August 2012
21 posts
9 tags
Patton Oswalt's Letters to Both Sides →
Patton Oswalt recently gave the keynote at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival. Instead of a traditional speech, Oswalt wrote two open letters, one to comedians and one to the “gatekeepers”, and read them allowed. There are a lot of gems written for both sides.
To the comedian:
What I mean is: Not being lucky and not being given are no longer going to define your career as...
6 tags
Slow Company →
Jason Fried on the type of company he’s trying to build, from a recent interview with Fast Company:
Our magazine is called Fast Company, but it sounds like you want to build a slow company.
I’m a fan of growing slowly, carefully, methodically, of not getting big just for the sake of getting big. I think that rapid growth is typically of symptom of… there’s a sickness there....
5 tags
“There’s no being wrong in seeing something in art, only being disagreed with.”
– Jonathan Safran-Foer
6 tags
“World history, after all, is not a chronological list of every damn thing that...”
– Tamim Ansary, from the preface of Destiny Disrupted
7 tags
“In a sense, we work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work...”
– David Byrne on how music works (and all creativity for that matter, from his forthcoming book.
9 tags
History Books
“Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings. This does not come about without some effort: to compose that general book, each individual book must be transformed, enter into a relationship with the other books I have read previously, become their corollary or development or confutation or gloss or reference text.”
...
7 tags
You Learn →
A poem by Jorge Luis-Borges, whose birthday would have been today:
After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises,
And you begin to accept your...
7 tags
The Student →
Robin Sloan points to this great interview with Francis Ford Coppola from The Rumpus. I was drawn to this segment where he speaks about coping with the success of The Godfather and his attempt to get back to his roots:
I wanted a clean slate so I decided to embark on a series of “student films” for myself to begin anew. I thought, “How do you be like a student?” Easy, you have no money. If you...
7 tags
The Spark File →
Steven Johnson (author of one of my favorite books of last year Where Good Ideas Come From has a new blog on Medium called The Writer’s Room. In his first post, he writes about the idea of what he calls a spark file, a running repository of all his ideas and hunches that aren’t quite ready for execution (much like how people use Moleskines or Evernote):
Now, the spark file itself...
7 tags
“To clarify, add detail. Imagine that, to clarify, add detail. Clutter and...”
– Edward Tufte (via)
8 tags
“It’s been a while since auteur theory made sense as an explanation of the web....”
– From Joshua Benton’s ways of looking at Medium, the new publishing platform from Ev Williams and Biz Stone.
6 tags
“Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between...”
– Paul Ford, Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?
5 tags
8 tags
“In reality, every morning is election day and we never stop voting with our...”
– —Rob Giampietro, from the Graphic Design—Under Discussion panel discussion on the current Graphic Design—Now In Production exhibition
He’s commenting on Metahaven’s Facestate, a intriguing part of the exhibition, that deals with Facebook and power imagining a fictitious future where...
7 tags
Daring Fireball turns 10 →
Daring Fireball, John Gruber’s famous Apple-focused blog turns ten years old today. I think I’ve been reading Gruber for roughly five years and I would probably go as far to say it’s my favorite blog. Gruber consistently brings an authoritarian perspective to topics I care about and I always know what to expect when he posts.
The Atlantic has a nice feature honoring this...
5 tags
5 tags
“Metaphors are good if they simplify things. Metaphors that draw attention to...”
– —Oliver Reichenstein on metaphors in interface design
Related: Toxic Nostalgia
9 tags
Truth's Typeface →
A few weeks ago Errol Morris asked a question on The New York Times blog, stating he was conducting a survey to determine if people were optimists or pessimists. Turns out the quiz was a cover for a larger experiment he was conducting: do typefaces affect peoples feelings, or more specifically, do certain fonts convey a feeling of truthfulness over others. To do this, a script ran that served the...
8 tags
Made to Measure →
Allen Tan has a great piece over at Contents Magazine on the struggles between full art direction on the web and the restraints of CMS templates. Using the metaphor of a tailor, Tan proposes templates that adjust to content:
If we compare digital editorial design to the craft of men’s shirt-making, art-directed pages would be bespoke shirts—luxury items uniquely made for an individual. On the...
5 tags
“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the...”
– Clayton Christensen
8 tags
Words Create Worlds
There’s a small building with a black awning on 3rd Street in the Lower East Side. You’d think nothing of it if it wasn’t for the elaborate paintings that cover the front wall, making a stark divide from the brick facades surrounding it.
If you happened to wander inside this building on a Friday night, you’d find yourself in a small crowded brick room. The lights would be...
