Archives

Mixel and Primitive Tools

The actual art-making tools available in our social collage app Mixel are pretty basic, with no modes and no calibration options. We shipped them that way for a good reason: we didn’t want people to feel that Mixel is a software application that they have to ‘master.’ A few moments is all you need to learn how to use all of the tools in the app, top to bottom.

Some people say that the tools are primitive, especially the cropping feature, which is downright imprecise. That one in particular is something we definitely want to improve, and we even intended to make it more powerful before we shipped the app but we ran out of time. We also left it as it was because we saw something really interesting in our beta testing that informed our whole attitude towards creative tools: imprecision is liberating. No one who tried to use Mixel’s crop tool to cut out a foreground image from its background ever felt that they were somehow “not using it right.” The tool is so rough and inexact that people believe there’s really no getting it wrong.

For us, that was a powerful realization, and one of the key insights that helped us make something fundamentally different from all of the other art software out there. The hugely constraining limitations of our toolset in effect let people off the hook, unburdened them of the pressure to make things perfect. It lets users create mixels in a few minutes, casually, almost without time to let their inner inhibitions about Art-with-a-capital-A take over. That’s exactly what we were going for.

Continue Reading …

+

Mixel Day One

Mixel, our social collage app for iPad, debuted at around midnight Wednesday, and so I barely got any sleep last night. I spent a long, tiring, exhilarating day today watching new users pour into the network, as well as responding to tweets and emails and generally trying to keep tabs on everything Mixel-related. We got some really terrific, very generous press coverage from lots of different outlets, and I’ll try and gather those in one place soon for those interested.

At about 6:00 I went home, read a few stories to my daughter and gave her a long hug before putting her to bed. Laura and I had a nice dinner together and then we sat down to watch some television. Just before we went to turn on the set we both checked into Mixel — and suddenly it was an hour later.

I’m just stunned and flabbergasted and deeply, deeply humbled by all the activity on Mixel during this, its first day. There was a constant stream of likes, comments, new mixels and remixes flooding in, and it kept me completely transfixed. I should really be sleeping right now, but I couldn’t turn in without acknowledging what this means to me.

Many of you may know that developers cannot freely send out pre-release versions of native iOS apps to alpha and beta testers — Apple imposes distribution limitations — so for the past eight months my co-founder Scott and I have been using Mixel with just a few dozen other (awesome) people. To now see thousands of people join in, many of them doing amazing and beautiful work, and many of them apparently having a great time, is very much like a waking dream for me. In fact, I think I’m avoiding sleep because I’m secretly afraid that will put an end to it.

In short, I’m touched by the enthusiasm and the experimentation and the feedback and even the criticism. We’re very proud of what we built but we’re also very cognizant of the fact that not everything we did was perfect, not by a long shot. There are many things that we did right, many others that we executed in less-than-ideal ways, and even some things that we got just plain wrong, and there’s even an already pretty healthy debate over which ones are which. I’m going to address some of these in the coming days and weeks, and we’re going to fix everything we can as soon as we can — maybe not to everyone’s satisfaction, but we are listening closely to what is being said about Mixel, I can assure you of that.

Right now though I just want to say thank you to everyone who gave even a tiny fraction of their waking hours to Mixel during its debut day. It means a lot to me.

Continue Reading …

+

Introducing Mixel

MixelIn my post from August titled “What Comes After Reading on iPad,” I argued that while the iPad is a game-changing reading platform, there has been perhaps too much emphasis on that one particular aspect of the device. Apple’s “magical and revolutionary” tablet brings with it many other transformational qualities that are being undervalued at the moment, and at least a few of them will spawn new businesses and maybe even new industries.

I talked about a few of those opportunities in that post, but the one that interests me the most, and the one that I’m betting on in a big way, is the fact that iPad is an ideal digital art device, one that requires little or no training — no mouse to master, no pen and tablet to plug in. Straight out of the box, it’s a powerful, completely intuitive tool for self-expression: just use your finger to make a mark.

Even better, for the very first time in decades of personal computing history, we have an ideal digital art device in the hands of a mass audience, a huge and still-growing user base composed not just of professional artists and early adopters, but of people from all walks of life who are embracing the liberating simplicity of this new platform.

That’s big. It changes what’s possible for visual self-expression in a huge way. Now anyone can do this — anyone. They just need the right software. Creating that software is what my co-founder Scott Ostler and I are trying to do with our new company.

Our app is called Mixel. It’s a collage-making tool and a social network rolled into one. With Mixel, anyone can create and share digital collages using images from the Web, Mixel’s library, or your own personal photos from Facebook or what’s right on your iPad. You can watch a video (directed by the inimitable Adam Lisagor) that describes all of this over at our site, Mixel.cc.

Why watch it when you can try it out for yourself, though? As of today, Mixel is available for download in the App Store. And it’s free.

Continue Reading …

+

A Short Film About Me

Last year director Raafi Rivero of The Color Machine asked me over email if I would be interested in being the subject of a short film project. By way of an example, he showed me this beautiful short that he had made about cinematographer Bradford Young. Flattered, I said yes, and not long afterwards he and a small crew filmed an interview with me in the beautifully arcane MEx Building, located on a still-ungentrified stretch of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

Continue Reading …

+

Where Are All the Ed-Ex Designers?

There’s a small but meaningful number of really, really good user experience designers in the world. I’m talking about the sort of individuals who can create a highly effective, truly immersive architecture around the way real users interact with software — and who have the skills and wherewithal to roll up their sleeves and get it done. Those types are not abundant, but they’re not uncommon either.

There’s also a reasonable number of really, really good editorial designers in the world, thanks to decades of publishing tradition and best practices. I’m talking about designers who know how to enhance and even maximize an audience’s understanding of published content. They’re comfortable working with writers and editors to help shape what we read, and they create unique value out of the combination of the written word and graphic language. Even given recent difficulties in the publishing industry, there are still lots of these people out there.

But there are very few designers who have both of these skill sets.

Continue Reading …

+

Subtraction.com and The Syndicate

I’ve just joined The Syndicate, a newly launched advertising network that delivers ads through RSS feeds. The other launch partners in The Syndicate are like-minded blogs focusing on technology, design, development and business: Marco.org, Asymco, ShawnBlanc.net to name just a few.

Starting 31 Oct, you’ll see ads in the Subtraction.com RSS feeds. The aim is to provide a space for relevant advertisers, so hopefully these ads will be a complement to the content I publish, rather than a distraction from it. Read more here.

Continue Reading …

+

Help Amit Gupta

If you’re like me you’re probably still pretty beat up over Steve Jobs passing away. Sadly that’s a loss that we can’t do anything about.

But a friend of mine is facing a similar, life-threatening dilemma, and there’s still an opportunity to do something about it. Amit Gupta, founder of Photojojo, is battling leukemia. He’s looking for a bone marrow donor of South Asian descent. You can learn more about the situation and about how you can help on this blog post.

Amit is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, and what he’s built with Photojojo is just awesome: a scrappy, incredibly fun and utterly new kind of consumer experience that takes any enthusiasm you might already have for photography and multiplies it exponentially. Anyone who knows him will agree: he’s going to keep giving the world amazing things if he gets the chance.

Continue Reading …

+

Should You Get a Masters in Design?

From time to time people ask for my advice on whether they should pursue a master’s degree in design, especially in interaction design. It’s a funny question for me because I never went to graduate school myself, and have relatively little experience with the graduate environment.

Two years ago I taught a semester at the brilliant Master’s Program in Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts. The program is run by my close friend Liz Danzico, who has staffed it with amazing teachers who are also practicing professionals, and the first few classes of students (it’s only a few years old) have been full of smart, ambitious people. But I did a terrible job teaching the course, probably because, in all honesty, the academic environment is not a good fit for me. I prefer to be working, and I don’t much enjoy the classroom.

Continue Reading …

+

Drivers and Thieves

Many of the movies I fell for as a kid drew a healthy portion of their magic from freely picking over the bones of the cinema that came decades before them. Most of what George Lucas and Steven Spielberg released in the 80s, for example, reveled in an unabashed nostalgia for the past. Many older filmgoers at the time held this approach to filmmaking in disdain, but for me and most everyone my age, it was a legitimate strategy for imagining what movies could be about. “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” were more than just rehashes of old movie serials; they were more sophisticated than their progenitors, more complete in their visions, more contemporary and alive to the audiences of that particular period than the source material could ever have been.

I still feel this way, that revisiting the past — even borrowing heavily from it — is a legitimate and even necessary part of the dialog that film conducts with itself and its audience. (For that matter, it’s an essential dialog for all art forms.) Still, it’s one thing to justify this technique when yours is the generation doing the borrowing; it’s a different experience when yours is the generation being borrowed from.

This was my experience watching Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive,” a remarkable movie that is irresistible in its craftsmanship but mildly suspect in its originality. It stars Ryan Gosling as an archetype of cool, a Steve McQueen like mystery man of very few words, absurdly lengthy pauses and super-human fighting and driving skills, whose zen-like mastery of his world goes awry when he begins to entangle himself with other humans.

Continue Reading …

+