• Journalism in the Age of Data [Stanford]
  • “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?”
  Ten Things I Have Learned [Milton Glaser]
• Clive Thompson on the Power of Visual Thinking [Wired]
  • “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.”

• Eye of the Beholder [Metropolis Magazine]
  • “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.”
  Carsten Nicolai – A Little Grid More [Gestalten]

IDEO’s proposal for the future of books is not a simple digitization of the physical format, but a future where books are personal experiences and journeys, recommendations and social interactions, and springboards of learning, much like their present day counterparts.

Thank you Metropolis.

• The Anthropology of Hackers [The Atlantic]
  • “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.”
  He’s a type A (and B, C, D, E … ) personality [The Boston Globe]
  • “Typeface designer Matthew Carter has left his mark on everything from Microsoft to magazines to even, yes, this very section you are reading”

“Data is the new soil…if you look at it directly it’s just a load of numbers and disconnected facts…but if you start working with it in a certain way interesting things can appear and different patterns can be revealed”

• Take Back Your Free Time: Establishing Boundaries Between Work and Play [LifeHacker]
  • “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 Trailer [Swiss Legacy]
  • “Linotype: The Film is a documentary about Ottmar Mergenthaler’s amazing Linotype typesetting machine and the people who own and love these machines today.”
  A5 Joy: Some Nice New Zines [Creative Review]
  The Price of a Hard Drive [Wired]
  Design Thinking vs. Data Thinking [Faruk Ates]
  • “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.”
  Google Instant Proves Google’s Design Process is Broken [Co.Design]
  • “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.”
  Revealed: Google’s new mega data center in Finland [Royal Pingdom]
  • “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.”
  An Interview with Greg Lamarche [The World's Best Ever]
  • “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 You Need A Typeface [Inspiration Lab]
  • “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.”

• John Madere: Massimo Vignelli [Design Observer]
  • “Good design lasts longer,bad design is very ephemeral…Vision, courage, and determination will bring you where you want to go…without them would be a miserable life”
  Episode #17: Design roundtable (2 of 3) [37signals]
  • “But there’s this fine line between art and design. There always is. And on the web it’s even harder to separate. It’s sort of like a lot of what I admire out there is art, but it isn’t really design. And what I mean by that is it looks beautiful and I’m like amazed that they managed to do it, but is it really communicating something or is it just in and of itself this beautiful site? And I could think of a lot of different web sites that I’ve seen that I think it looks cool, but I couldn’t even remember what the hell it was about. And to me design is about communicating. What’s the problem?”
  Episode #18: Design roundtable (3 of 3) [37 Signals]
  • “When we really understand design and we know it’s not just colors, or which curtains do we match with which pillows or whatever. The software person who doesn’t think like a designer is just connecting things together until they run out of things to connect, and they hope it all stands up….people get fixed on designer versus developer. Instead of designer and developer, and looking at… How should these two be working together? Who starts the process? How do we take turns? How do we give each other feedback? That’s, I think, the more interesting thing to look at. “

Utilizing the Postalicious plugin I was able to integrate my “further reading” delicious bookmarks normally found in my RSS feed into my blog. For an archive of those items follow this link. This change has allowed me to integrate my “link” delicious bookmarks into my RSS feed.