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Items of interest around 042411

Sunday, April 24th, 2011

- “Graffiti made me look at letters and think about them in a totally different way. Color, composition, movement, layering and repetition all play huge parts to developing letters and the creative possibilities are endless. Although I am a purist when it comes to graff I also want to evolve and take those ideas further primarily working with paper collage.”
- “Continuing the process theme of my last post, Jan Middendorp posted a link to this (mostly) non-digital handwriting and lettering process by Frank Ortmann of Freies Grafik Design. I’ve done a few screenshots from the video to give you an idea of it, but nothing beats watching an expert directly. I particularly enjoyed the practice work — this time spent ‘loosening up’ is (I think) a key part of any creative process, digital or not. Go and watch the whole thing, it’s good.”
- “In his new book, The Information, science writer James Gleick documents the rising role of information in our lives and the way new technologies continue to increase its velocity, volume, and importance.”
- “One linocut letter a day in March”
- “At 37signals, however, we have a different position on ambition. We’re not big fans of what I consider “vertical” ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere “horizontal” ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management.”
- “Stripping away the irrelevant—McCandless’ stated goal—can only be done once you’ve found a way to display the relevant. Too many of his visualizations display information in ways that hide much that’s relevant and essential, leaving little of value for the viewer to see. McCandless rarely chooses forms of display that our eyes and brains can perceive with ease and precision. He selects what will appeal superficially to the viewer (lots of circles, swirls, and vibrant colors), not what will most effectively express what’s essential and meaningful. His displays rarely draw viewers into the data in a thoughtful way, but entertain in a way that delivers a simple message, which is often anemic when compared to the richer, subtler, and more complex stories that live in the data.”
- A website dedicated to the documenting of abandoned NYC subway stations.
- “Jason Fried has a radical theory of working: that the office isn’t a good place to do it. At TEDxMidwest, he lays out the main problems (call them the M&Ms) and offers three suggestions to make work work.”

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Items of interest around 112210

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

- “In more than 70 hacker spaces in the U.S. and Canada, do-it-yourselfers are drilling, gluing, soldering and welding just about anything you can imagine. Some spaces consist of little more than a large room where they share tools and expertise, while others are equipped with expensive, computer-controlled power tools. While the focus at some hacker spaces is primarily on electronics, at others, sawdust flies and sewing machines whir as members build hybrid objects of a less technological variety. The spaces also offer learning opportunities through classes on anything from brewing beer to picking locks, and demonstrations of new contraptions.”
- “To the unknowing eye, quality design can seem obvious. Take the iPod: clean, simple and so ubiquitous it’s hard to imagine life before it. And that’s where the beauty is. Like Roger Federer makes tennis look easy, a good designer does the same. But easy it’s not. Designing a functional and enticing product while getting the right people on board to help manufacture and distribute it is almost impossible. Get-rich-quick schemes and infomercial-ready inventions are a dime a dozen, but excellent design is too rare.”

Tags:Hacker, Hacker Space, iPod, LunaTik, Scott Wilson, TikTok
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Items of interest around 112110

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

- “Javascript drawing tool”

Tags:311, Data, Data Visualization, Javascript, Mr. Doob, New York Magazine, NYC
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Items of interest around 110410

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

- “That diversity shows in the kinds of technology companies New York has produced. They are not just tech-for-tech’s-sake projects. Instead, they use software to enhance other passions: parenting, crafts, gossip, gameplay, health, and so on. They use technology in clever ways, but they are fundamentally about something else. I think that quality derives from their metropolitan roots, from the scenius of a big city. It is no accident that the slogan of Meetup, the éminence grise of New York start-ups, which allows groups of people with shared interests to organise face-to-face meetings, is “using the Internet to get off the Internet”. You can’t stay at home, staring at a screen all night, when there’s so much happening on your doorstep.”
- “But what about when the company has to reach outside the web? The printed volumes represented on Google Books form a completely different kind of problem. Google’s famous algorithm can’t be deployed to search through books because they don’t link to each other in the way that webpages do. There is no perfect BookRank corollary for PageRank.”
- “Impure is a new visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information. Developed by Bestiario, a Spanish information design start-up, Impure aims to bridge the link between ‘non-programmers’ and data visualization by linking information to programmatic operators, controls and visualization methods through a new visual and modular interface.”
- “When we look at our portfolio and analyze what has worked and what has not, we see a high correlation between having that “creative element” firmly ensconced into the founding team and success. The teams that are engineer heavy and creative light have not worked nearly as well as the teams that are creative heavy and engineer light.”
- “A gallery of – mostly – record company sleeves (as opposed to picture covers), but with a few from record shops and the occasional homemade or hand-decorated one too. No reproductions, all originals. Not in any particular order”

Tags:Data Visualization, eBooks, Google, NYC, Record Sleeve Art, Start Up, Technology
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Items of interest around 102510

Monday, October 25th, 2010

- “Niels Meulman of Calligraffiti (AKA Shoe) was commissioned to customise a Mercedes-Benz B-Class by the Pink Ribbon Foundation in the Netherlands. The work consists of hundreds of women’s names, representing the Dutch women the foundation works to help, and is a product of Mercedes’ sponsorship of the foundation.”
- “Almost all of America’s public libraries provide free internet access. Over the past two years, hard-hit Americans have been economising by cancelling their broadband contracts at home and looking to public libraries to fill the gap. At the same time, companies and government agencies are saving money by moving job applications and services online; so a rush of new visitors is arriving at libraries just as the local governments that fund them run out of money.”
- “While finalizing my slides for tonight’s lecture at SCI-Arc, I was reading again about one of my favorite topics: trap streets, or deliberate cartographic errors introduced into a map so as to catch acts of copyright infringement by rival firms. In other words, if a competitor’s map includes your “trap street”—a geographic feature that you’ve simply invented—then you (and your lawyers) will know they nicked your data, gave it a quick redesign and tried to pass it off as their own. But this strategy of willful cartographic deception is not always limited to streets: there can be trap parks, trap ponds, trap buildings. And trap rooms. “
- “Unless you’re very dedicated, and very well-traveled, most of the art and photography you’ve seen has been on the printed page as well. Will these, too, gradually be replaced with e-books? I suspect not, and I certainly hope not, but to understand why, we need to indulge in a little metaphysics.”
- “Data Hacks is a new library we have developed at bit.ly which is a set of command line tools to assist in data analysis.”
- “A bunch of ‘graffiti knitters’ are on the loose in the UK – hellbent on liberating us from the forces of drabness. Maddy Costa hits the streets with a woman called Deadly Knitshade”

Tags:eBooks, Graffiti, Internet, Knitting, Library, Niels Meulman, Shoe, Trap Rooms, Typography
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Items of interest around 100710

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

- "For too long now the ethos of graphic design — the fundamental sentiment that guides the practice of design and the activities of designers — has been understood as a link between suppliers and consumers….If we do nothing more than change a few words in the key phase — from link between supplier and consumer to bridge between information and purpose — we suggest a much broader arena of activity and imply substantially increased value."
- "Data journalism trainer and writer Paul Bradshaw explains how to get started in data journalism, from getting to the data to visualising it"
- "Making sense of complex issues through data and design."

Tags:Data Journalism, Data Visualization, Graphic Design, Rustoleum
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Items of interest around 092810

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

- “Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?”
- “In essence, I used “visual thinking”—drawing pictures to solve a problem. And if you believe the visualization experts, a new language of pictures may be precisely what we need to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.”

Tags:Clive Thompson, Data, Data Visualization, Milton Glaser, Visual Thinking
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Items of interest around 092710

Monday, September 27th, 2010

- “Have you read any good essays on beauty? That was the question I kept asking in advance of a workshop I taught this summer at Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles. I had planned to use the idea of beauty as a lens through which to view a famously unbeautiful city….I was hoping to turn up an essay about beauty as it pertains to the postwar American city, one that might inspire the students to look at the urban fabric in new ways….Such an essay may well exist, but I couldn’t find it. Not in the New York Public Library, not on Google, not on the shelves of St. Mark’s Books. Friends and colleagues suggested Reyner Banham, Elaine Scarry, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Alexander Nehamas, Kant … I found essays about beauty and essays about cities, but nothing really wed the two.”

Tags:Alva Noto, Architecture, Beauty, Carsten Nicolai, City, Gestalten, Karrie Jacobs, Metropolis Magazine, Postwar American City, Raster Noton
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Items of interest around 092210

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

- “A “hacker” is a technologist with a love for computing and a “hack” is a clever technical solution arrived through a non-obvious means. It doesn’t mean to compromise the Pentagon, change your grades, or take down the global financial system, although it can, but that is a very narrow reality of the term. Hackers tend to value a set of liberal principles: freedom, privacy, and access; they tend to adore computers; some gain unauthorized access to technologies, though the degree of illegality greatly varies (and much, even most of hacking, by the definition I set above, is actually legal). But once one confronts hacking empirically, some similarities melt into a sea of differences; some of these distinctions are subtle, while others are profound enough to warrant thinking about hacking in terms of genres or genealogies of hacking — and we compare and contrast various of these genealogies in the class, such as free and open source software hacking and the hacker underground.”
- “Typeface designer Matthew Carter has left his mark on everything from Microsoft to magazines to even, yes, this very section you are reading”

Tags:Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Matthew Carter, Typography
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Items of interest around 091910

Sunday, September 19th, 2010

- “Historically work was something you did in one location, with a set of tools, and when you left that location, you simply couldn’t work anymore. Doctors practiced in their offices, smithies labored in their foundries, accountants tended their ledgers until the close of the day, and so on. Innovations in technology and a broad shift towards information work have made it increasingly difficult to draw a clean line between work and leisure. Office workers of yesteryear might have been inclined to check in on things at the office or do a little work on early Sunday morning, but it wasn’t feasible unless they drove back into the office. Today, however, any office worker with a BlackBerry tether can tell you: it can feel downright impossible to feel like you’re ever really away from work.”
- “Linotype: The Film is a documentary about Ottmar Mergenthaler’s amazing Linotype typesetting machine and the people who own and love these machines today.”
- “What’s pointedly missing from Google’s approach is the human factor: there is no empathy in the process. It lives or dies entirely by the “sword of data” (Doug’s beautifully apt words, not mine), and while that can be a recipe for success—Google is doing quite well in the market—it is rarely a recipe for beauty, taste or comfort. It’s a cold process, almost entirely devoid of any humanity, precisely because it produces results that lack a human touch.”
- “If you have any type of design background, it’s probably funny to you that Google frequently mentions “design,” but doesn’t mention any “designers” involved — the Google design process seems to simply be creating a bunch of fairly obvious alternatives, and testing the hell out of them….Testing can only tell you so much — and it often only reveals that people only like things that are similar to what they’ve had before. But brilliant design solutions convert people over time, because they’re both subtle and ground breaking.”
- “Cooled entirely by sea water. The data center will be cooled using water from the Baltic Sea. It’s pulled in from the ocean floor, where temperature is more even, using pipes that are up to two meters in diameter. Twenty-year-old, renovated pumps from the old paper mill are used to circulate the water. This will be Google’s first data center to be chilled entirely using sea water, and to their knowledge, it’s also the first ever data center to do so.”
- “One of the main components of writing graffiti is the all-important idea of creating one’s own, unique style….I also feel there are aesthetics that have been overlooked and are ripe for ideas and elaborations. Elements of graff such as repetition, vintage colors, layers and movement are just some of my sources. Graffiti encourages you to draw out side the lines allowing you to creatively interpret letter forms”
- “So let’s end the week with a student project, an info graphic related to the job we do as graphic designers. Julian did a flowchart of the choices we go through choosing fonts, with a humerous approach.”