Category Archives: Design

Up for Air

Adobe Air LogoI was a skeptic of Adobe’s fledgling Air platform when I initially started hearing about it several years ago. At first, Air seemed more of the same of Adobe’s famously insurrectionist tendencies. I’ve long disliked the way the company tries to shoehorn in an entirely new platform onto my computer when I install or upgrade one of their marquee, indispensable software packages. Like most consumers, I see Photoshop, Acrobat, Flash etc. as applications that serve limited purposes — namely my own. But Adobe clearly regards them as beachheads through which they’re working to establish their own, Adobe-centric operating system. The result, invariably, has been bloated software. To put it mildly.

But the more exposure I get to Air, the more impressed I am. Granted, that exposure is somewhat limited, but I’m enjoying a handful of Air-based applications much more than I thought I would, even using some very regularly. Though Air apps are still conspicuously less than fully native to any of the major operating systems, they’re much closer to the ‘fit and finish’ of a true, dyed-in-the-wool Mac OS X application, say, than I had anticipated. Adobe has apparently gone to great lengths to provide a framework in which applications authored for this platform seem comfortable alongside truly native applications. Most casual users won’t be able to tell the difference.

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Dear Designer, You Suck

The CriticA friend of mine who happens to be a famous designer (this person shall remain nameless) said something not long ago about one of my projects that really pissed me off. At the time, I objected to this person’s tone and delivery, thinking it inappropriate. After all, we’re friends! But given some distance from the event, I realize now that, the formal qualities of the remarks aside, this person had a point. They weren’t necessarily right, mind you, but there was a legitimate criticism at the core, to which I should have paid attention. In retrospect I realize that getting hot and bothered about this person’s tone said something much less flattering about me than about the person.

Here’s why I’m saying this: almost by definition, design is a small community. If you’re a serious, dedicated practitioner of design in any of its flavors, you’re almost sure to meet a good number of your peers before too long — and then you’ll start to run into them over and over again, at conferences, at industry events, in trade publications, even when competing for business or interviewing for work. This is part of what makes design so terrific a vocation; its boundaries are reachable, its population so knowable.

Sometimes I wonder, then: given that everyone in design seems to more or less know everyone else, are we really having the kinds of meaningful, constructive, critical discourses that we really should be having? Are we too quick to take offense at the opinions of our peers? Or are we pulling our punches too much when discussing the merits of the work that our peers turn out? To put a finer point on it: are we being honest with one another?

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Horsey

This cover for the second record from Swedish chanteuse Frida Hyvönen really shouldn’t work. The comically wild typesetting for the word “wild,” the bland inset layout, the histrionic equine imagery, the leopard print… nearly everything about it offends my sensibilities. And yet I think it’s really something amazing, a piece of design that transcends pretension and slips into ‘art’ without fuss. I want it blown up big and framed on my wall. And the music is good, too.

Frida Hyvönen

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Collateral Damages at SXSW

Sketch of a Conference Schedule BookletThere are a lot of interesting ideas that I heard at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival that I’m still turning over in my head even now, a week after the conference ended. But silly as it may seem, the one thing I really can’t stop thinking about is how bad the conference schedule, map and badges were this year.

I don’t mean to impugn the hard work that went into designing and producing those printed collateral items, or to underestimate the crazy logistics and coordination that must have been necessary to get them written, designed, printed and into conference-goers’ hands on time. Nevertheless, I found them basically unusable. They were awkwardly sized and awkwardly conceived; once you decoded the hard-to-read sessions schedule, for instance, you’d have to refer to a map that failed to carry over any recognizable color-coding — and was printed upside-down. I’m sure my blood pressure went up a bit every time I had to refer to them.

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Patrick Thomas at The New York Times

Oof, I’m embarrassingly late on posting about this: English-born, Barcelona-based illustrator Patrick Thomas will be featured in a one-man exhibition at The New York Times building here in New York City.

This is something that is going to happen very soon. And when you see me say “very soon” in this context, you should read that as “The show’s opening reception is tonight, at 7:00 PM, hors d’œuvres served.” So if you’re here in the city and have a penchant for gorgeously screened, conceptually challenging graphic design as commentary, you should R.S.V.P. and come on by, meet the artist and mingle a bit with the Times art department. I’ll be there.

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Orange You Sorry About Tropicana?

imageTropicana’s recent reversal on their new, poorly received packaging for their orange juice products — on Monday they announced that they would be reverting to the old look for these products within a month — makes their rebranding effort an easy target for snarky blog posts. There are so many lessons to be learned — or at least ideas to be discussed arising from this debacle.

Particularly, I think, in the realm of whether the design and branding industry can really be trusted when a client endeavors to redesign a product. Did Tropicana really need that redesign? Was it really good strategy? In hindsight, the answer is almost certainly no, but hindsight of course is a too convenient perch. True, the botched execution ignited a minor consumer uproar, but it’s probably not fair to say that turn of events definitively proves that it was a bad idea in and of itself.

Still, let’s say that in the course of their research for the project, the responsible branding agency, Arnell, unearthed evidence that indicated that no, a redesign was not what Tropicana needed. Given that scenario, would Arnell have turned down the assignment, or advised Tropicana to undertake a much more modest redesign? Do they have that kind of integrity?

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Marketing in a Minute

Ubiquity LogoAza Raskin is one of the smartest people I know, but sadly I have not kept up with his endeavors since before he and some of his colleagues at Humanized joined Mozilla Labs last year. In recent days, he’s popped up on my radar again because his latest product, Ubiquity, has garnered a lot of buzz on the Internets.

While I have great faith in Aza and his team’s talent, and while I’m pretty sure that the product itself is almost certainly worthwhile, I have to be honest: I have no idea what it does. As of this writing, I lack a clear understanding of its function or purpose. This is largely because, though I’ve come across references to it many times, the marketing hasn’t worked for me.

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What Willis Was Talkin’ ’Bout

The parallel between design and the movies is one that’s commonly drawn, with not a lot of false modesty at play when the duties of an art director are likened to the work of a film director. Both are aesthetic managers, of a sort, charged with negotiating the realities of production, personnel and money in order to realize artistic visions that must resonate with an audience. However, the more I read about film, the more I wonder if there’s not a more appropriate similarity between an art director and a cinematographer.

Pursuant to my ongoing fascination with the work of cinematographer extraordinaire Gordon Willis, I recently dug up a lengthy profile that the author James Stevenson wrote about him in the October 1978 issue of The New Yorker. Given Willis’s impressive résumé, it’s strange that there are no book-length studies of his work; as a result, I read whatever I can get my hands on.

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Typecasting

No doubt it’ll strike many as suspicious that a guy who pretty much only uses Helvetica would say this, but most of the new typefaces being released today seem very samey to me.

For instance, there’s plenty of good work on display in I Love Typography’s round-up of the best typefaces of 2008, but in my view, not a whole lot of new expression there. Newzald looks like Matrix, FF Utility looks like Klavika, Soho looks like Apex Serif, etc.

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