the only way to survive the test...”
– Om Malik, reflecting on ten years of blogging
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Putting a Dent in the Universe
With a bit of extra time this Thanksgiving weekend, I was able to finally finish Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography Steve Jobs. Filled with emotions, I preordered it the night Steve died and had been working through it ever since. No one has had more of an influence and been more an inpiration on my work than Jobs and I was excited to get an inside look at his life and work.
I knew I...
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The Man Behind the Mask →
Alan Moore, the comic book writer of such hits V for Vendetta and Watchmen discusses what it’s like to see his famous V character move outside the realm of fiction into reality as it finds itself becoming the face of Occupy Wall Street:
I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an...
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Unless a poet is stumped by their art, they'll... →
Jonah Lehrer explores the idea that true creativity is birthed within constraints and predetermined frames:
Unless poets are stumped by their art, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line. They’ll be stuck with clichés and banalities, with predictable adjectives and boring verbs. And this helps explain the stubborn endurance of...
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