The Helvetica Hegemony

Fri 26 Jan 200708:25 PM

First, Gary Hustwit’s “Helvetica” documentary is real, or at least about ten minutes of it are, anyway. That’s how much I saw in a private screening of a handful of clips that was held last night at Pentagram here in New York. Hustwit invited about fifty or so of us to a “reception celebrating the release of three limited-edition letterpress prints” commemorating the film (beautiful work from Experimental Jetset in Amsterdam, Build in London and Norm in Zürich), but the real star of the show was the sneak peeks.

It’s very hard to judge an entire movie on the basis of a handful of snippets, but let me just say that I’m really excited for its release after this little taste. To see graphic design writ large on the silver screen (well, it was projected on a big wall last night, but that’s close enough) was really invigorating, and the interviews he showed, especially with Michael Bierut and Wim Crouwel, were riotous. Fingers crossed, the final product is going to be a film we’ll all treasure for a long time.

In other news, a resounding “Yes!” to those of you who have emailed in to ask — I will indeed be doing another run of my Hel-Fucking-Vetica tee shirts soon. I have a lot of traveling to do in the next few months, but I’ll try and squeeze in the time to actually put another order through. This round, the shirts will be run in a different color entirely, so as to preserve the ‘limited edition-ality’ of the first batch, perhaps in a shade of black or gray for increased bad ass-ness. And, in all likelihood, I’ll be running that second batch alongside a first edition run of my Fear of a Cooper Black Planet tee shirt, too. Stay tuned, type fans.

Finally, take note of “Helvetica Memory,” an alphabet designed by Mike Essl for Rick Valicenti’s Playground. It’s a fun reinterpretation of the typeface, as filtered through the lens of Helvetica’s contemporary ubiquity. And it’s also a good lead-in to something else Essl-related, for which you’ll need to come back to this blog next week. How about that? A weekend cliff-hanger!

Listen to My Music

Thu 25 Jan 200710:54 PM

The music industry is considering doing away with digital rights management, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. This change of heart might be interpreted as a white flag in the D.R.M. battle, an admission that software-based restrictions on digital media are problematic, at least, enough to hamper the labels’ ability to do business online.

Or, you can read it, as I do, as a strategic ploy to undermine the iTunes Music Store, which, as Apple has recently admitted, has turned D.R.M. against the very people it was meant to protect. Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management framework, by tying purchases made through the iTunes Music Store exclusively to the iPod and to no other handheld media players, has allowed the company to create a de facto monopoly on digital music sales, in which it’s very difficult for the major labels to peddle their wares over the Internet through any other vendor.

Even though it’s still just a rumor, this newly enlightened attitude is an encouraging sign, right? If it actually comes to pass, though, I seriously doubt it will be accompanied by an embargo on the industry’s questionable habit of suing consumers who download music from unauthorized channels. Concessions tend to come piecemeal, not wholesale, in this kind of economic disruption.

Nor will it mean that I’ll be any freer to do what I really want to do with digital music: create and distribute the equivalent of mix tapes online. A steady stream of new music makes its way into my iTunes library, some of it protected by D.R.M., some of it from less reputable sources. I’m no taste maker, but I hear a fair amount of interesting stuff, and I’d like to share it with people (this means you).

Hidden Fun in Software Design

Thu 25 Jan 200712:32 AM

Mac OS X’s built-in Address Book is about as unglamorous a utility as any you can name. Aside from the fact that having a system-wide database of contacts that’s available to any application willing to hook into it is incredibly handy, very little about it could be described as interesting. It’s dead boring, in fact.

And yet, the other day, it surprised me. A colleague of mine sent, attached in an email, an updated vCard with his new home address. At first, I groaned a bit, because the relevant information — the new address — was buried inside of the vCard, hidden from view. I wanted it visible in the body of the email so that I could just update his contact information by hand. I was under the impression that, if I clicked on the vCard, it would launch Address Book and automatically add itself again to my contacts database — leaving me with two different cards for my colleague. Not a big deal, but an annoyance.

Optimizing for Design Unusability

Fri 19 Jan 200702:39 PM

Nicholas Felton of the New York design studio Megafone does some beautiful work, but the piece that’s really caught my eye is his Feltron 2006 Annual Report. Not a corporation, “Feltron” is Felton’s nom de guerre, under which he publishes, I suppose, personal projects and experiments. It’s hard to say because, like many designers’ indulgences, there’s frustratingly little information available at Feltron.com.

Doesn’t matter. Because this ‘annual report,’ a follow-up to a similar project he did at the end of 2005, is a work of delightful inventiveness. Using the pro forma conventions and banalities of corporate annual reports, Felton summarizes the notable trivia of the past twelve months of his life: the number of days he spent on vacation, the amount of time he spent on jury duty, the many remote geographic locations visited, and even a summary of plants he’s killed. All of it is executed in the kind of highly detailed diagrammatic vernacular that designers tend to fetishize — “info-porn” is the term — and with Felton’s precise, disciplined and, here anyway, his nearly unfailing aesthetic eye.

New Boxes Are Here

Thu 18 Jan 200712:29 AM

The long-awaited new design for Boxes and Arrows, the venerable online information architecture magazine, went live earlier this week and it’s… um, it’s different. Very different.

Of course, it’s hard for me to give an objective assessment of this new look’s graphical merits. Way, way back in August 2004, I pulled a feverish all-nighter (with my former colleague, Chris Fahey) to knock out a competing design that I hoped would be selected as the new face for the magazine. I’m still very fond of what we pulled off, but, obviously, our proposal did not prevail.

Still, I’d like to think that even without that conflict of interest, I’d have much the same reaction as I had when I first saw this revision: the new Boxes and Arrows lacks certain traits of executional elegance that I value in well-designed interfaces. I’m talking about some basic stuff here: consistency in typographic conventions, semantic clarity in graphical elements, disambiguation in interface constructions, continuity with prior branding art… it’s a mess, and it will win no beauty pageants.

Biggie Installs

Thu 11 Jan 200712:52 PM

In the past week or so, I’ve had to update or install new versions of software from Apple, Microsoft and Adobe. Having undertaken these tasks more or less in succession, I noticed something I’d never paid conscious attention to before: how the sizes of their progress screens — the dialog boxes that visually track the completion of each software installation — also served as visual indicators for the character of each application.