Archives

Conscientiously Objecting to the Living Room War

Apple TVTime was, you’d buy a TV, bring it home and plant it in your living room. Then you’d watch it. For like a decade. And when the picture started failing, you’d go and buy another and do it all over again.

Nowadays, television is more than a piece of furniture, it’s an experience. It’s multi-sourced, time-shifted, narrow-casted, and/or delivered on-demand. Digital, in short. Like all experiences in the digital age, television now requires the support of a full complement of systems — a peripheral army of boxes, wires and software — to make it happen. You can’t experience digital television, really, with just one of anything.

This is why, I think, I’m an unlikely customer for Apple TV, Steve Jobs’ set-top contender in the living room war. To be honest, the couch potato in me is intrigued by its ability to access Internet video, which I’m sure I’d watch more of were it made as convenient as Apple TV promises. And last week’s announcement that Apple will rent movies on demand through the device, too, is intriguing.

But I just can’t imagine myself buying one anytime soon. It’s not only that I would be adding another box to my living room (though I’m certainly not eager to take on that added complexity), it’s also how much the digital television experience demands of us.

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Indulging a Suite Tooth

I don’t mean to pick on Adobe, I really don’t. I admit, I have a fundamental disagreement with the insurrectionist strategy they’ve been pursuing with their Creative Suite applications; the company has essentially spent the decade so far leveraging those programs to carve out more than its fair share of space on my hard drive, and using the appropriated gigabytes to not so subtly transform the software into an unwanted back-door operating system of its very own. It’s immoderate behavior and frankly a pain in my butt.

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Living in the Future

MacBook AirWe’re living in the future, and I’ll tell you why: if you’re drinking water and breathing air in a time when a Steve Jobs-helmed Apple Inc. maintains stock keeping units for both a handheld computing device and an ultra-portable sub-notebook (the thinnest notebook on the market, no less), then clearly you’ve left behind the constraints of late 20th and early 21st century life and entered the wide, wonderful world of science fiction.

Back then, back in the distant past, Apple only ever entertained products that could fit inside a conveniently simplistic matrix of desktops and laptops of two grades: consumer or professional. To ask for a device of a more unusual order — something of the sort that even Apple’s less prolific rivals were regularly shipping even a decade ago — was a farcical daydream. Want to carry around an Apple-branded data device in your pocket? Want to tote around a Macintosh laptop all day without bringing on spinal injury? It just wasn’t done, son.

But now, today, we’ve got the MacBook Air, a laptop so thin and light it’s named after a shoe. At just three pounds, it fits inside a manila envelope, and is practically guaranteed to bring about envy in those with heavier laptops for at least the next three months. It’s not perfect — no Ethernet port, no FireWire port, and no swappable battery — but you know what? I’ll take it. After all those years of unrequited pining for a sub-notebook, the future looks just fine.

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The Story So Far

Last year, I spent a good deal of time talking about how print designers often fail to realize that the shift from analog to digital media also represents a shift from narrative to behavior — a fundamental change in the language and purpose of graphic design. That’s still an important concept, I think.

But after looking at portfolio after portfolio over the past two years while recruiting talent for an employer that still places a high value on narrative, I should shade this argument further: the future of this profession is not predicated simply on a one-way shift from the sensibilities of analog to the sensibilities of digital.

It’s a two-way street. Granted, the majority of the shift is incumbent upon the analog-minded. But there is a tremendous amount of storytelling that needs to be told in digital media, too, and a tremendous amount to be recovered from the craft of art direction, a discipline that is seemingly stranded in the analog world.

My complaint, right now, is that the majority of storytelling that happens on the Web is based in the interactively rich environment made possible by Flash. Flash has its uses, and I have no particular disdain for the medium. But its unique value is becoming less essential over time even as native tools like CSS and JavaScript become more capable.

Actually, I should rephrase this argument: not enough Web standards-minded designers are thinking narratively in the way that our Flash-fluent colleagues are. The vast majority of practitioners of XHTML, CSS and JavaScript are almost exclusively dedicated to behavioral work — interfaces and templates. There’s very little narrative design being done with these tools, and that’s a shame.

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Coming Out as an Innie

Alan Chochinov, from Core77 told me today that he recently came across, for the first time, the term “innies” as a nickname for designers working in-house at companies whose sole business is not design. He thought it made for a memorable and appropriate bit of slang, and while I’m not sure I with him on how catchy it is, I do agree that it gives a useful appellation to a neglected subset of the working design population.

Anecdotally speaking, the majority of what’s written by design writers and discussed between designers pays short shrift to innies. Instead, the focus tends toward the world of studios, consultancies and agencies — businesses whose main sources of revenue result from selling design services of some form or other for outside clients.

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Picturing Primaries

Readers voting in New Hampshire’s primaries today, make sure to bring along your cameras: The New York Times has just re-launched the Polling Place Photo Project, “a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this year’s primaries, caucuses and general election.”

Sharp design observers may recall that this was an idea originated and executed by Bill Drenttel and AIGA during 2006’s mid-term elections. Bill approached us late last year with a proposal to overhaul it as a Times project, in collaboration again with AIGA. The editors really took to the idea to heart, and working with staff here, Bill and AIGA’s technology partner Thirdwave moved mountains to make it happen for this early stage of the campaign.

We quietly and preliminarily put up this site last week during the contest in Iowa, which is actually a caucus and therefore not an ideal subject for the kind of single-frame documentary photography we’re looking for. But New Hampshire is a proper primary with polling machines, and therefore was an ideal kick-off. As the marketing blurbs state, the project will run throughout the primary season and then into the general election — we hope to capture some fascinating visual documentation of democracy in action. When it’s election day in your state, remember to snap a photo to share with us.

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Word on The Wire

The WireThanks to the miracle of 21st Century television distribution — doorstep DVD delivery via Netflix and the more limited but also more instantaneous phenomenon of on-demand cable television — I’ve now fully caught up on the first four amazing seasons of “The Wire.” Narratively, this level-sets me just in time for the fifth and final season, which began airing yesterday evening on HBO. But having watched the prior fifty episodes in their post-broadcast state — allowing me to devour them two, three, sometimes four at a time — I’m not sure I’ll be able to content myself with a measly single episode a week. Wah!

It’s going to be a long season, to be sure, but it’s probably for the better that I’ll have to enjoy the remaining episodes over the course of several months. That will give me time to really savor these final installments before the show shuts down forever. I’ll say it again: “The Wire” is the best television show ever. Ever.

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Command Shift Me

Command-Shift-3If I had a lot more time on my hands, I’d learn video. It seems like a blast. But I’m struggling enough already to keep up with the relatively static brand of design I get paid to do; a self-initiated foray into the world of motion seems expensive and time-consuming.

Still, I had fun messing about in a completely primitive way with video last month. I was invited by Jennifer Daniel, Erin Sparling and Amit Gupta to create a short bumper message for their new site, Command-Shift-3 — which is billed as being “like Hot or Not, but instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot Web sites.” It’s a cute idea, and in the early days, at least, Subtraction.com was a leader in the head-to-head competitions.

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As Seen in Magazines

All my digital cheerleading aside, I must admit there’s nothing quite like seeing your name in print. There’s an intangible quality to the medium that’s predicated, at last in part, on how relatively difficult and expensive it is to get large numbers of printed items in the hands of actual consumers.

Take magazines, for example. In this digital age, their strange, delayed distribution often makes them feel like time capsules from a world that’s perpetually six to eight weeks behind our own. And yet, when one’s name appears in one… then it’s a thrilling moment, there’s no doubt.

This month, my name appears in two magazines, and I have to admit, both times gave me a thrill. They’re both design publications, of course — Reader’s Digest still refuses to run my heartwarming story of how typography saved me when I fell through the ice during a cold New England winter — and they’re both on newsstands right now.

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