Category Archives: Design

Better Screen, Same Typography

Three years ago I waited in line to buy the original iPhone and I haven’t upgraded since, so I’m definitely warming up my credit card for Apple’s newly announced iPhone 4. I admit that it took some will power to sit out the subsequent releases of the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS; the not-insignificant speed gains that those models brought would’ve come in really handy. Still, neither of those updates struck me as particularly impressive. They were incremental, at best, where iPhone 4 seems like a major leap forward.

Even the new phone’s screen, the so-called Retina Display, is an important development on its own. Its incredibly high concentration of pixels (326 ppi, or four times the density of previous iPhones) promises a quality of resolution that’s positively print-like, where the pixels seem to disappear to the eye and rendering of curved shapes is much smoother. The advent of higher and higher density screens like this one will continue to have some subtle but important changes on the way we practice design for digital media, eventually pushing us to work in a resolution-independent framework that’s currently foreign to most.

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The New New Typography

This coming Monday, I’ll have the honor of speaking at The Museum of Modern Art here in New York City as part of their PopRally event series. This particular event highlights MoMA’s current exhibition “The New Typography,” which includes a selection of seminal works from the eponymous design movement of the 1920s and 1930s. All of the pieces included in the exhibition are drawn from the personal collection of the legendary designer Jan Tschichold. Though the show is fairly small and intimate, there are some legendary and amazing selections to be seen there.

I’ll be joining Stephen Doyle of Doyle Partners, Chester Jenkins of Village, and moderator Juliet Kinchin (MoMA Curator of Architecture and Design), on stage in a conversation about typography in the twenty-first century and how it both draws upon and departs from the work of the New Typography from nearly a century ago. Needless to say, I’m very humbled. The event begins in one of the auditoriums at the museum’s main galleries on Fifty-third Street, and then continues upstairs with a private group viewing of the exhibition. I hope you can join us! Get your tickets here.

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EW’s Must-See Must List

There’s been plenty of discussion lately about how print magazines have been swinging big and missing big on the iPad, how their attempts at translating the value of their printed pages into apps have been ill-advised or clumsy. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson sums it up best, I think, in a recent blog post in which he declares that he prefers content in a browser rather than in an app, and I tend to agree.

However, I think it’s worth pointing out that one publication, at least, has gotten it right: Time Warner’s Entertainment Weekly has a terrific app called EW’s Must List. Unexpectedly, it’s a user experience winner. It may never achieve recognition for bringing penetrating content to the app space, but in my mind it nails precisely what a print brand needs to do in order to win a share of the attention market on this platform.

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Boston Bound

This coming Wednesday, I’ll be giving the 36th Annual William A. Dwiggins Lecture in Boston, Massachusetts for The Society of Printers. It’s an unbelievably humbling honor, as past speakers for this event have included Milton Glaser, Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter and Sumner Stone, among other luminaries. Gulp.

If you’re in the Boston area, I hope you can make it, especially as the event is in fact free, with a reception following the lecture, to boot. Details follow after the jump, excerpted from the poster.

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Show Me the Money (for Art Direction)

Speaking of magazines, I’ve just started writing a regular column about interaction design over at Print. If it seems a bit retrograde for me to publish my thoughts on digital media in that forum, believe me the irony is not lost. In spite of its somewhat anachronistic moniker, though, I still find Print to be incredibly vibrant as a showcase for great graphic design — and in spite of all my pooh-poohing of the fitful and awkward migration of traditional graphic design values into the digital space, I still think that digital designers have a lot to learn from print — just as print designers have a lot to learn from digital.

My first column will appear in the June 2010 issue, which will be on newsstands in May, but the editors have graciously decided to publish it in advance on the Web in full here.

Almost inevitably, the topic is Apple’s “magical and revolutionary” iPad and so the column has some overlap with my harsh criticisms of the Popular Science magazine app from earlier in the week (catch up on that blog post here). Specifically, I try to wrestle with the iPad’s prospects for ushering in a return to the visually and expressively rich values of traditional art direction.

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A Popular Misconception

Popular Science on iPadThough I opted for a 3G-enabled iPad that won’t be delivered until later in the month, I was able to get my hands on a Wi-Fi-only model today, one of two devices that we bought at the office. In my limited use so far it feels terrific, though until I’m actually in possession of an iPad I can call my very own, it’ll be still too early to decide how much I like or dislike it. Without really being able to customize a machine like this for my needs — installing my preferred apps and loading my personal data onto it — it feels a little bit like a model home; attractive enough, but not really cozy just yet.

In playing with iPad-optimized apps, I’m watching with particular interest to see how content publishers are approaching the platform. One that has gotten a fair amount of exposure is the Popular Science app, a digital version of the longstanding print magazine that has put forward an ambitious, visually rich attempt at embracing the things that only a tablet device can do.

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Layer Tennis, Anyone?

Tune in this coming Friday afternoon for Coudal Partners’ Layer Tennis, in which I will have the honor of matching my graphical prowess against Nicholas Felton of the famously self-aware Feltron Annual Reports. It’s sure to be a cornucopia of wild, free-ranging visual expressionism. ’Cuz y’know, that’s what both Nicholas and I are known for. What’s more, the venerable John Nack of Adobe will be providing the commentary as Nicholas and I parry back and forth.

Layer tennis, for those unfamiliar with it, is that curiously un-aerobic Internet sport in which two graphically adroit competitors, armed with Photoshop, swap a single image file back and forth, embellishing each volley with collage-like visual ornamentation. Oh, and it’s all done under the watchful eye of a stopwatch, so the pace can get kind of frenetic; each volley is fifteen minutes long, and the match is over after just ten volleys. Fun stuff. Check out the archive of previous matches to get a sense of what’s ahead. And point your browser to Layertennis.com on Friday to see Nicholas probably kick my ass.

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Get Fresh with Me

AIGA New YorkThe evening of next Wednesday, 16 December, I’ll have the honor of being on stage as a guest for AIGA New York’s twenty-fifth annual Fresh Dialogue event, alongside Tina Roth Eisenberg of Swiss Miss, Allan Chochinov of Core77 and Josh Rubin of Cool Hunting. Our mandate will be to cast an eye on the design world through the lens of each of our respective blogs, and to take a look at how social media is impacting the way design is practiced. The evening will be hosted by the design writer, critic and chair of SVA’s Masters in Design Criticism program, the remarkable Alice Twemlow. It’s going to be a blast.

Find out more about the event and register for your tickets here.

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Really Basic Maths

It should be obvious to most readers of this blog that Basic Maths, the WordPress theme that Allan Cole and I released recently (and available here), is a direct descendant of the overall look and feel of Subtraction.com. There’s a good reason for this: over the years, I’ve been asked countless times by others if they can use the Subtraction.com ‘theme,’ even though none existed — even if it did, I would have been inclined to say no, wanting to preserve its uniqueness for myself. So when I sat down to design Basic Maths, the aim was to create something that would satisfy this desire to have something Subtraction.com-like in the marketplace — not a clone, but a reinterpretation. As reinterpretations go, it’s pretty straightforward, I think. Nevertheless, I thought it would be interesting to showcase some of the steps in its design evolution, and how I arrived at the theme as it stands today.

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New Shell for AOL

imageIn advance of being spun off from Time Warner next month, AOL debuted new corporate branding yesterday, rolling out not just a revised logo but a visual system with a bit of a twist to it. Using a modicum of cleverness, the company’s new look is in fact a kind of visual randomizer in which a new, mixed-case typographic mark “Aol” (instead of the previous initialism “AOL”) is superimposed on top of various whimsical, silhouetted images.

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