Last week I took part in the Third Annual Phil Patton Lecture, hosted by the Masters Program in Design Research at The School of Visual Arts in New York. The event is held in honor of the program’s former faculty member, design journalist Phil Patton, who passed away in 2015.

Its format is a bit unique: it begins with a feature speaker who lectures on a topic at the intersection of design, research and writing, followed by a respondent speaker who offers a counter-argument.

This year’s event was hosted by writer and filmmaker Adam Harrison Levy. The feature lecture was given by Natasha Jen, partner at Pentagram in New York, who talked about “The Designer as Critic.” At the core of her talk was a skepticism about the merits of the “design thinking” approach to problem solving. In the past, in other lectures, Jen has stated explicitly her belief that “Design thinking is bullshit.”

I presented a response which might best be titled “In Defense of Design Thinking, Which Is Terrible.” I’ve rewritten my speaker notes in more readable form below. It combines many of the themes in talks I’ve been giving for the past year alongside new ideas about design vernacular, democratization and more. You can also watch video of both lectures at designresearch.sva.edu.

It’s an honor to be on stage here, taking part in the Phil Patton lecture. What a wonderful legacy he left.

Also it’s such an honor to be on stage with Natasha, of whom I’ve been a fan for a number of years. Thank you Natasha for your address. I’m going to try my best to live up to it with some remarks of my own.

What to do with design thinking? Actually, when it comes to design thinking, I can take it or leave it. There are some great things about design thinking, but it’s also true that design thinking has its downsides.

It can be superficial, it can be misleading, and it can produce bad design. (That last concept, “bad design,” is an idea I’d like to come back to in a moment.) Even so, design thinking is still a useful lesson in how we, as designers, think about the democratization of our craft.

Before I dive too far into design thinking though, I want to talk first about technology, coding and engineering. You can’t talk about design without talking about these things. I won’t be making an apples-to-apples comparison, of course, because I’m going to be talking about engineering very broadly, and design thinking is relatively narrow—it’s just a slice of design, not the entirety. Nevertheless, engineering is useful as a proxy for discussing design being done by non-designers.

How many people here know how to code? Okay a sizable minority of you.

If you’ve ever tried to learn how to code and you weren’t trained in a computer science program at college, you know that there’s still no shortage of educational resources out there for you.

We all know the “For Dummies” series of books, which cover everything. Just as there’s a “Woodworking for Dummies,” there’s also a slew of programming-oriented titles: “JavaScript for Dummies,” “C for Dummies,” and one for just about every language out there.

Similarly you could go to a place like Khan Academy online, where you can learn to program for free, forever. Amazing.

And Apple has a wonderful product called Swift Playgrounds. It’s an app for your iPad but it’s really an environment where kids can learn to program. Apple is of course invested in getting as many people to use their technology products as they can, and in fact they promote their Swift programming language with this page on their site, with the headline “Everyone Can Code.”

“Everyone Can Code” is an interesting idea. The implication is that there will be a lot of good code out there, but it also implies that there will be a lot of bad code too. In a world where everyone can code, not all code will be good. There will be bad code, in fact.

It’s worth noting though that engineering as a discipline, as a trade, as a profession is largely unthreatened by the idea of bad code. In fact, you could say that the prevalence of bad code has been a boon to the world of engineering. In spite of all the bad code being written out there, the discipline is thriving.

This is due in part to the fact that engineering has come to be widely distributed. It’s everywhere now, in everything, and that has helped establish a cultural comfort with engineering, with its tools and, importantly, with its vernacular.

We all speak engineering now. Not just words like “gigabytes,” “megahertz” and “RAM.” Those are terms that we’ve adopted in order to better describe technology.

But we’ve also adopted technology terms as a way of describing our own world. Words like “reboot,” “bandwidth,” “offline” and “beta.” We use these words not just to talk about modern life, but also to cement the relationship between technology and our daily life.

Even numbers, which theoretically have no meaning, are influenced by this relationship. When we say “1.0” and “2.0,” we are connoting specific ideas and meanings derived from tech.

In fact, you could say that bad engineering, just like good engineering, has helped turn technology into the most powerful force for change in the 21st century. Engineering has been incredibly democratized and it’s been good for engineers. Today’s engineers are in greater demand than ever.

And yet design—and designers—seem perpetually threatened by democratization. I’ve been a designer for two and a half decades and I’ve seen this again and again.

Design—and designers—seem perpetually threatened by democratization.

We’ve talked for years about accreditation, the idea of licensing designers and regulating design. This would require designers to pass the equivalent of a bar exam in order to work professionally, thereby controlling the gates of who gets to practice design.

We bemoan services like 99 Designs, a marketplace for design services where designers can bid on small projects. The end result that we fear from sites like this is downward pressure on the economics of design.

And with great passion, we’ve fought the custom of spec work, in which designers and design companies do free work in the hopes of winning paid contracts. A good argument can be made against spec work, of course. But sometimes our vehement opposition to it seems to exist out of spite, like rich one-percenters incensed by the idea of social services.

And it’s this tradition that I’m reminded of when I consider the backlash against design thinking. It sounds like more of the same. It sounds territorial—like designers defending our turf.

In Natasha’s appearance at last year’s 99U conference, she offers this definition for design thinking:

When I saw that, I was immediately struck by its territoriality. I know this was not her intention, but for me the unmistakable implication was…

Only designers can do design.

And also, perhaps, only designers should do design.

To expand on this reaction, allow me to go a bit deeper into my analogy of technology.

Some of you may be familiar with Eric S. Raymond’s book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” This is a foundational text in the idea of open source, which is arguably the ultimate expression of democratization in modern technology.

Put somewhat simplistically, Raymond’s book argued that there is a dichotomy of approaches to software development.

There’s the cathedral model, in which software and technology are solely the domain of the developer. If you think about early computing in the 1960s and 1970s, in order to participate in digital technology, you’d usually have to drive to a computer center where huge mainframes were housed, a kind of cathedral of technology administered by a priesthood of computer scientists.

In the bazaar model, by contrast, software is iterated on in public view, and everyone is able to participate. Technology happens everywhere in the bazaar, and this approach is in part why we have supercomputers in our pockets, on our wrists, and available everywhere we go.

Now, when I think about this particular part of Natasha’s quote…

…Claiming that it can be applied by anyone to any problem

…it sounds like that same tension between a cathedral model and a bazaar model. It suggests that design, when it’s practiced out in the wild, is problematic, is superficial, is misleading, leads to bad design. And it also implies that good design is practiced by only “real” designers, under controlled circumstances, addressing only worthy problems.

There has long been an economic incentive for designers, especially in studios and agencies, to shroud design itself in secrecy.

Now when we listen to arguments like this for the sanctity of the design cathedral—or the fallacy of the design bazaar—it’s important to keep in mind how the business of design has traditionally worked. Put simply, there has long been an economic incentive for designers, especially in studios and agencies, to shroud design itself in secrecy, to obfuscate the particulars of its methods. Maybe even moreso, there is an economic incentive to promote designers as “genius inventors,” singular talents who are uniquely able to channel the spirits of “good” work—priests in the cathedral of design.

Designers want design to be an exclusive domain. They want its processes to be mysterious, and often rooted in the idiosyncrasies of mercurial creative directors and savants, because it preserves the perceived value of our craft. Put more plainly: the more difficult design is to practice, the more lucrative it is for practicing designers.

But, as the dichotomy of the cathedral and the bazaar implies, if you have an idea—a force of nature—like technology, it becomes most powerful when it’s democratized, when it gets out there into the world and in the hands of millions of people.

I believe this is true of design, too.

Any embrace of design by non-designers is a good thing, and design thinking qualifies here. The reason for this is that when that happens, it means our language, the vocabulary of design, is broadening to the rest of the world.

Any embrace of design by non-designers is a good thing, and design thinking qualifies

This is important because relatively little of the world of design has crept out into the world at large, out beyond our professional circles. Those who aren’t already clued into the parlance of design don’t have the language to talk about what it is that design does and can do. There are few if any design counterparts to words like “reboot,” “bandwidth,” “offline,” and “beta”—those words that I mentioned earlier which have earned their places in the common vernacular. And when you lack language, you also lack the capacity to understand.

Now another question for the audience: how many of you are designers? From the show of hands, it looks like most of you.

And how many of you have been able to successfully explain what you do to your mom?

That question always incites chuckles. We joke inveterately about our mothers and fathers’ inability to understand what it is that we do. The humor comes from love of course, because we imagine they’ll never understand. But when we settle for that circumstance, when we accept it without contest, we’re effectively abdicating our responsility to explain design to the world at large—not just a responsibility but an opportunity to do so.

By evolutionary design, our mothers and fathers are predisposed to rooting for us, to trying to understand what it is that we do, to champion what we do. If designers are looking for advocates amongst non-designers, parents should be an easy win. But if we can’t explain it to our mothers and fathers, we’re doing something wrong.

So if we’re not talking to our parents when we’re talking about design, to whom are we talking? To whom is our critical discourse aimed?

The answer is obvious: ourselves. And that’s pretty much it.

Designers are most comfortable defining design to one another, to discussing design only with initiated peers who already have the vocabulary to talk about the work. You can see this in almost anything anyone ever publishes about design; the audience is almost always people who are more or less just like us.

Now at this point it’s worth noting that today, March 28, 2018, is the first time that Natasha and I have ever met. In some respects it’s surprising that it took so long because we’re both residents of New York City, we’re both designers, and we have plenty of mutual friends.

Design is a small community. Most of us, I would say, are just one or two degrees of separation apart from one another. And the smallness of that community has profound repercussions on who talks about design.

Most of what gets written about design, most of what gets read, and certainly most of the discussion around design, amounts to designers talking to other designers.

In some respects that’s a good thing. The design community is wonderful about sharing our knowledge with one another, talking about our process, and pushing our craft forward. We’re generally open and welcoming, if only to other designers.

But this has its downsides. And it’s not just that we’re insular and that our language is obscure, either. No, it’s worse: the smallness of our community compromises our discourse.

We all know each other, and if we don’t, we know that we might know one another soon.

We might hire someone we know. We might be hired by someone we know. We might pitch business to someone we know. We might attend a conference and sit next to someone we know in the audience or on a panel. We might even find ourselves on stage at an SVA event with someone we’ve just met, with whom we have many friends in common.

That familiarity, that closeness, can have a chilling effect on what it is that we’re willing to say. It prevents us from talking openly and honestly. It constrains our discourse.

Actually in some ways I’m grateful that Natasha and I didn’t know one another before this evening. It’s easier to talk frankly and to make honest points because we’re not friends. (Though Natasha, I do hope we’re friends after this. If you want to take a wait-and-see attitude though, I understand.)

However, this lack of independence in design discourse is really, really problematic if you think about it. Imagine if other art forms worked this way.

The design industry’s familiarity, that closeness, can have a chilling effect on what it is that we’re willing to say.

Consider Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at The New York Times. He nearly won a Pulitzer for his incisive writing which puts architecture in context, gives it meaning and makes it more relevant for countless people.

Now imagine if Kimmelman were a practicing architect. Imagine that he has projects all over the world and is working on a huge high rise in downtown Manhattan at the same time as he files his bylines at The Times. That would undoubtedly and profoundly change the way we think about what he has to say about architecture.

Think about more “populist” arts, too. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who rose to prominence as film critics in the 1970s. They used to have a syndicated television show and for years they would come into our homes every week and talk not just about what was in theaters but also about the ideas behind film. In doing so they turned us all into better informed, more passionate moviegoers.

What if Siskel had been a working film producer too? Or if Ebert was a screenwriter and director at the same time as he was a critic. The effect would have been that they would have both been far, far less influential than they were, and we’d all be poorer for it.

That hypothetical scenario happens to be exactly the situation that design finds itself in today—we have a heavily compromised discourse. Just about everything that gets written about design, every robust discussion about design is constrained from being truly honest, truly open, and from truly pushing the profession towards greater relevance to the world at large.

I might even argue that in a more ideal world, Natasha shouldn’t be here tonight giving a lecture in honor of Phil Patton. And I would certainly argue that I shouldn’t be up on stage here either. For all you know, I could be just really craftily trying to sell you on Adobe software.

Who should be here? An independent voice, a critic whose job it is to think and talk about and interrogate design. Someone whose income is not derived from the practice of design, whose agenda is clear and unbiased when it comes to interrogating design’s practices, its implications, and its people.

Unfortunately we don’t have a lot of independent design critics. This is true for a host of reasons. And whether it’s a cause or an effect, the fact of the matter is that design discourse is dominated by designers, and that is a major defect of our industry.

I offer this complaint not just because I long for our craft to be taken more seriously as an art form (which I do). This is about more than recognition.

It’s also about how vitally important it is for designers to contribute at this very moment in history.

If you Google the term “tech backlash” you’ll get no shortage of results that reference this pivotal moment in the relationship between people and the digital world we’ve all been building the past few decades.

There are headlines about how people are re-evaluating how they interact with Facebook, Google and Twitter. There are widespread concerns about the massive amounts of data that have been compiled about all of us, all with worrisome opaqueness. Even the devices we love, like the powerfully liberating smartphones we all carry around, are now seen as having potentially damaging effects on our mental health. And of course there is alarm at the way that our social media activities have basically been weaponized against us and against democracy.

The world at large and maybe even many of the people in this room think of these purely as tech problems. But upon deeper reflection I bet that many if not all of you would agree that these are just as much design problems as they are tech problems. And you’d likely all agree that designers can—and should—contribute to the solutions for these challenges.

However if you Google “design backlash” the results are dramatically different. You’ll get almost none of those stories about this moment in history. Just a random selection of results that happen to include the words “design” and “backlash” on the same page.

That is as stark as any an illustration of how little the world understands design, how little it values design, how little it thinks of design as a critical factor in changing the world.

The way we’ve jealously protected the language and tools of design, the way we’ve focused so much on the ‘genius designer’ has been counterproductive.

We all know that impression is wrong. We’ve been arguing the exact opposite for decades. We’ve been relentlessly advocating for the importance of design.

But the way we’ve been arguing has been counterproductive.

Our insular discourse, the way we’ve jealously protected the language and tools of design, the way we’ve focused so much on the “genius designer”… these behaviors have all worked against our own interests.

They’ve limited us, limited the opportunities we get to contribute to the fullest of our ability. And they’ve limited our capacity to fulfill design’s true potential as the world-changing force that we’ve all been insisting that it is.

Ultimately debates like this are about a simple question: what do we want design to be?

So when I consider design thinking, it matters less to me whether it leads to a lot of bad design or not. What matters to me is whether it helps broaden the language of design, if it helps expand the community of design, if it helps build a world that values and understands design better than it does today. If design thinking is making us more relevant to the world at large, leading non-designers to embrace the way designers think, then the net effect strikes me as positive.

So design thinking? Sure.

I’d be happy to have, alongside design thinking, the idea of “design feeling” too.

“Design sleeping”? “Design eating”? Bring it on.

Ultimately debates like this are about a simple question: what do we want design to be?

Do we want it to be as small as it is today, an insular community with an obscure language that largely gets ignored by the world at large? Or do we want it to be as big and influential and as inspiring as we all know it can be?

Thank you.

The perfect note-taking software hasn’t been invented but Agenda, a new contender that runs on the Mac, comes reasonably close. It finally delivers on a notes management feature that I’ve spent what seems like an eternity waiting for: the ability to link a note to a specific event on my calendar.

Like Evernote (which is what I use currently) or Apple’s own Notes app, in Agenda I can simply create new notes in a folder or project view, displayed on the lefthand side. Those notes can be either re-ordered manually or sorted by the dates that they were most recently edited.

Unlike those competing apps, though, Agenda also gives me the option of associating any given note to a specific event on my calendar. The screenshot below shows how clicking on the calendar icon lets me find a date, view the events on that date, and then link that event with the current note. Even more powerfully, I can also view my calendar in a right-hand pane, click on an event there and initiate a new, linked note that automatically copies over the event’s title, attendees and description. Brilliant.

The team behind Agenda markets this as a “unique approach [to] organizing notes into a timeline.” I was delighted to find it (and also delighted by how elegantly the whole app has been designed and constructed). But this ability to link between two databases, one storing notes and the other storing events, seems so basic and obvious to me that I’m shocked it’s not more common.

I personally take notes in exactly this way: I create a new note in Evernote for each new meeting (in fact, I use a somewhat clunky IFTTT applet to do this automatically) because this is exactly how I would go look for it later. That’s not to say I don’t also appreciate the value of being able to create notes that are not pegged to specific events; I’ve got plenty of those, too. I just want some of my notes to be easily findable within a calendrical interface. In my opinion every note-keeping app should work this way.

Alas, even though Agenda gets this right, and even though I’ve been waiting for the feature forever, I have to admit I won’t be able to switch away from Evernote. The truth is that I need to take notes on every platform these days, not just on my desktop. I actively take notes on my iPhone, sometimes on Android, occasionally through Evernote’s web interface, and even occasionally via Google Home and Amazon Echo. Access from everywhere has become table stakes for basic kinds productivity software like notes and to-do items, which is why Evernote is so invaluable to me, and so hard to leave. Fingers crossed that Agenda comes to other platforms soon or, even better, that this incredibly obvious feature migrates to other note-taking apps too.

I wrote an article over at Quartz on diversity in the design industry. These excerpts are the heart of it:

I’ve been working as a designer in some fashion for more than two decades—as an employee and as an entrepreneur, in small studios and in large agencies, and at tiny startups and late-stage enterprises. What I’ve seen is that as an industry, we are teeming with progressive-leaning professionals, most of whom would avidly applaud the idea of greater diversity and inclusion in design workplaces.

But if I’m honest, I can only count a handful of times that I’ve worked with an African American, Hispanic, or Native American designer at any level. The reality of the design industry is that we’re homogenous—overwhelmingly white and, like myself, Asian American…

This egregious situation reflects an ongoing, industry-wide failure to prioritize the development of diverse and inclusive workplaces. I’m as guilty of this as anybody: When I was starting out in the design field, I readily accepted the commonly held belief throughout our culture that problems of race and cultural diversity were largely solved. And if things weren’t perfect, the consensus opinion seemed to imply that the best way to resolve them in everyone’s favor was to just ignore race, gender, and culture entirely.

Clearly, that hasn’t worked. If that were the only problem, it would be significant enough to motivate us all to act decisively. But this is more than just an issue of doing the right thing—it’s a challenge to the very notion of design itself.

This is the lates part of an ongoing campaign to use whatever influence I have at my job at Adobe to try and push this situation towards greater fairness and equity for everyone. More to come later this year. In the meantime, read the full article at qz.com.

I feel a little sheepish about confessing that I didn’t really like “Black Panther” all that much, especially after the nearly universal acclaim that greeted its debut last month. I went to see it on opening night with high expectations, in part because I thought director Ryan Coogler’s previous film, “Creed” was pretty close to a masterpiece. And while I was impressed by the cultural significance of “Black Panther”—it’s a total triumph on that front—I found that, narratively, it was as messy, as poorly paced, and as unconvincing as any other Marvel film.

In fact, I find myself pretty much at the end of my rope with Marvel movies. I still believe there’s a lot of interesting things that can be done with this genre, but I’m exhausted by the studio’s obsession with continuity and crossover appearances and, well, merchandising. Every outing seems to lead to the same large-scale, bloodless and mostly stakes-free battle scene, and only serves to queue up the next installment.

Also, as a designer, I’m tired of the milieus of these films all looking almost exactly the same. Whether it’s a technologically superior African country or a mythological realm of Norse gods or even the Second World War, these worlds are all dreamed up within a very narrow band of imagination. The costumes and the technology and the sets and the effects all look like they were designed by Nike.

Admittedly, “Black Panther” does sidestep some of these problems. It’s more of a standalone film than its predecessors, if not by much, and it poses some genuinely interesting social questions. And the injection of African dress and aesthetics into Marvel’s usual quasi sci-fi production design did make it moderately more intriguing. But I found myself largely bored unless Michael B. Jordan’s Kilmonger character was on screen; not only is he a better performer than leading man Chadwick Boseman, his character was just many times more engaging on screen.

People do seem to adore this movie though and so maybe I ought to watch it again. But it used to be that the only time I’d want to rewatch a movie was when it was so good that I felt compelled to experience that excellence over and over. But with these movies that hail from heavily sequelized cinematic universes, the sensation is closer to feeling duty bound to watch so as to be sure that they’re not bad. Partly that comes from the sunk cost fallacy; I’ve invested so much into these franchises that I want to find something worthwhile in them, if for no other reason than to be able to properly consume and appraise the next sequel. That is a bad way to watch movies.

Anyway, in addition to “Black Panther” I also watched twenty-three other movies last month. Here they are:

• “Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner” Only for die-hards.
• “Boogie Nights” I didn’t like it when it debuted and I still don’t.
• “It Might Get Loud” Kinda fun.
• “U2: From the Sky Down”
• “Heaven Can Wait” This is the 1943 original. A little tedious.
• “Too Late” A bit misshapen but really interesting.
• “Battle of the Sexes” Run-of-the-mill biopic.
• “A Prophet” Amazingly good.
• “The Beguiled” Not too bad at all.
• “Nine to Five” Hilarious.
• “Alan Partridge’s Scissored Isle” Also hilarious.
• “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” Rewatched this for like the fifth time. Easily the best of the franchise.
• “Wind River” Left little impression.
• “The Maltese Falcon” Delightful.
• “Good Time” Really well done but I’m not sure I’ll ever want to watch it again.
• “The Raid” If you’re into this kind of thing.
• “Breaker Morant” Excellent.
• “Black Panther”
• “Brighton Rock” Excellent also.
• “Crossfire”
• “American Made” Yeeeha! Forgettable.
• “Allied” Not as bad as expected.
• “Bringing Up Baby” So terrific.
• “The Brother from Another Planet” Glad I watched it but nothing special.

If you’re interested, here is my list from January and all the movies I watched in 2017, and in 2016. You can also follow along with my film diary over at letterboxd.com.

Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 New York City Subway Map is well remembered both as a beautiful example of modernist design and as a notorious victim of public short-sightedness. I tend to think it’s a bit overpraised and the fact that it was largely deemed unusable by the public has been too conveniently written off by its fans.

That said, its hallowed reputation amongst design fans continues to grow. Now Milan-based author and illustrator Emiliano Ponzi has nudged it further towards mythological status with a children’s book that tells how it came to be. The book uses warm, painterly illustrations that playfully illustrate the challenges that Vignelli faced, while also squeezing in a gentle introduction to design problem solving and the principles of modernism. Sample spreads:

To learn more about the book, you can read Steven Heller’s brief appraisal at designobserver.com. You can also see some of the original illustrations, free of copywriting, in this Behance project. And of course you can buy a copy for the young modernist in your life at Amazon.

Update 03 Apr 2018: This feature is now available in Lightroom for iOS as well.

When I take photos I often like to get the composition as square and upright as I can. If there’s a straight line, like a tabletop or a wall or the contours of a building, I do everything I can to make sure it’s as rectilinear and aligned with the edges of the frame as I can. This isn’t always possible, of course, not just because I can’t always get in the right position to capture an image in that way, but also because of the way camera lenses of all kinds (especially those on phones) tend to visually distort the images they capture.

Some photo editing apps make it pretty easy to fix this, especially on desktop. On mobile, I used to use an app called SKRWT which did a nice job for a while before a disastrous redesign a few years ago rendered the app basically unusable. Since then there hasn’t been a good replacement, but last month Adobe Lightroom CC mobile app added a “geometry” feature that makes this effect easy to do. Finally.

These screen grabs illustrate the process. After importing an image, in this case a shot I took of some theater signage that stood several feet above me, I tap on the new “Geometry” tab in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. That allows adjustment of the image using sliders to control the distortion, an imprecise but sometimes useful method.

It’s much more satisfying though to tap the small, cross-like icon just above those sliders to manipulate the image more directly, as shown in the middle image above. This is done by using my finger to draw guides on the image itself that the app uses to straighten the image. You can draw as many as four of them along angles in the picture, each one indicating that the image data should be stretched or pinched to appear more square. Because this can dramatically distort the shape of the overall image, the last step is to crop it down to just the usable area. Below you can see the resulting image, where the type in the signage is more or less fully straightened, as if I shot it looking straight on.

This is an incredibly handy feature to have on the go and frankly its execution is superior to SKRWT or anything that came before, in my experience. Unfortunately right now it’s only available on Lightroom for Android which is a little frustrating but iOS users get so many features first or even exclusively that it’s only fair to feel the reverse occasionally. Nevertheless my colleagues at Adobe remind me that the feature has been available on Lightroom for desktop for some time, and assure me that it’ll come to iOS soon too.

This incisive tweet from type designer James Edmonson of Oh No Type Co looks like a humorous one-liner but is actually a brilliant piece of criticism. In just four words, he summarizes the pervasive tendency towards a visual uniformity that seems to draw in nearly every major tech brand operating today.

EVERYBODY FALL IN LINE! pic.twitter.com/B9JU5nvpMu

— OH no Type Co (@OHnoTypeCo) February 13, 2018

When I read it it struck me as a good companion—a much more succinct and effective one—to the post I wrote here in January about the near ubiquity of a very specific, narrow band of visual expressiveness in illustrations for tech brands. Like that post, this tweet raises questions about what kind of culture we’re building online and whether it’s as truly diverse as their ostensibly progressive shepherds would claim. For me it also asks the question of why we aren’t examining the design language of these companies with more rigor?

Consider the macro trend of these brands all visually converging alongside the industry’s current mania for design systems. That juxtaposition suggests that we’re far more interested in implementing ideas than we are in ideas themselves. Put another way, as practitioners of design we’re most comfortable asking questions like “How do we implement our brand’s design language, propagate and scale it, and make sure it’s consistent?” We’re much less comfortable asking questions like, “What’s the larger context for the brand we’re building? Are we making a unique and worthwhile contribution to the value of our company, to the world at large, or even to our profession?” It’s the difference between merely executing ideas and really understanding them.

Last week American Airlines failed in its second attempt to register its logo with the U.S. Copyright Office. Apparently the body was unimpressed by the level of distinction inherent in the diagonal shape, meant to suggest both a wingspan and a runway and interrupted in the middle by a stylized eagle’s head. In a written explanation a spokeperson said, “A mere simplistic arrangement of non-protectable elements does not demonstrate the level of creativity necessary to warrant protection.”

This current logo is of course the one that, back in 2013, replaced American Airlines’ longstanding and iconic Massimo Vignelli-designed identity. While I prefer Vignelli’s, I’m surprised by this rejection by the Copyright Office. First, it’s surprising that a major corporation with the heft of American Airlines has been unable to push through a successful copyright application. You would expect them to have more sway.

But I’m more interested in the fact that the Copyright Office is essentially rendering a design judgment here. I know nothing about its operations, but a quick look at the body’s web site shows that its leadership team is largely composed of lawyers and policy makers. I don’t doubt their expertise in copyright law of course, but do they know design? What level of expertise do they have in logotypes and corporate identity, and is that even a required area of knowledge to serve on this board?

More to the point, shouldn’t there be a designer on their leadership team at the U.S. Copyright Office, someone with proven experience in the design industry who can help give context to cases like this? I’d never thought about whether there should be design representation in copyright before, but now I’m very curious about how our industry’s work is affected by how this body operates and renders judgments. To my eyes, this logo is easily more than a “simplistic arrangement of non-protectable elements.” It’s not exactly my taste, but it’s as good as countless others out there.

At the beginning of January, before everyone came back from the holidays, I indulged myself in what is, for a parent of young kids, an unimaginable luxury: one full afternoon spent by myself, at the movies. I started with Steven Spielberg’s Pentagon Papers dramatization “The Post”. And I followed that with Aaron Sorkin’s “Molly’s Game,” which tells the story of Molly Bloom, a former Olympic athlete who came to run a high-stakes poker game for Hollywood’s elite. It was kind of a liberal’s double-header, you might say.

“The Post” is like a lot of Spielberg’s recent prestige fare: overly earnest and really, really on-the-nose about what it wants you to think and feel. It’s also visually nauseating; cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s highly stylized atmospherics have all the personality of one of those sickly sweet Hallmark posters with little kids giving each other adobrable kisses that they issued to everyone’s dentists in the 1980s. Still, the movie is not ineffective and I found myself wrapped up in it way more than I expected to be. Good flick for the plane, if it happens to be playing.

As for “Molly’s Game,” it’s tough to know which Aaron Sorkin is going to show up for any new project: the brilliant, hilarious storyteller responsible for “A Few Good Men,” “Sports Night” and the best years of “The West Wing”? Or the didactic, agenda-obsessed debate club vice-president of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and “The Newsroom”? Luckily it’s mostly the former who was on duty for “Molly’s Game” which also happens to be Sorkin’s feature film directorial debut. He generally knocks it out of the park with a smart, expertly paced, fully gripping thriller disguised as a biopic. Mind you, the movie itself is preposterous in its framing of virtue and vice, and it’s as flawed as any Sorkin work. Nevertheless it’s a blast.

Including those two, I watched a total of fifteen movies in January. Here is the full list:

• “The Post”
• “Molly’s Game”
• “The Money Pit” I always heard that this was terrible; it was not.
• “The Founder” Dodgy but it nagged at me for days; I wrote about it in this blog post.
• “The Big Steal” Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in a film noir/road movie/romantic comedy.
• “Illegal” Edward G. Robinson in a weird and forgettable legal drama.
• “Paddington 2” This is a very, very good movie if you’re a kid and you need to keep your grownup busy for an afternoon.
• “Apollo 13” Has lost zero of its power; if anything it’s gotten better with time. Also, I guess I was kind of on a Tom Hanks marathon last month.
• “What We Do in the Shadows” Rewatched this and liked it even more.
• “Megan Leavey” Sweet story, boring movie.
• “Suicide Squad” Not horrific; just horrible.
• “Home Alone” My kids lost their minds with this!
• “Atomic Blonde” Severely underappreciated when it was released last year. Charlize Theron is reinventing action movies.
• “Frankenstein” First time I’ve ever seen this classic.
• “The Bad Sleep Well” Sometimes Kurosawa meanders.
• “The Fallen Idol” Delightfully proper and then unexpectedly terrifying.

If you’re interested, here is my list of all the movies I watched last year, as well as my full list from 2016. You can also follow along with my film diary over at letterboxd.com.

I’ve seen a decent number of airport art exhibitions in my time, but I’ve never seen one as good and as extensive as “The Parisianer 2050,” on display right now at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. I landed here this morning on my way to a week of conferences and meetings in Lyon and Berlin, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the fifty or so large graphic prints that make up this exhibition lining the long corridor between my gate and immigration.

“The Parisianer” is of course a riff on the long, grand illustrative tradition of The New Yorker magazine’s covers. There is no Parisianer publication, but as a project it has been running for nearly five years. It’s a kind of ongoing a platform for French illustrators to do wonderful work celebrating the City of Lights. This exhibition is actually a preview of an upcoming book whose theme is imagining the Paris of the future and the artwork is phenomenal. It’s a perfect greeting for visitors and it will be on display for the next few months in Terminal 2E, Hall M.

By the way I’ll be in Lyon the next few days where I’ll be giving a talk about design criticism at IxDA’s annual Interaction 18 conference. Then, on Friday, I’ll be at Awwwards Berlin, where I’ll be giving a talk about how we can level up the design industry. Then, on Monday, I’ll be making an appearance for the IxDA Berlin chapter too. If you’re in Lyon or Berlin, join us!

Below are some samples from “The Parisianer 2050,” prints of which are conveniently for sale at image-republic.com.