Today is a day that I never thought would come: the cult classic film “Wet Hot American Summer” is now a Netflix original show (and the reviews are great). When it debuted in 2001 the movie sank nearly without a trace, and what many of my peers and I thought was a masterful showcase for some of the sharpest comedy and comedians of our time seemed to have been rejected by the larger world.

Now, a decade and a half later, it’s astonishing to see how many of the movie’s cast members—all of whom have returned for the series—have achieved mainstream stardom. Moreover, its shocking to find that the movie’s very particular, wildly absurdist, brazenly unfunny brand of funny has achieved widespread cultural acceptance. That’s something I never imagined could happen, and even if it did, I could never, not in a million years, have guessed that popular regard for the film could reach such a critical mass that a television adaptation would result. And yet here we are. Let this be a lesson to the cynical: anything is possible.

For longer than most I was an apologist for Apple’s iTunes software. It did the job for me, even in all its convoluted mess. But the most recent versions, especially since the introduction of the woeful Apple Music, are too much to excuse. It’s now almost impossible to refute the charge that iTunes is riddled with user interface design problems—this article at The Atlantic does a decent job of enumerating many of them.

More than a textbook case in how not to design usable software though, iTunes has for me come to represent all the things that Apple is doing wrong, even as the company’s profits continue to snowball. On just one level, the application is an executional mess that speaks to the company’s worrying inattention to detail. iTunes is slow and bloated; it’s a terrible, poky, unreliable network client; it’s embedded into the operating system and yet works well with few other apps; its management of iOS devices (for those who don’t use iCloud) is painfully inelegant. And if all that weren’t enough, it just looks incredibly ugly.

That last bit sounds superficial but it hints at how Apple’s stewardship of iTunes is worse even than just an extended series of poorly executed features. You could argue that the most serious crime that Apple continually commits with every new release of iTunes lies in the software’s missed opportunities. iTunes doesn’t have to be any of these things that it is; it doesn’t even have to be a version of what it is right now that works a little better. Instead it could be beautiful.

iTunes (and its counterparts on iOS) should be a sterling exemplar of bold, ambitious software. It should be a lightning fast, empowering tool for managing one’s media and devices, and a fluid, engaging bridge to the media that Apple sells. iTunes should also be best-of-class in integrating cloud services into native software. It should combine all of the copious metadata that veteran users have accrued from years and years of use with the creativity that big data can unleash (and none of it has to compromise privacy).

Apple is doing wonderful things, no doubt, but it falls down much more often than can be reasonably expected from a company that has achieved such lofty heights. How much can one expect from the most profitable company in history? It’s certainly not asking too much for iTunes, which is in so many ways the front door for the Apple ecosystem, to be less of a shabby gateway and more of a grand entrance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0ne-XfXtnQ

The IKO is intended to be “a bridge between a playful experience and an everyday functional prosthetic system.” Basically it’s an artificial arm designed for kids that works with LEGO bricks. It was designed by Carlos Arturo Torres during a six-month internship at LEGO’s Future Lab, a research and development group. The IKO’s socket houses a battery that can be recharged in a docking station, and the highly articulating hand incorporates LEGO-compatible tubes and studs, the elements that interlock bricks together. This allows the child not only to play more fluidly—LEGOs work much better with two hands—but also to attach all sorts of LEGO constructions to his or her arm. It’s wonderful.

More at wired.com.

This week’s issue of New York features what will likely be considered the most significant magazine cover of the year. It depicts thirty-five women speaking out about their claims of assault against comedian Bill Cosby, all photographed in stark, uncompromising black and white. The simply arranged composition is a powerful form of visual accounting; it builds its case person by person, row by row, until the sheer volume becomes almost too much to bear. While I knew that Cosby had many accusers I didn’t realize that there were at least thirty-five of them, and seeing them gathered together made me shudder. As art direction, it would be a triumph if the subject matter weren’t so horrifying.

Kids today.

How has one of those “listicles” rounding up sixteen animated logos. In and of itself that’s nothing special, but it’s rare to see this many animated logos in one place and to see the animators credited. Animation is going to become increasingly important to all kinds of design (despite the advice of some) so we should start paying attention to who is doing the animating. See the full list at howdesign.com.

Monotype commissioned design studio Field to create a series of experiments that use digital technology to play with typographic forms. The results are beautiful, though claiming that they’re a “reinvention” of type is perhaps a bit much. The Field team is less than shy about comparing this work to art, but what I see instead is rudimentary R&D for advertising grammar; as visually stunning as the work is, it seems fundamentally geared towards figuring out new ways to make products look desirable. Nice work if you can get it, I guess. More at field.io.

This Wired article looks at Spotify’s attempts at generating “perfect playlists” to suit its customers’ various moods and life moments. It includes a look at the music service’s new Discover Weekly feature, an algorithmically generated playlist tailored for each user that’s refreshed every Monday.

Combined with what the company calls your ‘taste profile,’ an internally kept list of traits and types of music you tend to enjoy, Spotify can automatically refine and perfect recommendations just for you. When you open the app, you’ll see different playlist choices than I do; those playlists themselves could even be customized just for you. That’s where Discover Weekly comes from: It’s your taste profile, brought to life in two dozen or so songs each week.

I have never found these types of playlists to be remotely satisfactory, whether they were created by man or machine. But I was shocked by my experience with the first playlist that Discover Weekly generated for me this week.

It’s twenty-nine songs long, about two hours worth of music, and I would estimate that I found about eighty percent of that to be really enjoyable, tracks that made me curious about the albums they came from and the artists that recorded them. And that’s the other thing; I consider myself to be a moderately advanced consumer of independent music; I actively seek out new acts all the time and try to stay on top of up-and-coming bands. But Discover Weekly included a healthy percentage of acts that I hadn’t even heard of before, most of which I’m now very curious about.

I can’t say enough about how pleasantly surprising this playlist is; after listening to it repeatedly since trying it out for the first time yesterday, it’s harder and harder to believe that it wasn’t compiled for me by a real person—someone with a vast knowledge of music and who also happened to know my music preferences intimately. If a friend had made this exact playlist for me, that person would be just about the coolest person I know.

Discover Weekly is probably the most potent example yet of the significant competitive edge that Spotify gained when it acquired The Echo Nest last year. That service describes itself as a “music intelligence company;” The Wired article explains it this way:

The Echo Nest’s job within Spotify is to endlessly categorize and organize tracks. The team applies a huge number of attributes to every single song: Is it happy or sad? Is it guitar-driven? Are the vocals spoken or sung? Is it mellow, aggressive, or dancy? On and on the list goes. Meanwhile, the software is also scanning blogs and social networks—ten million posts a day, Lucchese says—to see the words people use to talk about music.

If this is just the beginning of what Spotify and The Echo Nest can do together, our collective expectations for how music discovery should work could change dramatically in the next few years. It could soon become inconceivable that you would ever be presented with a music library or source that doesn’t feel like it was somehow tailored expressly for you. It’s fine that today’s streaming services can boast catalogs of thirty million-plus songs, but that may soon matter little. Would you prefer a huge warehouse full of music that’s mostly irrelevant to you, or a record shop in which everything on the shelves suits your taste? The former is what we have today; the latter is where we might be heading.

What’s more, this kind of taste acuity could be a silver bullet in resolving the continual tension between streaming services and musicians, especially lesser known artists whose income potential has been dramatically reduced in this new paradigm. The Spotify team seems to weight these Echo Nest-driven playlists in favor of acts that its users aren’t familiar with; if they succeed, they could be sending significant play traffic to new contenders. It’s probably far too soon to say how viable this is, but there does seem to be the glimmer of something potentially market-changing in the intelligence and relative indifference to popularity of these recommendations.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Spotify and The Echo Nest have been compiling my “taste profile” for only a few years, and yet the result is a truly remarkable understanding of what I like. By contrast iTunes has over a decade’s worth of my listening habits, and yet as I wrote in this post when Apple Music launched, Apple seems to have very little understanding of my tastes at all. More and more, Apple Music is looking like a disappointment.

Designer John Korpics was a hero of mine early in my career, when I was focusing on print design. Korpics was at Entertainment Weekly at the time, where he created some of the most vivid editorial design I had seen; it was brash, elegant and continually inventive. He later went on to amazing runs at InStyle, Esquire and Fortune, winning scores of design and publishing awards along the way. For the past several years he has been running design at ESPN—first in print, and now across its digital properties too. Earlier this year he and his team launched a major redesign of ESPN.com, a key pillar in their plan to modernize the digital experience for sports fans. I recently talked to Korpics about his quest to hire a Senior Product Designer to lead their mobile apps.

What does the Senior Product Designer for Mobile do?

This person will lead the product design and UX for ESPN.com and the ESPN app—roughly eight to ten folks. The complete product design team is about twenty-five people, which doesn’t include front end dev, or web and native dev.

What’s special about this job?

Over the next two years we will be greatly expanding the personalization experience throughout all of our digital properties; surfacing content, scores and alerts around teams; commingling automated, social and curated content in a smart way for small screens; creating more effective, seamless and fun on-boarding flows; and in general making content relevant to the fan appear in smart intuitive ways wherever they are.

The biggest challenge is probably understanding the role and value of design and UX within our very complex ecosystem of content, video, advertising, scores, live events, social, fan behavior, device use cases for sports, marketing, and much much more. I’ve been here four years and I still have a lot to learn!

What kind of designer will thrive in this role?

This is a leadership position, and we are looking for people who have experience leading teams, collaborating across product, technology and content, and driving ideas. We love talented, smart people with smart ideas, but you also need to be able to build trust and effect change. Its a very entrepreneurial company, and we tend to reward people who thrive in that type of environment. It also doesn’t hurt if you like sports. Just saying, we are the Worldwide Leader after all.

So how much do you have to love sports to do this job?

I assume most designers have at least a passing interest in the subject they are designing for, so yes, at least on some level, it helps to like sports, but you don’t have to be a sports junkie, and in some cases it can actually be an advantage when you don’t know something, because you may bring a fresh perspective to solving the problem.

At the end of the day, nobody knows everything there is to know about sports, and it’s not hard to find an endless supply of experts here who are more than happy to share what they know. When I first arrived at ESPN, I had big gaps in my understanding of college football, college basketball, and soccer. I’m still completely clueless about cricket, but those are all just opportunities to learn, which never gets old.

ESPN is located two hours north of New York, in Bristol, CT, which is a bit too far to make for a practical commute. How do you make it worthwhile to candidates to consider moving there?

Work-wise, we involve you at every level of the product design process, and we give you exposure to partners and leaders at every level of the company. We build products as teams, and everyone has a voice in the work the team does. We also care a great deal about quality of life, making sure people have time to spend with families or simply outside of the office. We offer competitive compensation packages, and big discounts to all Disney parks!

Disney (ESPN’s parent) offers relocation support, and we are also within commuting distance of places like Northern Westchester, NY, where I live, so you don’t always have to move to central Connecticut to work here. Other than that, we offer a state-of-the-art daycare on campus, lots of ways to be involved with our communities and outreach programs, and of course, lots of intramural sports leagues!

If you’re interested in this opportunity, read more at Authentic Jobs.

This is the fourth in my occasional series spotlighting interesting job openings for designers. See also my interviews with The Coral Project, Digg and Toca Boca.