June 2011
19 posts
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“Twitter — I have no idea what Twitter is. But Facebook I know, because I saw the...”
– —Woody Allen, from this interview with MSNBC. Love it!
And as a sidenote: go see his latest film Midnight in Paris. It’s fantastic—quintessential Woody Allen.
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‘Nothing is boring, except people who are bored’ →
Brian Jay Stanley on interestingness, boredom, and seeing the potential in every single thing:
Paging through an accounting textbook, walking past a wig shop, or listening to a lecture on early American basket-making, I never say “that is uninteresting” but rather “I am uninterested”, for it is always more reasonable to assume that I fail to see what is there than that...
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Why Man Creates
If you have 25 minutes this weekend, I recommend watching Saul Bass’s short documentary film, Why Man Creates. The film was produced in 1968 and written by design icon Saul Bass and writer Mayo Simon and provide a look at creativity through a series of animated vignettes.
I’ve included the entire documentary, in two parts via YouTube, after the jump. Enjoy.
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The 'wanting to like it' principle →
bobulate:
Nico Muhley with an approach to reading:
[I] came across somebody’s blog, the first line of which was, “I decided not to read this when it came out.” What. Why would you take the time to write that you, on purpose, didn’t read something? What a strange impulse, and a strange thing to admit to; maybe it’s something in my makeup but it seems only polite to listen to every goddamn thing...
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“[E]verything we do, everything we make, is not about the beginning or the end of...”
– From Frank Chimero’s inspiring piece The Storm and The Line
We get to create tomorrow. Together, we can build a new world, a world that’s better than this one. That’s what great art does—it momentarily takes you out of this world and lets you see a glimpse of another world, a...
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Present →
Michael Formica on being present:
So, how do we stay present? The first thing to recognize is that, try as we might, we really can only do one thing at a time, so we ought to do that thing wholeheartedly. Most of our time is spent in the past or the future, rather than the present moment. What we end up doing is passing through that moment on the way to somewhere else and, in doing so, we miss...
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“Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly... →
I completely devoured this lengthy profile on Edwin Land, the inventor and founder of Polaroid. Here is what Time said about Polaroid in its cover story on the company in 1972:
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Polaroid is that it has grown huge by creating products for which there was little detectable demand, until Edwin Land thought of them. Each is, as Land says, sui generis—in a...
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“The art comes from the awkward ache. The knot in my stomach usually teaches me...”
– —Jon Foreman on Making a Living. He goes on:
In fact, the argument could be made that a human being is most God-like when she is most creative: ingeniously crafting the true and the beautiful out of the confines of the present tense. Remixing tomorrow out of the raw materials of today....
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“[Gutenberg] took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an...”
– Steven Johnson on how Gutenberg used the idea of the wine screw press to create his printing press from the book Where Good Ideas Come From
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“I am troubled by the devaluing of the word ‘design’. I find myself now...”
– Dieter Rams, writing for The Daily Telegraph
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How Print Design is the Future of Interaction →
Mike Kruzeniski:
Products like Flipboard are attractive because they are consciously and carefully designed to highlight the content, instead of crowding the experience with UI tools. The design of these experiences is being driven by new thinking in interaction design, where visual design is central to the experience, rather than painted on at the end. Once the traditional elements of UI are...
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“There is also increasing global demand for American-style higher education....”
– Louis Menand, Debating the Value of College in America
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The Real Helvetica →
Designer Christian Schwartz is releasing a restored version of the original Helvetica, “Neue Haas Grotesque”:
Helvetica’s detractors rail that it is boring, but after spending time working on Neue Haas Grotesk, Schwartz argues that Helvetica “was never intended to be the cold, perfect, rational typeface people believe it is. There is a subtle warmth in the shapes that...
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But no matter how much the mess and distortion make you want to despair, you can’t abandon the work because you’re chained to the bloody thing, it’s absolutely woven into your soul and you know you can never rest until you’ve brought truth out of all the distortion and beauty out of all the mess – but it’s agony, agony, agony – while simultaneously being the most...
