The Man-Made Object was part of the six-book series Vision + Value published between 1965 and 1966. I’m pretty sure I just found my new favorite book cover. (More on the Olduvai Hand Axe.)

The Man-Made Object was part of the six-book series Vision + Value published between 1965 and 1966. I’m pretty sure I just found my new favorite book cover.

(More on the Olduvai Hand Axe.)

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. … Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
Carl Sagan, who passed away 16 years ago today, on the power and magic of books (via explore-blog)
“Like the sea, we are always in motion. The waves loom in our dreams and in our nightmares through all of time, their rhythms pulsing through us. They move across a faint horizon, the rush of love and the surge of grief, the respite of peace and then fear again, the heart that beats and then lies still, the rise and fall and rise and fall of all of it, the incoming and the outgoing, the infinite procession of life. And the ocean wraps the earth, a reminder. The mysteries come forward in waves.”
From Susan Casey’s excellent book The Wave

‘People read books to make connections’

Travis Alber and Aaron Miller have written an excellent piece on the book as a social platform drawing from their experience building BookGlutton. They propose that books are—and have always been—a way to make connections; connections with ideas, with stories, and with others. Through the act of reading is often a solitary activity, from that interactions with others almost always occur:

It’s a lofty publisher who tries to look above the bottom line to ask the question: but how should books be read? And not only to ask that question, but to understand that it’s not merely a question of hardback or paperback, or Kindle vs. Nook. It’s not merely about whether a book will be an app, or whether it will be available in foreign territories simultaneous with its U.S. release. It’s not about Garamond vs. Bembo either, or the colophon or dedication, or who you can get to write the introduction. It’s not an experiential question at all; it’s entirely metaphysical, and it might even be better to start with the question: why do people read books?

We think there is a very simple but profound answer to that question: people read books to make connections. This can be considered at a cognitive level, through simple, repetitive pattern recognition, or at a conceptual, spiritual level. Either way, the basic work of the reader’s mind is to make connections, and the basic mode of higher thought is to exist both in and out of the physical world for a bit, drawing lines between the two.

“World history, after all, is not a chronological list of every damn thing that ever happened; it’s a chain of only the most consequential events, selected and arranged to reveal the arc of the story—it’s the arc that counts.”
Tamim Ansary, from the preface of Destiny Disrupted
“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest for something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidarity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.”
E.B. White, Here is New York
“But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest—for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both—must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.”
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
“A book ought to not only document its contents but actually perform or enact its contents. In an ideal case, those things are so seamlessly integrated that sometimes it’s hard to tease out the content from the form.”
Prem Krishnamurthy of Project Projects on the format of the book in this great interview from Triple Canopy.

“It’s only with the heart that one can see clearly. What’s essential is invisible to the eye.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A quotation from a favorite book that has had a profound impact on the work I do. Here’s a clip from the 1974 movie adaptation of *The Little Prince”.

“He was a poet, and he exhibited me many of his poems. I remember many of them. They were silly, you could say, and about love. He was always in his room writing those things, and never with people. I used to tell him, What good is all of that love doing on paper? I said, Let love write on you for a little. But he was so stubborn. Or perhaps he was only timid.”
From Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

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 would love the book and I did. I had a hard time putting it down many nights and stayed up much later than I should have reading four, five, six chapters in one sitting. But then there were other times—and this I didn’t expect—where I had to put the book down, where I couldn’t bring myself to read another page because I suddenly had the urge to go make something of my own.

A constant thread through Steve’s life was his focus on making great products, on “putting a dent in the universe” by making a product that would change the world. This book made that passion and that focus palpable and contagious.

I laughed when he would berate employees when they produced anything short of perfection and I cried when the cancer returned and kept him in bed, slowly eating away his body. But more than anything, I closed the book inspired, knowing I have work of my own to do and that I need to start now because I don’t know what the future will bring. But if I work hard enough, I can create my own future, and though it will pale in comparison to what Steve gave us, I can put my own little dent in the universe.

Wit and Cleverness

Peter Mendelsund of Jacket Mechanical on the state of book jacket design:

Book jackets these days, for reasons I won’t unpack, seem to revel, overtly, in wit, conceptual deviousness, unusual clever or droll juxtapositions- we, as a professional community, seem to have elevated the visual bon mot above all other virtues. Again, I won’t delve into the “why” of the matter here for want of space, but suffice it to say that clever work is the work that is celebrated in our community. Not that wit in itself isn’t valuable, and doesn’t have an appropriate place in design- but wit is not the same thing as insightfulness, and often insightfulness is what is called for in a book jacket. Our fetishizing of cleverness has taken a toll I believe, in that (quite often) these clever solutions work at cross-purposes to the (more often than not sincere) narratives they represent. A book in which an author has gone out on a considerable limb in order to write in a genuine and unaffected fashion does not want a cover that winks at the reader. Wit, when it becomes compulsive (as anyone knows who has a friend who puns too often) quickly becomes its opposite- dullness or predictability. Are we, as a professional community, that punning guy? I hope not.

Simply, cleverness and intelligence are not the same thing. Graphic design can very easily stay in the witty and clever, but without any substance—just empty jokes. Cleverness is short-lived and does not age well. Be sure to look at Peter’s most recent work—they feel incredibly timeless and classic.

Maria Bustillos also tackles the idea of cleverness in her piece on movie tagline copywriters Poster Boys from The New York Times:

Richard’s [Goldman] favorite was one he worked on with David [Saltzman] for an ESPN documentary called “The Streak.” It was about a wrestling team that had never lost a match; it had “the longest running winning streak in the history of high school sports.” But “the tension was so unbelievable. If they lost they would be disgracing their grandparents. So my line was, ‘The more you win the more you have to lose.’”

I asked why that was his favorite.

“Because it’s NOT clever.”

David and I both tell him well, yes, it is clever.

“No, it’s truth! It’s true.”

“So truth trumps cleverness?”

“Absolutely.”

The apparent shallowness and glitz of Hollywood are often mocked, but it has always seemed to me that there is a ton of intelligence and passion that goes into making every bit of a Hollywood movie or TV show. Not just careerist passion but true, artistic passion. “Sometimes you feel you are writing an aphorism. Something that will last forever,” Richard told me.

“Work is easier when its just work; it’s much harder when you actually care.”

—John Maeda, from his recent book Redesigning Leadership

Really enjoyed this book - super quick read and an interesting perspective on the transition from artist/designer to leader.

the sea seethes
the sweethearts seethe as the sea seethes
the sweethearts see stars
stars at sea
the war starts

Sweethearts by Emmett Williams is the seminal example of concrete poetry. Simply using letters from the word “sweethearts” evenly spaced across every page, Williams crafts a visual poem that acts as a flip book of sorts as the letters’ arrangements simulate the relationship between a man and woman.

In addition to being a groundbreaking literary work, to me, this is also a prime example of the union of language and visuals. First published in 1968, the book was recently put back in print.

On the left, Mark Rothko’s Gray on Black painted in 1969, and on the right, NASA photograph of the moon, July 1969. From Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises:

I happened to notice the date on [Rothko’s] last painting: 1969. Night horizons, indeed, but like no night on earth. Rather, of course—the pitch-black upper half of the painting the shimmering, flittering, ghost-white expanse of the bottom half—like nothing so much as night (or rather day) on the Moon. The very image, come to think of it, that was being broadcast repeatedly, plastered everywhere, that amazing summer of the moon landing. (I remember marveling, at the time, about how the moon would be the place where you knew it was day because the ground was shining.)

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