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Layer Tennis, Anyone?

Tune in this coming Friday afternoon for Coudal Partners’ Layer Tennis, in which I will have the honor of matching my graphical prowess against Nicholas Felton of the famously self-aware Feltron Annual Reports. It’s sure to be a cornucopia of wild, free-ranging visual expressionism. ’Cuz y’know, that’s what both Nicholas and I are known for. What’s more, the venerable John Nack of Adobe will be providing the commentary as Nicholas and I parry back and forth.

Layer tennis, for those unfamiliar with it, is that curiously un-aerobic Internet sport in which two graphically adroit competitors, armed with Photoshop, swap a single image file back and forth, embellishing each volley with collage-like visual ornamentation. Oh, and it’s all done under the watchful eye of a stopwatch, so the pace can get kind of frenetic; each volley is fifteen minutes long, and the match is over after just ten volleys. Fun stuff. Check out the archive of previous matches to get a sense of what’s ahead. And point your browser to Layertennis.com on Friday to see Nicholas probably kick my ass.

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Pulling Over and Asking for Directions

All told, I think I did a pretty good job of ignoring “Lost” for years, in spite of all the raves and recommendations from friends. Mostly, it was out of self-interest; I couldn’t afford the time investment that another hugely complicated television series would require, especially one that seemed to inspire such obsessive fandom. But now, living with a “Lost” devotee as I do, I find I can no longer willfully ignore the persistent phenomenon that is J.J. Abrams’ labyrinthine television saga. I started watching a handful of episodes here and there last season, and when the show’s sixth season debuted on Tuesday evening I joined Laura on the couch to take in its latest two hours.

Here’s my assessment so far: it’s a superbly crafted entertainment but it executes itself haphazardly. I find myself easily drawn into its fundamentally strong storytelling tactics, but even after watching the best episodes, the momentum of the series inspires no real confidence that the next installment will be any good.

And, frankly, I don’t really get what’s happening. What is this show about? A time shifting island? A fractious fraternity of metaphysically-challenged losers? A just-in-time catalog of bogus belief systems? I have no idea, really, but to the show’s credit it’s all good enough to keep me thinking about it. Herewith, then, are some random notes from a Viewer New to “Lost”

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Notes on iPad

It’s not as if I haven’t had a point of view on all of this tablet computing device stuff that’s been lighting up the Internets for the past several months, but for professional reasons, I’ve had to keep mum. Suffice it to say, I’m really excited about Apple’s iPad, announced today, and I’m even more excited about what can be done with it.

However. I’m pretty sure that I’m in the camp that believes that this is not the salvation that most publishing companies have been looking for. Not that the device falls short in some way, but rather because nothing can save publishing as it’s been operating for the past several decades. The iPad does nothing to change the brutal mandate that has been pushing publishers to change for these many years; if anything it compounds the imperative.

iPad

As a general principle, there’s no way around evolution, and in this specific instance the reality is that there is no direct translation of the print experience to digital media. That is, the content can be translated, but it’s not likely to be as literal as many might expect or even hope. Those looking to the iPad to return us to some semblance of a print-like reading experience are basically wrong, I believe. In fact, lots of really smart people will continue to get this wrong going forward. We’re all still figuring out. That’s the definition of an opportunity.

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Watching Movies When Not Watching Baby

Since becoming a dad, I’ve been able to go out to the cinema to see just three movies in three months. Luckily, at home, the situation is a little better, thanks to Netflix, Apple TV and the new Blu-Ray player that I got for the holidays. Still a general lack of free time makes it hard to see as many as I’d like, and I feel lucky that I get to see any movies, let alone write about them here on this blog. The days of being able to knock out lengthy reviews of the sort that I once did for, say, last year’s “Public Enemies” or 2008’s (still underrated!) “Speed Racer” seem a long way off now.

I still like writing about movies though, still enjoy articulating my thoughts about them, trying to get at the core ideas in filmed media that matter to me. Whether or not anyone really likes them, or whether the generally design-centric audience for this blog finds anything relevant in them, I’m not sure. But writing about shit you like is one of the perks of having your own blog, so I’m going to keep doing it — when I can. I’m just going to have get used to writing more succinctly, and get over the embarrassment of sometimes only publishing my thoughts long, long after the movies have left the current spotlight. Here are three write-ups to get started.

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Oh-Nine’s Ox Tails

Music. I listened to a lot of it last year. Not nearly as many as lots of people, I’m sure. But I had an Emusic account, an Amazon Prime account and a sufficiently generous credit card limit to supply me with days of listening entertainment — 1,530 songs played continuously over 3.7 days, according to iTunes.

Looking back, I liked a lot of the music I heard, and got reasonably excited about it too. Maybe not as excited as I used to get about music, back when I had a lot more free time, a lot less money, and a mistaken belief that pop music could be useful a framework for living one’s life. But for the first year in many years, I got genuinely enthusiastic about what seemed like a lot of new acts. Maybe it was a subconscious attempt to retain or rekindle youth as I entered parenthood, or maybe it was the fact that a brilliant record label run by a friend from my twenties came roaring back even more brilliantly than it had ever been before, but I found a lot to like when I plugged my earbuds into my iPod last year. Anyway you look at it, there were a lot of good tunes in 2009, and I’d like to share some of them with you.

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Having Fun with Pains

Last week, The Hype Machine, a sort of combination music meta-blog and playlist, published its round-up from the year just ended, including its listing of the top fifty bands of 2009, with each of the fifty slots illustrated by an invited visual artist. If you skip ahead, you’ll see that the indie pop contenders The Pains at Being Pure at Heart came in at number thirteen, and that the illustration was done by none other than yours truly.

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Basic Maths on Sale This Week

When Allan Cole and I released our WordPress theme back in November, we set the price slightly lower than we originally intended, in order to make it as affordable as possible straight out of the gate. But the response was so great that we ended up just leaving it there at US$45 — until now. As a sort of holiday special, Basic Maths is on sale through the last day of the year for 33% off the regular price, bringing it down to just US$30. That’s a terrific deal for a one of the very finest blog themes around on any platform. If you haven’t already got your copy, here’s your chance to get a great deal on it. Click here to buy.

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Backing Up Over Broadband

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve tested a number of online backup solutions, and found them all lacking. Some are disappointingly constructed and others seem feature-poor, but no matter how well they were designed they all share a single fatal flaw: consumer broadband in the United States is insufficient for backing up the dozens of gigabytes that an average user requires.

Still, the fact that broadband is the problem is progress, given my past experiences with backing up my data. I used to find that backup solutions were expensive or complicated to implement — a decade ago, I used the completely bewildering Retrospect and a prohibitively expensive tape backup system to back up my files — or tried to, anyway. The setup was unwieldy enough that I ran backups erratically, at best, and an erratic backup is not much better than none at all.

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Get Fresh with Me

AIGA New YorkThe evening of next Wednesday, 16 December, I’ll have the honor of being on stage as a guest for AIGA New York’s twenty-fifth annual Fresh Dialogue event, alongside Tina Roth Eisenberg of Swiss Miss, Allan Chochinov of Core77 and Josh Rubin of Cool Hunting. Our mandate will be to cast an eye on the design world through the lens of each of our respective blogs, and to take a look at how social media is impacting the way design is practiced. The evening will be hosted by the design writer, critic and chair of SVA’s Masters in Design Criticism program, the remarkable Alice Twemlow. It’s going to be a blast.

Find out more about the event and register for your tickets here.

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Really Basic Maths

It should be obvious to most readers of this blog that Basic Maths, the WordPress theme that Allan Cole and I released recently (and available here), is a direct descendant of the overall look and feel of Subtraction.com. There’s a good reason for this: over the years, I’ve been asked countless times by others if they can use the Subtraction.com ‘theme,’ even though none existed — even if it did, I would have been inclined to say no, wanting to preserve its uniqueness for myself. So when I sat down to design Basic Maths, the aim was to create something that would satisfy this desire to have something Subtraction.com-like in the marketplace — not a clone, but a reinterpretation. As reinterpretations go, it’s pretty straightforward, I think. Nevertheless, I thought it would be interesting to showcase some of the steps in its design evolution, and how I arrived at the theme as it stands today.

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