Archives

Johnny Mnemonic

Scary realization: more and more often, I’m finding I have no useful recollection of the details of conversations I’ve had in the recent past. You might have sat with me in a meeting last week, say, and we may have come to perfectly lucid agreements on what steps we’d take next to advance whatever project was at hand. But lately the chances are increasingly good that when you ask me about them next, those action items will have escaped me. I’ll probably recall that we spent some time in a meeting together, sure. And maybe even that we had arrived at some mutual understanding, too. But little else.

This is really inconvenient, not to mention frustrating. At first I thought this condition was a symptom of the sheer number of projects I deal with each day (lots), but more and more I worry it’s just a function of getting along in my years. Office life is making me old.

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The Adventures of Tintin in the 21st Century

X-FLR6If you really want to see graphic communication — the artful combination of images and words put in service to narrative — at its most powerful, then have a look at this picture of my nephew reading a copy of “Explorers on the Moon,” the seventeenth in master draughtsman and storyteller Hergé’s long line of Tintin comic albums, which he acquired last week during our trip to visit my dad, his grandfather, in Paris.

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JFK to SFO to CDG

Okay, um, I can’t seem to get my act together on this blogging stuff. I’ve been a bit… distracted lately, is one way of putting it. And now I’m about to head out to San Francisco for the better part of this week. I’ll be there until Friday morning; I’m a terrible trip planner, so for all of those folks whom I know in the Bay Area and whom I haven’t called, please forgive me. However, I’ll be around until Friday morning if you want to drop me a line — at which time I’ll be taking my nephew to Paris for a week. Look for a couple of posts while I’m overseas, at least — I figure I’ll have some free time. How hard can it be to keep an eleven year old entertained?

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Allow Me Not to Explain Myself

Sometimes I feel as if I could blog all day every day, and other times I feel like I couldn’t write another blog post if my life depended on it. At the moment I’m feeling a bit of the latter, as some readers might have intuited from the fact that for the first time in a long time, I blogged not once all last week.

Part of the blame for this goes to the disorderly state of my blogging software. I’m eager to move off of Movable Type and over to Expression Engine, but it’s a process that’s going to take lots of time (even though I’ve been receiving the generous help of some readers like Adam Khan in getting up to speed with the new software). In the meanwhile, it kind of pains me to continue to mess around with the existing platform.

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Watching Woody

In part to prove Steve Jobs wrong, I quietly resolved to myself earlier this year that I would read a book a month, but I’m already way behind. The problem is that for book number one I chose “Conversations with Woody Allen” by Eric Lax, a thoroughly engrossing compendium of Lax’s many interviews with the filmmaker over the past three-plus decades.

In theory, it should have been an easy book to polish off for January, because it reads quite breezily. The thing is its subject matter has naturally spurred me to spend much of the time that I should be reading book number two instead watching as many of Allen’s movies as I can. In case you lost count back in the nineties, there are now over thirty-five of them. Gulp. Before I read this book I think I’d seen about twenty of them, but now I want to watch all of the ones I’ve missed — and watch those twenty again, too. Time consuming.

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Blue in the Interface

This comes as a surprise to me, but a look at most all of the icons on my computer reveals that the vast majority of them are blue. There’s only a very small handful — Adium, Address Book, iCal, Transmit, some others — that aren’t. Blue, blue, blue — everywhere I look all over my hard drive, blue.

Maybe this is old news to you — it’s hardly novel for any Westerner to realize that, if there’s a default color that signals acceptability and inoffensiveness, it᾿s blue. But if you don’t believe me, have a look at these thirty icons I collected from my hard drive (please, no potshots about how out of date some of them are. I’m too busy to upgrade) and how shockingly uniform they are in color.

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The Sagmeister Phenomenon

The graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister is now a kind of phenomenon. In recent months, he’s released a second book, mounted a solo exhibition at the renowned gallery Deitch Projects, and made a splash at Art Basel. And these are just the latest achievements in a career brimming with landmark design solutions and attendant accolades.

All of which has been well-earned. His work is often breathtakingly ambitious in its understanding of what design can be. It takes a certain kind of ingenuity and clarity of vision to intuit that this profession can mean typography carved into human flesh, or charts and graphics rendered huge and inflatable, or hanging out the side of the Empire State Building.

What’s more, his work also possesses a unique sense of whimsy that’s typically scarce in graphic design. Whether it’s a wall bricked with hundreds of bananas or a two actual school buses stacked one on top of the other, there’s a healthy amount of pure mirth present in most of his solutions — you rarely get the idea that he’s weary of his assignments, or that he’s doing anything less than having the time of his life. Indeed, one of the things that makes it so genuinely engaging is that Sagmeister seems to possesses an indefatigable willingness to act upon his playful ideas, to go to whatever lengths necessary to turn them into reality. Contrast that alacrity with the resignation of those of us who, if we can’t conjure up a solution in software or within ten feet of our desks, rule out anything more ambitious entirely. (Guilty as charged.)

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A Brief Valentine’s Day Message

I’m not much for this holiday, really. It’s kind of hard to get enthusiastic about it when you’re not dating anyone, as happens to be the case with me at the moment. In spite of that convenient pessimism, I have two Valentine’s Day-related bits to share with you, both of which also happen to be A Brief Message-related.

First is today’s adorable new Message, written by Esther K. Smith about giving pink hearts a chance, embracing cliché and reliving the abandon of grade school arts and crafts. This one was illustrated — also adorably — by Clément Fabre. Don’t be afraid — go read it.

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The Power of the Printed-on-Demand Word

Digital evangelists: if you have any doubt about the convincing power of print, then order yourself a book of your own making over at Lulu.com — remember to put your name prominently on the cover — and show it around to your friends. That’s what I did for a project I’m working on with Steven Heller; I wrote and designed a ten-page spread (illustrated by my good friend, the incomparably hilarious Olso Davis) and created a PDF in which the pages are repeated over and over again about fifteen times, then sent it off to Lulu.com for a single hardcopy.

The effect I was going for was a kind of bookish trompe l’oeil in which I create the impression of a real, full-length book. But more on that when the project actually comes to fruition.

In the meantime, I’m very pleasantly surprised and delighted by my first experiment with Lulu.com. I just got the end product in the mail last week, and when I opened it up I saw it was really just a bunch of laser prints hardbound together — nevertheless, it’s convincing as heck. When I show it to friends and colleagues, their eyes light up with amazement at my name on the cover. I mean, it stops people in their tracks. Sadly, Web sites don’t do that.

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Charityware

The much hyped One Laptop per Child project makes me sad. I ordered one of these promising, kid-friendly portable computers last November, during the very first week it became available for domestic customers under its foundation’s “Give One, Get One” program. For US$400, not only would I get an XO Laptop, but I’d also be be effectively buying one for a needy child in a developing nation.

But my XO never arrived. I waited and waited, and it never arrived. And then it became apparent to me that good intentions and great publicity don’t necessarily equal great customer service. When I went looking for my laptop, I discovered that the OLPC foundation’s ability to track, update and ship my laptop to me is barely better than that of a home mail order business. Last I heard from them, they assured me I would get mine “delivered in 45 to 60 days.”

Now I’ve lost my enthusiasm for the laptop altogether, especially given the generally poor reviews that the device’s operating system and interface have garnered. So I called them this week to cancel the part of my order that would buy a laptop for me — I didn’t have the heart to ask for a refund on the half that was ostensibly destined for some poor Third World child. Even that, they couldn’t get right; the operator on the phone could only refund an unspecified “fair market value” price, for some obscure reason. It felt like bureaucracy, to me. Sadly.

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