Writer Sam Adams has an interesting perspective on Netflix’s recent rate hikes and the unintended consequences of pushing users away from discs-by-mail and towards streaming.

“As critic and historian Dave Kehr is often moved to point out, the prevailing myth that ‘everything is on DVD’ is hilariously wrong. Every time a new technology takes over, a chunk of film history gets left behind. Movies that were mainstays of undergraduate film classes have been marginalized as colleges and universities zero out rental budgets and build new classrooms that only allow for projection from digital sources.”

I actually don’t quite agree that some film history is lost “every time” there’s a technological shift, or at least I don’t agree that it’s quite that simple. The advent of home video resulted in an explosion of movie availability, and I have greater access to films today than ever before. But it’s also true that not every film on a reel made it to VHS, and not every one of those made it to DVD, etc. In this argument, it’s important to weigh the benefits of availability as well as the lost inventory.

Still, I think Adams is essentially correct in his assertion that with this specific shift, from discs to on demand services, there is a very real danger of losing a nontrivial subset of the films once available on disc. As he argues:

“The services offering access to a bottomless library of content continue to multiply, but for myriad reasons ranging from licensing restrictions to tangled chains of custody, these services are critically flawed.”

It seems inevitable that most of our entertainment media will soon be accessed primarily via subscription or via on demand purchases — via Netflix, Spotify and Kindle — and that it’s not a safe bet to assume that everything that was available to us in physical form will be available to us as bits.

Read full article here.

A great, fun poster from designer and illustrator Robert Ball that showcases fifty famous film villains.

He was selling prints, but unfortunately they’re sold out for now. Get a closer look at the art, and a key to who’s who, at Ball’s Web site.

The New York Times reports that of all of Condé Nast’s many splashy iPad magazine apps the relatively boring New Yorker is its most successful. It now boasts about 100,000 readers, 20,000 of whom bought annual subscriptions.

“…The figures are the highest of any iPad edition sold by Condé Nast, which also publishes Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamour and others on the Apple tablet… The New Yorker, a magazine that has always been heavy on text, took a different tack from its peers. Instead of loading its iPad app with interactive features, the magazine focused on presenting its articles in a clean, readable format.”

This is part of the strategy that I’ve been advocating for in my various critiques of Condé’s approach to the iPad. In short, the best way to serve a reading audience is to focus on providing a terrific reading experience and to de-emphasize the showy, buggy and difficult-to-use extras that have become synonymous with the ‘iPad magazine app’ format. And in fact, I’m a regular user of The New Yorker app, especially while traveling, because it gives me reasonably unfettered access to the only thing I’m seriously interested in: the text.

None of which is to say, though, that The New Yorker app is anywhere close to perfect. First, it could use a code refresh as it crashes so frequently as to be unusable; in my recent experience all it takes to induce it to unexpectedly quit is to launch it and let it alone for five to ten seconds.

Second, selling 20,000 paid subscriptions is fantastic, but according to the Times as many as 75,000 of the app’s customers are, like myself, originally subscribers to the print edition. So in fact the majority of customers do not represent an expansion of the market at all. None of these numbers are to be sneezed at, of course, and even transitioning a print subscriber to the digital edition can be counted as a kind of win. But it strikes me that the whole lot of customers would be better served with an HTML5-powered app, rather than the current native app. That way, it would be significantly cheaper to service those 100,000 users and significantly easier to keep it from crashing so much.

Read the full Times article here.

I spotted this book about the resurgence and evolution of the modernist aesthetic in graphic design and ordered it immediately. The description sounds like it was written just for me.

“Today’s designers and illustrators are synthesizing the best elements from past eras of graphic design to create a new visual language with a reduced and rational approach. The Modernist documents this uniquely contemporary, yet timeless aesthetic that is built upon the rediscovery and seamless melding of classical type elements and collage of the 1950s, the geometric patterns and graphic elements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the vector graphics and computer-aided montage of the 1990s.”

Not only that, but the cover features a drop-dead gorgeous collage illustration from the incredible Dan Mountford.

The terrific design inspiration blog Grain Edit has some snapshots of the book itself, too. You can read more about the book at the publisher’s site. Or buy it from Amazon and I get a little kickback.

Designer Simon Foster has assembled a wonderful collection of record center labels — the decals at the heart of every vinyl platter. Here’s one example:

He has dozens of these available for perusal at CenterofAttention.me. Via Eye Magazine.

After “The Undefeated,” the recently released documentary about Sarah Palin, ran for its second weekend in theaters, its promoters applied considerable spin to its box office performance. Box Office Mojo takes a closer look:

“To put these numbers into further perspective: The Undefeated’s ten theaters on opening weekend yielded 159 showings. Using the current average ticket price of US$7.86, that means the movie played to an estimated 52 people per average showing or at about one-fifth to one-quarter capacity. In the movie’s second weekend, which had 211 showings, the per-showing average attendance dropped to 15.”

Read the full analysis at Box Office Mojo.

There’s not a lot of information about this project but it’s pretty neat all the same: twenty-six renderings of lower-case characters using what appears to be motion-captured liquid animations.

See all of the renderings, as well as some beautiful video of the animations in action over here.

“On Sunday, July 24, 2011, New York became the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage. Hundreds of couples applied to be wed at the City Clerk’s office in Manhattan. [Here] is a selection of twenty couples who said ‘I do.’“

These made me cry a little. Congratulations to all of them. See all twenty photo and audio portraits here.

Earlier this week The New York Observer’s Betabeat ran a cover story on the challenges that Condé Nast has faced with its app strategy. I’ve been a longtime critic of the approach Condé Nast has pursued (I outlined most of these thoughts in this blog post from last year), so I was interviewed as part of the reporter’s research. There are a few choice quotes from me in the final article, which you can read here.

Today, the writer, Nitasha Tiku, published a second piece which is basically a transcript of the interview she conducted with me. It’s a more complete rendering of our chat and my thoughts, and so I thought it may interest some of you out there. Read the interview here.

FontShop have just released an iPad version of their iconic “FontBook” resource. Like its print progenitor, which was 1,500 pages long and massive, this app is a 524MB download. But worth it.

The most amazing part is that it costs a ridiculously affordable US$5.99 in the App Store. Before you buy you can find out more here.

(Update: I just came across a terrific write-up for the FontBook app from Jens Tenhaeff. Read it here.)

Also worth noting: four years ago, in this blog post, I interviewed typographer and well-known type expert Stephen Coles about his work on the last major revision of the print edition.