Favorites from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards

MAY 12, 2008

The winners were announced sometime in the last week or two (based on where these links lived in my tabs) and I tabbed through all of them for some creative inspiration. These were my favorites.

Sanlitun North by Lot-EK

This is a mixed-use building in Central Beijing by Lot-EK and designer Kengo Kuma. I'm a sucker for boxy with a twist.

Title Sequences by Prologue Films

The film stills above are from the title sequence of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a pretty good move with great titles. This team is also responsible for the great Spiderman 2 and 3 title sequences.

Magazine Design by Open

I've long been a fan of Good's design, especially the covers, and I was taken with what I saw of Scott Stowell's (he is the head of Open) work on The Nation.

Posted in Design at 3:47 pm.
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The Beginning of a Blog

MAY 7, 2008

For anyone who has fallen in love with blogging, you remember those early days when writing 5,000 words a week was like breathing. Of course, back when I started, I wasn't nearly as poignant as Roger Ebert.

Ebertt is following a trend I see of established writers who finally get blogging. Their first few months of posts are filled with topics that have been sitting in a large pile — similar to my pile of New Yorkers — of information waiting to be shared. Yesterday's post from Ebert is a good example of something he's probably thought about a lot but hadn't found the right outlet to share.

Frank Bruni's Diner's Journal started the same way. Now that he has gotten all of the long held tidbits off his chest, he's invited other writers to keep up the output.

This is certainly not a revelation, but it is fun seeing well respected writers following the same trends we've seen from bloggers since the beginning. Unfortunately for all of us, Ebert and Bruni have never written blog posts like this.

Posted in Technology\Web at 10:23 am.
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Impossible Still Life

MAY 1, 2008

If I had only come across one of these, I probably wouldn't have even bothered to post them in the sidebar, but seeing them together somehow changes that.

Johan Lorbeer is a German street performer. He became famous in the past few years because of his "Still-Life" Performances, which took place in the public area. His installations includes "Proletarian Mural" and "Tarzan", which are famous in Germany. Several of these performances feature Lorbeer in an apparently impossible position.

Johan Lorbeer's Still Life Performance and its Secret via monoscope

Chinese artist Li Wei from Beijing started off his performance series 'Mirroring' and later on took off attention with his 'Falls' series which shows the artist with his head and chest embedded into the ground. His work is a mixture of performance art and photography that creates illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality. Li Wei states that these images are not computer montages and works with the help of props such as mirror, metal wires, scaffolding and acrobatics.

The Impossible Art of Li Wei via Buzzfeed

Posted in Tidbits at 3:13 pm.
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What's the Problem?

APRIL 21, 2008

Wednesday of last week I went to see three partners from Pentagram — Paula Scher, Michael Bierut and Michael Gericke — present "Designing New York’s Visual Identity" at the Museum of the City of New York. Most of the pieces weren't new to me, but the discussion portion got my mind stirring.

One of the Michaels, I believe it was Bierut, mentioned his preference for redesigns over creating new branding. Responding to a question about how to deal with poorly received design, Scher explained that this is actually a failure in understanding the client's needs. Together, these points got me thinking about the anxiety that comes with new design projects.

I enjoy design work, but I often get frustrated when there isn't a clearly defined set of problems. Redesigns tend to be easier because the questions are clearer. Not only do you have an existing model for reference, but the client has a better sense of what's missing in the current setup.

The key to keeping frustrations at bay is defining as many questions and answers as possible before putting pen to paper. If you don't have all the questions, go back to the client. If you don't have all the answers, go to your coworkers or peers. It sounds simple, but it's something I rarely remember to do when I'm feeling stressed.

Posted in Design at 9:26 pm.
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Britain's Beautiful New Coins

APRIL 8, 2008

I'm floored by Britain's new coinage, designed by Matthew Dent, a 26 year-old graphic design student. They're based on the British Royal Arms and all form a piece of the whole. For a little more explanation and some history, be sure to watch the video.

On the other hand, the MySpace-ification of U.S. money continues with the new five dollar bill. Technically impressive, completely uninspired and totally American.

Posted in Design at 12:41 am.
1 Comment |

Please Movie Industry, Don't Do It

MARCH 13, 2008

The studios seem to be playing the cash grab game and it's making me nervous. It wasn't pretty watching the music industry go down the tubes, but I'm not terribly concerned about it. Self-producing and releasing music is relatively cheap these days and, while this may be hard to believe, I won't shed a single tear as the major labels go down with the ship.

The movie industry is another story. No, I don't have a personal attachment to any of the studios, but making movies ain't cheap, so we kinda need them. This is why I'm disappointed to see them shift focus to 3-D films. There are a bunch of 3-D releases on the way (including Toy Story 3) and the studios just announced an offer to convert 10,000 theaters to 3-D, which the exhibitors have yet to accept. I'm definitely in favor of improving the movie-going experience, but do you really think the Hannah Montana movie was a success because of an additional dimension? (Actually, a lot of people say it was just savvy marketing.) I would think there is more money to made pumping movies directly into all those new home theaters, but I guess that's not as flashy.

Compared to IFC's recent deal with Blockbuster, 3-D seems completely innocuous. The deal gives Blockbuster 60 days of exclusive access to rentals and downloads before any retail copies can be sold and three years of rental exclusivity. So if you use Netflix or an independent store, you won't be able to rent any future IFC release until 2011 at the earliest. This has caused problems in the video game world — I wrote about Madden and EA a while ago — and will only confuse and frustrate movie fans. As the Reeler points out, this is not terribly independent of IFC.

My biggest fear is that the movie industry learns nothing from their audio-only brethren and continues to make it difficult for me to spend money. The 3-D issue seems misguided, but I may just be suffering from fuddy-duddy-ness. Signing exclusive deals seems like just another reason for consumers to find the quickest path to a movie without regard to legality.

Posted in Music\TV\Film\Media at 5:19 pm.
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For Those Who Can, Please Vote Today!

FEBRUARY 5, 2008

Unlike most days, when this site is bustling with activity and new posts, today I'm putting up Matt's vote page to remind ya'll to get out there and pull that lever, push that button or whatever it is you do to make your vote count.

And if you do go, take a picture and send it to the Polling Place project.

Posted in Culture\Politics\Law at 11:57 am.
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My Top Feature Request for All Feed Readers

JANUARY 24, 2008

After putting together Simply Structured and years of hearing people gripe about the dearth of style in feed readers, I've realized my biggest request for NetNewsWire, or any reader for that matter, is customized styles for each feed. Even more, I don't just want the end-user to be able to customize styles, but for the author to be able to push styles alongside their content.

Styles on a feed-by-feed basis isn't a huge stretch, especially in NNW where style packages already exist, but pushing styles with your feed is something RSS and Atom don't support. But so what? In the early days of HTML, Netscape Navigator went beyond the HTML spec and added unsupported styles that developers wanted and the web is a better place for it. I'm not advocating for every feed reader to require its own custom flavor of RSS, but if they could add one line that was easily ignored by other RSS parsers, it would make for a fantastic experience. If we're already designing custom versions of sites for our iPhones and other mobile platforms, why not feed readers too?

You could argue custom styles unnecessarily complicate a feed reader, but I don't think it effects how most people consume feeds. The primary benefit of feed readers is having a device that notifies you when there is new content. The second largest benefit is having all the content in one place. Individual styles don't diminish these facts and help bring some individuality back to the web. In a time when we all have custom homepages and visit fewer and fewer sites, it'd be nice to inject a bit more personality into our daily lives.

Posted in Technology\Web at 1:27 pm.
3 Comments |

Simply Structured: A NetNewsWire Style

JANUARY 14, 2008

I'm an avid NetNewsWire user and was ecstatic when they announced it is now free. I don't know if the announcement inspired me, but I decided the release of NNW 3.1 would be a good time to create a custom style. I've been a longtime user of EAB - Gray, so I used Eduardo's code as a base to get started.*

More than anything, I wanted a design that stayed out of the way. Reading posts via feeds instead of actual sites lets me consume more data. Having a simple, highly legible style makes it much easier. Here are the problems I hoped to solve and I think this new style does a good job with it.

• Highly legible type that squeezes as much content as possible on a page. Helvetica, Verdana and a base font size of 11px helped make this possible. I think short posts, long posts and image-heavy posts look good, if I do say so myself.
• Feed metadata that's easy to process. I like having the data at the top of the screen, but NNW defaults to putting it all in one line. Simply Structured adds labels and makes everything a little more orderly.
• Images that float right or left when they're supposed to. When an image style is not embedded inline, the style won't come through. I fixed this by adding styles for some common image style declarations. (If you end up using Simply Structured and find styles I haven't included, let me know and I'll put them in.)
• Even though I don't use it, I also adjusted the style to work with the widescreen view. You can see an example at the bottom of the entry.

Putting this together was a lot of fun. After years of worrying about IE6, Firefox 1.5 and who knows what else, it was refreshing to work in a closed system. I've never used :before before!

The style still isn't perfect, but it suits my needs. The biggest concession was cutting off long URLs in the feed metadata box, which only bothers me a little. If you do find any other problems, feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to fix it.

Installing Simply Structured

1. Download this: simply-structured-nnw.zip.
2. Unzip it and place "Simply Structured.nnwstyle" in the folder you keep your NNW stylesheets, which defaults to USER_NAME/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/StyleSheets/.
3. Open up NNW. If the style menu is not visible in the lower right corner of the application, click "Show Styles Menu" in the View menu. Then select Simply Structured and you're good to go!

More Screenshots

Widescreen view

All text

* Expect a post later this week about creating your own style and another one with my biggest feature request for NNW.

Posted in Technology\Web at 1:33 pm.
8 Comments |

The Air Car

JANUARY 7, 2008

This was going to be a quick post, but there were too many amazing facts to include. Before I list through them, the air car's engine was built by a French engineer and runs on compressed air. There is no emission and the car will cost $7,000 when Tata Motors releases it. While the list below is enlightening, watching this BBC video will tell you the story in 80 seconds.

• In the single energy mode MDI cars consume less than one euro every 100Km. (around 0.75 Euros) that is to say, 10 time less than gasoline powered cars.
• When there is no combustion, there is no pollution. The vehicle's driving range is close to twice that of the most advanced electric cars (from 200 to 300 km or 8 hours of circulation) This is exactly what the urban market needs where, as previously mentioned, 80% of the drivers move less than 60Km. a day.
• The recharging of the car will be done at gas stations, once the market is developed. To fill the tanks it will take about to 2 to 3 minutes at a price of 1.5 euros. After refilling the car will be ready to driver 200 kilometres.
• Because the engine does not burn any fuel the car's oil(a litre of vegetable) only needs to be changed every 50,000Km.
• The temperature of the clean air expulsed form the exhaust pipe is between 0 and 15 degrees below zero and can be subsequently channelled and used for air conditioning in the interior of the car.

They'll initially come to market with the MiniCat and the CityCat. This first generation technology sounds amazing. I can't wait to see where this is going to go.

Posted in Technology\Web at 1:00 pm.
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