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Fast Talk

I was fortunate enough to see a really healthy audience turnout last Saturday afternoon at my South by Southwest Interactive 2011 talk, where I spent an hour unpacking many of the ideas in my book “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design.” Thanks a million to everyone who showed up to listen to me talk about what I always thought was a topic of fairly narrow interest. I was incredibly gratified to find out that I was wrong.

Later that same afternoon I made another appearance at the conference, this time on the Fast Company stage where I was interviewed by my good friend, the design writer Alissa Walker. This was a much smaller venue and not as widely publicized, so only a handful of people got to watch it in person.

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SXSW 2011

It’s awesome to be in Austin again for this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival. I just got in last night (thanks in part to a free ride in from the airport courtesy of the great folks at Food on the Table), registered for my badge and had a quick look around before heading to dinner with friends. Based on that brief scouting alone, this year’s show looks even bigger than ever. It’s going to be crazy here.

You can find me at three events during this yeaṟs festival. On Saturday I’ll be doing a talk at 12:30p about the ideas in my book “Ordering Disorder.” Later than afternoon I’ll be interviewed by Fast Company on the PepsiCo stage. Then on Sunday morning I’ll be doing a book signing at the South by Bookstore in the Austin Convention Center. Come out and say hi!

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The Speed of Redesigning

The New York Times MagazineThis past weekend, The New York Times unveiled a new redesign to its Sunday magazine under the sure hand of my former colleague, magazine art director Arem Duplessis, and the magazine’s new editor Hugo Lindgren. The new look of the magazine is heavily influenced by “newspaper and vintage magazine issues from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s,” what many might call the golden age of publication design. I think it says something about the state of publishing today when even a magazine that is exempt from the metrics of newsstand sales (The Sunday magazine is distributed as an insert to the paper and is thusly not subject to newsstand sales numbers) still feels compelled to recall the glories of an earlier age. Nevertheless, the redesign is stunning work.

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Watching Charlie Sheen

All week long I’ve been wondering if it would be completely inappropriate of me to blog about apparently over-the-edge actor Charlie Sheen, but now I think I’ve found an angle that justifies some comment. I demurred several times on publishing this, but ultimately I kept coming back to my draft and re-reading it, so here it is.

I’ve found Sheen’s recent, furious spate of bad boy antics and megalomaniacal television interviews to be fascinating, and it’s not just a fascination borne from schadenfreude, either. Yes, the man is a car wreck that it’s hard to turn away from, but what an interesting car wreck. I have no doubt that there’s something psychologically wrong with him, and a lot of his behavior is plainly abhorrent and inexcusable. But I also happen to believe there’s an element of genius at work here, too, even if it’s inadvertent.

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Long Live the Design Director for NYTimes.com

Everyone gets replaced sooner or later. Roughly seven months after my departure, I’m told that my former colleagues at The New York Times have just hired someone new to take over my old job heading up the NYTimes.com design team. The very talented new design director is my good friend Ian Adelman, who, of course, was also the very talented design director who has helmed NYMag.com for the past four years or so. He did an incredible job there and he’s going to do an incredible job at The Times too. In fact, I slightly envy Ian this opportunity: there are lots of great projects there, and lots of great opportunities to do really meaningful design, and I sort of wish I was still there to work on them. Anyway, I expect great things. Congratulations to Ian, and continued good luck to my old colleagues at The Times, too.

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The Sad Story of Illustration on the Web

I’ve argued that you can’t design for digital publications the way you design for print publications, but that doesn’t mean that what we leave behind in the print tradition is not missed online. One of strengths that print designers have long brought to their publications is illustration, where artists are commissioned to create visual translations of an article’s most salient or provocative concepts. Print publications have a long, long history of truly great illustrations that became indelible companions to the content they accompanied. Not so much online.

In fact, in digital media, illustration is missing in action, and its absence is palpable. I can’t think of a single, regularly publishing, large-scale digital publication that uses original illustrations prominently, much less pays illustrators a working wage for their efforts. By and large, digital publishing traffics in photographic images, most of them literal — an article about President Obama will be accompanied by a photo of President Obama. Occasionally, when the subject matter of an article doesn’t inspire obvious photo selections, a bit more imagination becomes necessary. This is where, given different economics, digital publishers might turn to illustrators. Instead, they turn to stock photographs, usually with awful results. Here are a few I found this morning.

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Home Alone…with All My Stuff

Every serious adult should have an inventory of the possessions in his or her home in case of fire, flood or alien attack, but I don’t. This is one of the things that I’ve been meaning to do forever, and I’ve always thought that software should be able to help me do it. But home inventory software has always struck me as being unrealistically data entry-oriented. That is, most of the packages I’ve seen are predicated on the idea that the user is going to be very thorough and record every data point around each possession: not just the make, model and serial number, but also date of purchase, price, a scan of the receipt, notes on any servicing that might have happened, even a photograph of it… I mean come on. Who’s going to do that?

Part of the problem is that almost all of the home inventory software I’ve seen is intended to live on my hard drive. It’s packaged software (or, now, downloadable from the Mac App Store) that resides locally, tied to a specific computer, with little or no awareness or acknowledgment of the network. In reality, it should live on the cloud where it would make much more sense as a service, and not just because keeping this data physically off-premises is in keeping with the whole point of tracking it in the first place.

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The Interactive TV You Already Use

We have been waiting forever for interactive television, but Peter Yared of Webtrends argues that it’s already here. It’s just not happening on our television sets, where we had always imagined elaborate user interface layers would be superimposed onto the channel-tuning paradigm we’ve been familiar with for so long.

Instead, consumers have opted to leave their televisions relatively untouched — and simple — while supplementing their viewing experiences with other digital devices: laptops, smart phones and tablets. You’ve probably done this yourself: in the middle of watching a movie at home you spot a an actor or actress who looks familiar but whose name you can’t recall; out comes the laptop or iPhone, where a quick Internet Movie Database lookup scratches that itch. Or, you’re catching up on the back catalog of a popular television show that’s particularly engrossing, so you go searching the Web for commentary, background material, and hypotheses about why the heck there was a polar bear on that island.

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Confirmed: Blu-Ray Not for Moms

When I was visiting my mother earlier in the month, I helped her upgrade her ‘home theater’ — I hesitate to call it that because her needs are not nearly so grand as replicating a theater viewing experience inside of her home. She just likes to watch the occasional movie and maybe tap into her granddaughter’s Flickr stream and that’s about it.

She had an old 30-in. CRT television that weighed about a ton, but I managed to kick it to the curb and bought her a new, inexpensive Vizio LCD television. Setup was a breeze, but of course her old DVD player was not capable of upconverting to the new TV’s greater resolution, so playing movies looked terrible on it. I went to the store with the idea of buying her a new, simple, US$50 upconverting DVD player.

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Music at the Speed of Hype

A few weeks ago, fan site Radiohead At Ease — among other sources — reported on an unsubstantiated rumor that Radiohead’s long-awaited eighth album was already complete. Then, this morning, the Internet woke up to find that apparently the album is finished after all and fans can pre-order it immediately. Physical copies of the new record won’t be available for a few months, but the songs will be available for download this Saturday. Wow.

This is the way music works in the 21st Century: no waiting through months and months of unconfirmed deadlines, no release dates announced several quarters in advance, no slogging through interminable marketing campaigns trying to build up anticipation, no manufacturing timelines holding up the delivery of the songs, no record companies just generally getting in the way. When the music’s done, it ships. This will soon be the norm for record releases but at the moment it still strikes me as kind of amazing. Now, if the band could just finish recording their records a bit more quickly, we’d really be living in the future.

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