October 2010
46 posts
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“The camera is the least important part of photography.”
– —Julius Shulman
I just watched Visual Acoustics, a wonderful documentary on the most influencal architectural photographer in history. Having shot buildings for Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, and Richard Neutra his photographs has had just as much influence on modernism as the buildings...
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President
I only have memories of two Halloweens.
This mid-Autumn holiday where all my friends would dress up in costumes and walk through our little neighborhood collecting candy was something I never really got into. Yet each year, I reluctantly put together a costume of my own and would roam the dark streets with my parents and sister knocking on the doors of our neighbors before finally giving it all...
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The Gutenberg Parenthesis →
A sidenote in Robin Sloan’s The Candy Parenthesis and why he doesn’t like candy mentions a thing called The Gutenberg Parenthesis:
In media, there’s an idea called the Gutenberg Parenthesis. The argument is that the age of books has been an exceptional episode in human history. Before Gutenberg, there was this huge oral tradition stretching back millennia; today, with TV and the...
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“Work is more fun than fun.”
– —Noël Coward
My problem, of course, is that sometimes I can’t tell the difference.
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The Future of Books →
Steven Heller has a great interview with Scott Thomas, publisher of the book Designing Obama, on the future of books and publishing in the digital world:
Publishing is broken. It is never more evident than now. The concept of a book has evolved more in the last three years than in the last 300 years. When the book went from the being scribed by hand to set with movable type there was an explosion...
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“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
– —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his wonderful children’s book The Little Prince.
It’s true in life and it’s also true in design. This short book should be required reading.
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Autumn in Kutztown – A Photo Set
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“I believe that these things are killing our discipline, killing our ability for...”
– Designer James Victore from this fantastic interview with the 99%.
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Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative →
The ever insightful Jonah Lehrer argues that depression, sadness, and suffering causes people to be more creative and innovative:
In a survey led by the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, several dozen writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were interviewed about their mental history. Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. A similar theme...
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“Show them their world in innovative ways, and let them interact with it like...”
– —A closing, thoughtful message from Apple’s new Mac App Store guidelines.
To me, this reads like the perfect criteria for doing any good creative work:
“Show them their world in innovative ways” is a lot like what I strive for in both my design work and my writing here on the...
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“Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first...”
– —Instapaper founder Marco Arment on information obesity from Wired Magazine.
For what it’s worth, Instapaper is easily one of my top five most used iPhone apps. This past year I’ve seen an interesting shift in my online reading habits; I now do the majority of my reading on my phone and...
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Building Frameworks
(Photo Credit: Apartment Therapy)
I read an article a few weeks ago about an interesting element of Shaker design. Inside Shaker homes, a simple wooden strip with evenly spaced pegs spans every wall. We’ve all seen this idea; we often hang our coats on this peg rail system, but the Shakers have built an interesting system upon this framework. Since this is a common element among all the homes,...
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Handwriting
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“The creative act is no longer about building something out of nothing but rather...”
– That is from Wired Magazine’s 7 Essential Skills You Didn’t Learn in College section on “Remix Culture.” I’ve been thinking about meta content recently; work that is based on preexisting frameworks and products. How many people make a living and spend their time writing...
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Later →
The New Yorker has a fascinating article on procrastination—what it means, why we do it, and how to help it. I especially enjoyed this hypothesis for why we procrastinate:
[P]rocrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict. But some of the philosophers in “The Thief of Time” have a more radical explanation...
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“The purpose of art is to inform and delight.”
– I watched an excellent documentary on Milton Glaser last night called “To Inform and Delight.” The title comes from this quote Mr. Glaser has always liked from Horace, a Roman poet. That’s probably the best definition of art I’ve ever heard. That’s how I want to view my...
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“Certainty is a closing of the mind. To create the new, requires doubt.”
– —Milton Glaser on pieces from his latest exhibition at the AGIA National Museum. At 81, he claims this exhibit is his “last hurrah.” I hope that isn’t true.
Glaser, along with Woody Allen, inspire me in the amount of work they are still producing at their ages. I hope I’m...
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Can Social Media be used for social change? →
Malcolm Gladwell, in his latest piece for The New Yorker, argues that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites are not conducive to help ignite social reform:
It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural...
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“When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to...”
– —Marshall McLuhan from his 1967 book The Medium is the Massage.
I am continually amazed at McLuhan’s insight on things and how relevant they still are today. Some of the things he’s wrote about in the sixties easily apply to social media and technologies that weren’t even invented...
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Expert versus beginner →
Bobulate:
Have you ever noticed that you can remember perfectly well what someone said to you, but you don’t remember exactly what words she used? … Most of the time, we aren’t interested in mere wording; we are interested in what was said, that is, meaning, the subject matter. Our indifference to wording is a symptom of our expertise. Only beginners needs to pay attention to words and their...
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White Space
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add,” says Antoine de Saint Exupery, “but when there is nothing left to take away.”
The white space is key to a good design. Somethings what isn’t there is just as important as what is there. White space acts as breathing room, a place to rest your eyes. A visual pause. Adding white space frees up the design, making it...
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“To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds...”
– —John Dewey from Art as Experience
This book can be a bit dry at times but I’ve found myself scribbling down a lot of passages from it.
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