Category Archives: Design

Graphic Design at 70 M.P.H.

In case you missed it, there was a really terrific piece in yesterday᾿s New York Times Magazine called “The Road to Clarity.” Ostensibly a report on how the Federal Highway Administration is transitioning Interstate highway signage away from the typeface Highway Gothic and to the better optimized Clearview, its writer, Joshua Yaffa, manages to elegantly transition the angle of this article into an excellent primer on the nuances and importance graphic design. It’s actually quite slyly done.

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The Framework Formally Known as ’Prints

Grids are good. I’ve said so many times, and I think people are catching on. Not that I’m taking credit for the rising stock of this creative tool among Web designers, mind you; I just wanted to say how happy I am that more and more thought is being put into what it means to use typographic grids as a layout principle in digital media.

What’s even better, a lot of this new thought goes far beyond what I myself would be capable of contributing to the conversation. Take the Blueprint framework, for example (not to be confused with the promising Blueprint content management system from Inventive Labs). It’s a foundation for developing typographic grids using Cascading Style Sheets that was developed by Norwegian tech student Olav Frihagen Bjørkøy and released last Friday after several months of development. It’s an impressive piece of work that’s leagues past what I could have offered in terms of technical insight into how to build grids more efficiently for today’s browsers.

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One Book to Specify Them All

FontBookSome people find it hard to believe, but I do in fact like to use typefaces other than Helvetica. Recently, for instance, I’ve been really feelin’ Apex Serif, a beautiful, contemporary typeface that, as the name suggests, even has serifs. I like it so much that it’s the primary typeface for a side project I’m working that’s currently in ‘coming soon’ mode.

It’s not that often that I come across typefaces that I like as much as Helvetica, or even as much as Apex Serif. I probably wouldn’t have found it, though, if I hadn’t been flipping through the FontShop’s massive, nearly comprehensive tome, “FontBook.” It’s billed as “the largest typeface reference in the world,” and just a single flip through its 1,500 pages leaves one with no reason to doubt that claim.

The book is most directly a product of the mad mind of Erik Spiekermann and co-edited by Jürgen Siebert and Mai-Linh Thi Truong. But I was first turned on to this new version by Stephen Coles, author and editor of the wonderful Typographica blog. Stephen was a long-time user of the previous edition of the book, and was so persistent in sending his notes and corrections to the editors, that they hired him to help with this edition, fact-checking, editing and working on cross-references. In the interview that follows (conducted over email), I asked him about who would take on an outsized project like this and why.

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Coin-operated, User Experienced

Tilt: The Battle to Save PinballGreg Maletic’s film “Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball” is, like many of its peers in this recent golden age of documentary films, a temporary detour into what might have otherwise been — and what may yet be again — overlooked subject matter. It’s highly entertaining, completely engrossing and beautifully made, but you’d be forgiven for not expecting much in the way of day-to-day practicality. As it turns out though, it provides a surprising amount of tangible relevance for those of us working in digital design.

With a prefigured sense of melancholy, Maletic uncovers the tale of Williams Electronic Games’ last ditch attempt to reinvigorate a gaming industry suffering through a precipitous decline. That the decline followed so soon after the industry’s peak, and that both happened so recently — the pinball business hit all-time highs in 1993 and was on its last legs by 1998 — is a turnabout in fortune familiar to anyone who lived through the dot-com wave that boomed in the late 1990s and foundered in the early part of this decade. In a way, the one can be seen as a less-glamorous template for the other, or even a cautionary tale for the present.

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New Site, New Blog for AIGA New York

AIGANY.orgYesterday we officially launched a brand new version of AIGANY.org which was beautifully and smartly designed by the dynamic duo of Greg D’Onofrio and Patricia Belen over at Kind Company. They’re a small but extremely talented shop in Brooklyn that’s doing some stellar work, including a terrific and invaluable resource commemorating the work of Alvin Lustig.

AIGANY.org is the official site for the New York chapter, not to be confused with AIGA.org which was famously and wonderfully redesigned earlier this year by Happy Cog for the national organization. Naturally, our site is focused on all the design-related events that the chapter puts on in New York City during the fall, winter and spring of each year. All modesty aside, it’s really a hell of a lot of stuff; you’d have to TiVo the majority of a television season just to attend half of these events each year.

So to help keep everyone apprised of what’s going on, this redesign features a new blog called, somewhat cheekily, DESIGNY (RSS feed). Get it? DESIGNY, design-y and design-New York? Corny puns aside, we’ve staffed this blog with a hand-selected coterie of up-and-coming design tastemakers: Randy J. Hunt, Louise Ma and Michael Brenner. Between them, they’ll be covering all of the events we put on, and more.

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Designed Deterioration

RimowaIf you buy yourself a piece of high quality luggage from Rimowa — and I’ve daydreamed about it, but have never been able to justify the exorbitant expense — you’re getting a structurally and aesthetically pristine object that’s going to get beaten up.

You know how airlines and luggage handlers can be; the vagaries of travel can be unkind to luggage of all kinds, including thousand-dollar, aluminum frame suitcases. The state in which a bag tumbles out of the chute onto a conveyor belt at baggage claim is never quite the same state in which you handed it over to the airline at check-in.

The thing with a Rimowa, though, is that those scratches, dings and dents are part of their aesthetic. A new, unspoiled Rimowa suitcase is actually the least desirable kind of Rimowa suitcase in that it is, to paraphrase something I once heard Jasper Johns say, an ‘ignorant’ suitcase. Unused objects are ignorant; only the ones that have been put to use, that have traveled, that have been tossed around have accumulated knowledge. That knowledge and familiarity, if it’s worn properly, can make an object desirable. A beaten, worn, scratched Rimowa then is actually a point of pride.

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Arrogance Among Us

This afternoon I was chatting with a friend of mine about a graphic designer that we both know, and, maybe feeling a bit petty, we were remarking on how monumentally arrogant is this person. It got me thinking about how amazing it is to me when I encounter this kind of person — rude, disdainful and superior designers who can’t afford common courtesies to those below them in professional or social stature. When confronted with this type, what I invariably think in my head is, “Why are you so high on yourself? You’re just a designer.”

In no way am I trying to discount the social or material consequence of our profession; I’m as big a proponent of design’s singular, critical role in the world as anyone. At the same time, I try to remember that nothing that we do as designers is so important that it excuses us from being nice.

Aside from a very select few among us, we all earn our salaries in a service profession, after all. Which is to say that our job is to provide our labor — our design expertise — in service to others. By its very nature, that sort of arrangement demands a certain humbleness. With apologies to Yogi Berra: design is ninety percent talent and hard work; the other half is people skills.

And speaking of those select few: I’ve met a handful of the cream of the crop, those who practice design in a manner that might be described as ‘with impunity.’ To be sure, arrogance is well represented among them, but there are some stellar folks who happen to be extremely approachable, friendly and level-headed — and some of these folks happen at the very top of the industry. If these designers can bother to maintain humility even at those great heights, some of these lesser gods among us surely can too. I look up to the ones that can. Fuck the others.

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Two Books by Two Designers

I’m at a point in my life know where I actually know real authors of real books. It’s strange, because these are regular, ‘one pant leg at a time’ human folk like you and me, and yet somehow they’ve managed to articulate a real, honest to goodness view of the world… and they’ve convinced other folks to print it for them. Now you can buy these books via the Interweb and even hold them in your hand. It’s amazing to me.

So, having said that, now I’m going to plug two of them.

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I Had No Ikea

Sheepishly, I admit to having had no idea whatsoever that people would be so interested in Ikea when I wrote my post about the massive home furnishings retailer earlier in the week. Something about the combination of reasonably presentable modern design and low, low prices clearly inspires passionate responses from consumers, both good and bad. Also, I admit that the positive notices on Ikea were more abundant than I anticipated.

This interest doesn’t strike me as being about affordability as much as it’s about design. There are plenty of cheap furniture retailers out there, but how many of them inspire the impassioned, trainspotting chatter of Ikeafans.com, where customers trade every possible detail about the products and the store branches? Or the enthusiastic inventiveness of Ikea Hacker, where all manner of novel uses and transformations of Ikea goods are showcased? (Thanks to readers Gong Szeto, AJ Kandy and Jason Beaird for pointing those out to me.)

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The Complete Ikea

IkeaA few years ago I read an interview with Saint Bono of the Irish mega-group Bono and the U-2’s in which he justified his then-recent purchase of an exorbitant, fully-furnished new Manhattan apartment — even the silverware and bath towels were waiting at the ready for his family the day they walked in the door for the first time — using this reasoning: when wealthy rock musicians become preoccupied with furnishing their houses, buying table linens, choosing wallpaper, etc. instead of focusing on their craft, they will consequently produce absolutely crap records. By purchasing the house in a ready-to-live state, he hoped to avoid sapping his creative energies with domestic busywork, allowing him to devote his attentions fully to his art instead. And then the band released “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.” Oh well.

I have neither fame nor wealth — nor even an artistic temperament on par with Bono’s, it can be argued. But I do have a relatively new apartment that I’ve been devoting considerable time toward furnishing for the past several weeks. And I can attest, at least, to how thoroughly the act of setting up a new apartment can drain one’s creative energies.

Which is how I found myself in Elizabeth, New Jersey yesterday, trolling the huge showroom full of singularly contemporary and inexpensive furnishings at Ikea, along with a few friends who had also recently moved or will soon move into new apartments.

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