September 2010
60 posts
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“Ideas are cheap. Always be passionate about ideas and communicating those ideas...”
– Charles Eames (via charlesandray)
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Designing Obama →
The entire Designing Obama book published by design director of the Obama campaign Scott Thomas and funded through Kickstarted, is now available online in a digital form as well as through an iPad app. I spent some time looking through it and while I’d love to own a hardcopy, it’s great to see some of the process, variations, and extent the brand created. Looking at it all in one place...
August 2010
77 posts
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Americana: A Photoset
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The Wilderness Downtown →
I am completely at a loss for words after watching this video experiment from Arcade Fire. The Wilderness Downtown is a full HTML5 interactive video that is not only technically astounding but also emotionally energizing. I’m just speechless. Go follow the instructions and see for yourself.
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WatchAndrew Zuckerman has just completed his latest project, a photography book and documentary titled Music. His last two projects, Wisdom and Bird, are fantastic and this one looks to be right on par. He’s assembled a great collection of musicians and some of thoughts they share in this teaser trailer are great. I’m really looking forward to seeing the finished product.
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Cooking, Magic, Jamming Your Own Stuff Through the... →
Insightful and inspiring thoughts from Frank Chimero on magic:
I’m not sure I know specifically what magic is, but maybe it is encountering a good impossibility. We don’t run into many Willy Wonkas or Walt Disneys in our lives: someone who has a completely different viewpoint than our own, and somehow, through sheer talent or brute force, builds a temple to that point of view. One who isn’t shy to...
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“To live in the world of creation — to get into it and stay in it — to frequent...”
– Henry James
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He Not Busy Being Born is Busy Dying - Part 2
(This part two in my two part series on printed media, content consumption and how technologies must constantly reinvent themselves if they fear death. Part one is available here.)
There is an old gas station on 12th Avenue South in an up and coming trendy section of Nashville. The gas station has been converted into what initially appears to be an upscale clothing store but upon further...
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It’s in the details →
On Apple’s LED power indicator:
In July 2002, Appled filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”
The average respiratory rate for adults is 12-20 breaths per minute, which is the...
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He Not Busy Being Born is Busy Dying - Part 1
(This part one in my two part series on the future of printed media, content consumption and how technologies must constantly reinvent themselves if they fear death. Part two will be posted tomorrow.)
In 1995, David Carson famously declared that we have reached ‘the end of print’ with the release of his book of the same title. This seemed to suggest that printed design was dead and the field had...
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Inside the world of Trader Joe’s →
A great inside look at America’a largest neighborhood grocery store:
You’d think Trader Joe’s would be eager to trumpet its success, but management is obsessively secretive. There are no signs with the company’s name or logo at headquarters in Monrovia, about 25 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Few customers realize the chain is owned by Germany’s ultra-private...
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10 Reading Revolutions before E-Books →
Tim Carmody has a great history lesson over at The Atlantic on how the way we read has evolved over time:
The phrase “reading revolution” was probably coined by German historian Rolf Engelsing. He certainly made it popular. Engelsing was trying to describe something he saw in the 18th century: a shift from “intensive” reading and re-reading of very few texts to...
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“It is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will...”
– Noam Chomsky (via)
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Emerging Adulthood →
I devoured this article on why 20-somethings are taking longer to “grow up” than they did thirty years ago as they increasingly go back to school later, move back home and struggle in limbo between childhood and adulthood:
It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a...
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WatchI really enjoyed this fantastic TED Talk from David McCandless, author of the new book Information is Beautiful, on the beauty of data visualization and information graphics. At times it seems many infographics are simply information organized in a visually appealing way, without any data to ground it, but McCandless shows how data visualization can actually take complex concepts and ideas and...
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WatchVideo footage I took of Newsboys performing the title track off their latest record, Born Again last night at the Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove, NJ.
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Newsboys
A few of my favorite photos I took at last night’s Newsboys show at the Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove, NJ–the venue I saw my very first Newsboys show seven years ago. It was quite a different experience this time.
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“The art that makes us feel is the art that makes us hurt.”
– Jonah Lehrer, from Proust Was a Neuroscientist
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Facebook troubled over ‘The Social Network’ →
Michael Ciepley for The New York Times on Facebook’s views on the upcoming film The Social Network:
After fretting for months over how to respond, the company appears to have decided that its best bet is to largely ignore the movie and hope that audiences do the same — that “The Social Network” will be another failed attempt to bottle a generation, like “Less Than Zero,” and not culturally...
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“If you meet a person who cares about the same obscure things you do, hold on to...”
– —Frank Chimero
(Is anybody out there?)
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The Timeless Beauty of National Geographic →
Alexander Charchar takes a look at the slight design evolution of National Geographic magazine:
In a sense, the magazine does exactly what design should. It’s hardly noticable. The typography doesn’t stand out in a way that’ll win it mountains of awards for innovation in design and the layouts aren’t exactly something you’d see on many (any?) design blogs. But it’s for exactly this that it’s a...
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Mickey Drexler is my new hero →
This Charlie Rose interview with Millard “Mickey” Drexler, CEO of J. Crew has gotten me all excited. Drexel talks about everything I like: leadership, micro-managing, craftsmanship, the important of information, uniforms, and availability.
After rescuing Gap in the early nineties and turning it into what we know today, he was suddenly ousted in 2002 and quickly moved to J. Crew in...
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Summer Day
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“In a short period of time it became clear that the apparel business is...”
– Fashion entrepreneur Scott Sternberg on the ease of getting into the fashion business, but I don’t think it just applies to fashion. If you are making something “honest and interesting and personal and cool and relevant and well-made,” there will be market for it somewhere. The key...
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WatchWell, here’s the first official teaser trailer for I’m Still Here, the documentary film by Casey Affleck on Joaquin Phoenix’s transition from actor to rapper. I posted the first poster a few weeks ago and after watching the this teaser, I’m still as confused as ever as what this is really about though I’m fairly convinced this will go down in history as one of the...
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New Work: Blue Eagle 5k 2010 Shirt Design
For the past few years now, I’ve been handling all the design work for the Blue Eagle 5K, a local 5K run/walk held every August to support the Nazareth School District’s track and cross country teams and to remember Chief Bruce Ruch, a local police chief who supported the teams and died a few years ago. One of the largest components each year is the design of the race t-shirt that is...
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“The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest...”
– —Fred Brooks, from this interview in Wired.
His new book, The Design of Design, sounds really, really good.
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“Consider that Coke. You’ve looked at the nutritional label on a Coke before,...”
– The first part in Frank Chimero’s series on nourishment was exactly what I needed to read today. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of nourishment and thirst and satiating hunger. Not in the strict sense of food and drink, but in the philosophical sense of life and meaning....
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Why doesn't Steve Jobs have a license plate? →
Gizmodo reports on how Steve Jobs has mysteriously gone four years without a license plate on his Mercedes:
In a state where SL55s are a fairly common sight, and where no personal information can be gleaned from a license plate number, the act of putting a plate on would actually be the best avenue toward anonymity.
So maybe there’s some other reason Steve Jobs avoids rectangular metal...
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“But in so many ways, I’m still that kid, not sure exactly how to be...”
– I hear you, Don, I really hear you. 