A new Mac app that applies two-dimensional graphic designs into three-dimensional renderings — a label for a soup can, for instance, can be turned into a convincing image of a real soup can in just a few steps. Works with Adobe Illustrator. Read more here.

I don’t have a great Lou Reed story, though I wish I did. I saw him around downtown Manhattan a few times, but never talked to him. The closest I really ever got to him was through his music. When I was fourteen or fifteen and living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., my family took a trip to New York. I was already in love with the city at that time, and I remember stopping by an open air market — probably the one on Broadway near Fourth St — and bought this album:

Actually I bought it on tape, which tells you how old I am. I think I was a dollar short of the cost, but the vendor let me have it anyway, almost like an elder hipster passing along an heirloom to a wannabe hipster.

It didn’t change my life the way rock albums are supposed to do, but I did fall deeply in love with it, listening to it constantly for years. It was a big part of that era of my life, as were the other Velvet Underground albums and many of Reed’s solo albums. Thanks, Lou.

A new exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

“Modern design of the twentieth century was profoundly shaped and enhanced by the creativity of women — as muses of modernity and shapers of new ways of living, and as designers, patrons, performers and educators. This installation, drawn entirely from MoMA’s collection, celebrates the diversity and vitality of individual artists’ engagement in the modern world, from Loïe Fuller’s pulsating turn-of-the-century performances to April Greiman’s 1980s computer-generated graphics, at the vanguard of early digital design.”

Included: Linder Sterling’s still awesome design for the Buzzcocks’ “Orgasm Addict.”

More information at MoMA.

AIGA recently put forward a proposal to sell its not quite iconic but still spiritually critical national headquarters, situated in a hugely desirable lot on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The building was bought in a fundraising campaign in 1994 — “The money was raised through blood, sweat and tears, and it was a grand moment in the organization’s then 80-year history” — and is now worth nearly twenty times what was paid for it.

A list of notable designers including Michael Bierut, Hugh Dubberly, Steven Heller, Paula Scher and others believe this proposal is ill advised, and in this blog post on Design Observer, come out squarely against it.

“In short, we believe the proposed choices outlining the future of AIGA are misguided, misinformed and manipulative, and should be regarded skeptically by our fellow members. We want you to know what’s going on with your organization. We urge you to reject this false choice.”

You don’t see much dissension in the graphic design community, so this is conflict of the highest order. Every signatory to this objection is a former AIGA board member, president and/or medalist. The public nature of this dispute between actors who have been historically aligned so closely is unprecedented. Read the full post here.

Yesterday I took the train to Baltimore to moderate a panel with three of that city’s leading digital design practitioners, as part of the local AIGA chapter’s ambitious Design Week. On stage with me were Andy Mangold of Friends of the Web, April Osmanof of Fastspot, and James Pannafino of Millersville University. It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed meeting the Baltimore chapter immensely.

It was also my first introduction to James, and his book “Interdisciplinary Interaction Design: A Visual Guide.”

The book’s title is more than a mouthful of syllables, but its contents are expertly succinct and useful. It is truly a “visual guide” to the sometimes amorphous concepts that guide work in our profession, from affordances to Fitts’s Law to user errors. Each concept is explained clearly and thoughtfully, with crisp, unfussy illustrations that help root its central idea in real world examples. It’s truly excellent, and highly recommended. Find out more at the book’s site and order it from Amazon.

The hook of this is “Was iOS 7 created in Microsoft Word?,” which is slightly provocative but not really the point. Rather, this time lapse video actually shows the upgraded operating system’s entire home screen — app icons and all ” being recreated using the infamously tetchy and primitive design tools in Microsoft Word. It’s surprisingly compelling to watch. See it at YouTube.

The font co-op and marketplace Village recently relaunched its Web site (beautifully designed by Oak). I find that Village is the font source that I return to most consistently — the quality of typefaces there is superb. My current favorite is Domaine Display.

The Domaine family is from typographer Kris Sowersby. It comes in a full array of weights, but Display is by far the most interesting. More here.

Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar has joined forces with Guardian civil liberties/U.S. national security columnist Glenn Greenwald to form a new journalism venture. Jay Rosen talked to Omidyar about this and offers early details, though the shape of the new company and its products is still very much undetermined.

Combined with Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post, this seems to indicate that we are in for some innovations in news in the next year or two. It’s also interesting how these events replicate the old pattern of successful entrepreneurs in other industries turning to journalism and media to help cement their legacies.

Read Rosen’s write-up of Omidyar and Greenwald’s venture at his Press Think blog.

A showcase for sites designed with a strong emphasis on the typographic grid. I’m not sure I remember the original version, but this redesign is sharp and it features some wonderful work. Read more here.

The venerable usability experts weigh in:

“Is iOS 7 fatally flawed? The short answer is no. Simply because there is no such thing as fatally flawed designs: we can always learn from mistakes. What’s surprising is that we don’t learn from someone else’s mistakes: Apple ignored some of the hurdles that Microsoft experienced with flat design and swipe ambiguity in Windows 8. We still have to see whether Apple’s strong design guidelines will protect most app designers from not getting lost in the flat 2D world. Early experience with applications redesigned for iOS 7 is fairly negative: several have worse usability than their iOS 6 versions.”

Read the full report here.