Comic Con: The Documentary

I’m in San Francisco today, where I gave a talk at the super-fun TYPO Talks San Francisco yesterday. Alas, I have to get on a plane in a few hours, so I’ll miss the conference’s second day, which makes me sad because it looks terrific.

Anyway, for the plane ride back I just downloaded a rental of documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock’s latest: the awkardly but I guess appropriately named “Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope.” Spurlock tracks five super-dedicated fans as they make their annual pilgrimage to the immense Comic Con festival in San Diego.

Geek subject matter aside, what’s notable about the release of this movie is that it’s being made available online on the same day and date as it’s being released to theaters. It’s certainly not the first film to try this approach, but to me it seems like the first film for which such a forward-thinking release strategy makes perfect sense. This is a independent movie with limited theatrical distribution, but it has the kind of built-in audience that is geographically distributed but nontrivial. So if you’re in one of the bigger markets that can support theatrical releases you can see it at your local movie house starting today. But for geeks in smaller markets, having same day availability via online services is obviously a huge plus; like Comic Con itself, it pulls together a meaningful, focused audience out of a widely dispersed subculture.

Find out more about the movie, including where you can see it and/or rent it, “at its official site” For added color, you can also read about my one and only visit to Comic Con in 2006 too.

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Frustro

Designer Martzi Hegedus’ Frustro typeface is a well-executed implementation of the kind of idea that occurs to most type students at some point or another: letterforms that appear as if they’re facing in more than one direction.

Frustro

The banality of the idea doesn’t take away from the fact that the end result is really quite handsome. I like it a lot, and expect to see it on a record sleeve or movie poster at some point. See the full project here.

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Wind Map

Information porn at its finest: this mesmerizing animated map visualizes “the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the U.S.” in real time.

Wind Map

It was created by Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, who work for the Google Big Picture Group, though this project appears to be an independent production. Read more about it on the site. (Via Infosthetics.com.)

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Mag+ on Retina iPads and File Size

One of the creators of the Mag+ platform for publishing content in the form of magazine-like tablet apps has some thoughts on the new iPad and the file size implications of its high-definition screen. This is in response to some speculation that when Retina-optimized magazine apps hit the market, the file size of these already bandwidth-hungry apps will balloon even further. The writer argues:

“I don’t believe people actually give a flying frog about file size — they care about value.”

Personally, the only tablet magazine app that I still use with any regularity is The New Yorker’s iPad app. As I’ve said before, I only download it to read the text and could care less about whatever value-add that its enormous download size is supposedly delivering. I’ve also said many times before that I believe most people don’t care about the value-add, that they would be just as happy to get a plain text version of the content without all of the design fussiness that these apps seem to think is indispensable. In fact, I would prefer a plainer version of the content, as I can’t tell you how often its heavy download demands have proved to be inconvenient; few things are as irritating as trying to get out the door in the morning when this app is leisurely downloading superfluous ads that I could care less about.

That said, Mag+ is essentially right that file size does not matter — or at least that it will matter less in the long-term. Eventually we will get enough bandwidth so that we can download the 150 megabytes or more that these apps ask us to retrieve. Though what I fear is that when we have that capacity, publishers will be asking us to download gigabytes per issue; this is after all an industry that cannot resist imposing greater and greater demands on its users in order to impress itself.

Read the full blog post here.

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Moebius, R.I.P.

The artist and comic book illustrator Jean Giraud, known to most as Moebius, passed away Saturday at the age of 73.

Moebius

As a young comic book reader I remember how striking his work looked in comparison to his contemporaries. Comics are by nature fantastic, or at least they strive to be, but in Giraud’s hands even the most mundane took on a beautiful, otherworldly quality. The truth is that he was a true visionary of science fiction and fantasy, not just in comics but in concept work he did for major films like “Alien” and “Tron,” among many others. It would’t be an overstatement to say that he has had a profound effect on the way we all picture the future. More here.

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Bound for Anything

Little by little, we’re getting to the point where most consumer goods will be customizable. We have a long way to go, but the site Bound for Anything gets us a step closer: they let you customize your own journals and notebooks, meaning you can specify whether the pages are pre-printed with lines, grids, calendars, even storyboard boxes and simple games. Not only that, but you’re not limited to one type; the service lets mix and match as many sections as you like, so you can create a notebook that meets your specific criteria. My friend Jared, who first brought Bound for Anything to my attention, ordered one of these and said it was shipped to him in about a week. Find out more here.

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InVision: Prototyping Tool for Visual Designers

This designer-centric tool for creating interactive prototypes using real design assets has apparently been gaining traction for some time, but I’m only getting a look at it today. Their logo parade of customers is impressive, and they already boast that InVision is used by almost 20,000 agencies. I’d be curious to hear what people who have used the product think about it, but I’m glad that someone is trying to fix this problem.

For many years, there’s been a gaping hole in the market for a more capable prototyping tool than Photoshop or Fireworks or just HTML, and it’s always puzzled me that no one has tried to fill it. There’s an article about the company at TechCrunch today, and you can find out more about the product at its Web site.

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