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Coin-operated, User Experienced

Tilt: The Battle to Save PinballGreg Maletic’s film “Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball” is, like many of its peers in this recent golden age of documentary films, a temporary detour into what might have otherwise been — and what may yet be again — overlooked subject matter. It’s highly entertaining, completely engrossing and beautifully made, but you’d be forgiven for not expecting much in the way of day-to-day practicality. As it turns out though, it provides a surprising amount of tangible relevance for those of us working in digital design.

With a prefigured sense of melancholy, Maletic uncovers the tale of Williams Electronic Games’ last ditch attempt to reinvigorate a gaming industry suffering through a precipitous decline. That the decline followed so soon after the industry’s peak, and that both happened so recently — the pinball business hit all-time highs in 1993 and was on its last legs by 1998 — is a turnabout in fortune familiar to anyone who lived through the dot-com wave that boomed in the late 1990s and foundered in the early part of this decade. In a way, the one can be seen as a less-glamorous template for the other, or even a cautionary tale for the present.

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Criminal Negligence for “The Wire”

The WireOn the advice of readers a few months ago, I decided to sample HBO’s urban crime procedural series, “The Wire,” reaching back in time to 2002 to start with the first season on DVD, courtesy of Netflix. Almost immediately, I understood what everyone was raving about. My reaction: “Oh, so this is what the best episodic television ever written looks like.”

“The Wire” is an embarrassment of riches. It’s full of pitch-perfect storytelling, methodically and confidently strewn across long, ambitious story arcs and populated with vivid, complex characters. Its attention to detail, and its inconspicuously accurate and unflinching realism are everything I’d ever hoped for in a dramatic series. The erratic and usually rare appearance of those virtuous traits in supposedly superior shows has frustrated me so much after years of TV viewing that it’s simply astonishing that this show has been able to sustain them so uniformly and effortlessly. The series also happens to be the best acted show I’ve ever seen — if there’s a more scarily commanding performer on television than Idris Elba as Stringer Bell, then I haven’t seen him. That guy should be a superstar by now.

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Glaring Omissions

After some patience, I finally got my iPhone situation sorted out: I’ve now happily left Verizon Wireless behind and am using my new iPhone on AT&T with generally satisfactory results. I tried AT&T’s wireless network for about a week in 1998 but dumped it quickly because its signal quality at the time was just plain unacceptable in New York City. So I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by how often my calls sound clear and strong; the network has obviously been significantly improved. The voice network, that is. You can pretty much forget about the company’s EDGE network for any sustained or urgent Internet access.

But that’s not what I’m here to complain about today. Rather, I want to point out a couple of conspicuous deficiencies in the iPhone. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m generally delighted with it; without a doubt, it’s a breakthrough device and, more importantly, it’s fun to use. But there are two significant and, to my mind, glaring omissions in the design of this product.

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New Site, New Blog for AIGA New York

AIGANY.orgYesterday we officially launched a brand new version of AIGANY.org which was beautifully and smartly designed by the dynamic duo of Greg D’Onofrio and Patricia Belen over at Kind Company. They’re a small but extremely talented shop in Brooklyn that’s doing some stellar work, including a terrific and invaluable resource commemorating the work of Alvin Lustig.

AIGANY.org is the official site for the New York chapter, not to be confused with AIGA.org which was famously and wonderfully redesigned earlier this year by Happy Cog for the national organization. Naturally, our site is focused on all the design-related events that the chapter puts on in New York City during the fall, winter and spring of each year. All modesty aside, it’s really a hell of a lot of stuff; you’d have to TiVo the majority of a television season just to attend half of these events each year.

So to help keep everyone apprised of what’s going on, this redesign features a new blog called, somewhat cheekily, DESIGNY (RSS feed). Get it? DESIGNY, design-y and design-New York? Corny puns aside, we’ve staffed this blog with a hand-selected coterie of up-and-coming design tastemakers: Randy J. Hunt, Louise Ma and Michael Brenner. Between them, they’ll be covering all of the events we put on, and more.

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Designed Deterioration

RimowaIf you buy yourself a piece of high quality luggage from Rimowa — and I’ve daydreamed about it, but have never been able to justify the exorbitant expense — you’re getting a structurally and aesthetically pristine object that’s going to get beaten up.

You know how airlines and luggage handlers can be; the vagaries of travel can be unkind to luggage of all kinds, including thousand-dollar, aluminum frame suitcases. The state in which a bag tumbles out of the chute onto a conveyor belt at baggage claim is never quite the same state in which you handed it over to the airline at check-in.

The thing with a Rimowa, though, is that those scratches, dings and dents are part of their aesthetic. A new, unspoiled Rimowa suitcase is actually the least desirable kind of Rimowa suitcase in that it is, to paraphrase something I once heard Jasper Johns say, an ‘ignorant’ suitcase. Unused objects are ignorant; only the ones that have been put to use, that have traveled, that have been tossed around have accumulated knowledge. That knowledge and familiarity, if it’s worn properly, can make an object desirable. A beaten, worn, scratched Rimowa then is actually a point of pride.

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The YouTube Aesthetic

YouTubeIt’s still too hard to locate online versions of recent television commercials. When McDonald’s, say, runs an ad that I want to talk about here, I don’t know of a particular place where I can go find a link for it. Sure, the more notable ones make it to YouTube, but sometimes it’s the mundane ones that don’t that are more interesting to discuss.

There are two that I have in mind: one, from McDonald’s, features two young, college-age guys, beatboxing some ridiculous rhyme about Big Macs or something. And there’s another for Oreo cookies that plays like a home movie in which two pre-adolescent girls sing the praises of Oreos. If I could find them to show you, I would, but maybe you’ve seen them already.

They’re both cute enough, but what struck me was how thoroughly they ape the ‘YouTube style.’ Which is to say, they are shot on digital video (though at a higher grade of quality than most of the source material at YouTube) in a cinematographically naïve manner; they feature pronouncedly offhand, amateur and somewhat embarrassing performances from purportedly ‘real’ actors; and they are ostensibly improvised — or at least they go through considerable effort to obscure the influence of any sort of director behind the camera.

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Arrogance Among Us

This afternoon I was chatting with a friend of mine about a graphic designer that we both know, and, maybe feeling a bit petty, we were remarking on how monumentally arrogant is this person. It got me thinking about how amazing it is to me when I encounter this kind of person — rude, disdainful and superior designers who can’t afford common courtesies to those below them in professional or social stature. When confronted with this type, what I invariably think in my head is, “Why are you so high on yourself? You’re just a designer.”

In no way am I trying to discount the social or material consequence of our profession; I’m as big a proponent of design’s singular, critical role in the world as anyone. At the same time, I try to remember that nothing that we do as designers is so important that it excuses us from being nice.

Aside from a very select few among us, we all earn our salaries in a service profession, after all. Which is to say that our job is to provide our labor — our design expertise — in service to others. By its very nature, that sort of arrangement demands a certain humbleness. With apologies to Yogi Berra: design is ninety percent talent and hard work; the other half is people skills.

And speaking of those select few: I’ve met a handful of the cream of the crop, those who practice design in a manner that might be described as ‘with impunity.’ To be sure, arrogance is well represented among them, but there are some stellar folks who happen to be extremely approachable, friendly and level-headed — and some of these folks happen at the very top of the industry. If these designers can bother to maintain humility even at those great heights, some of these lesser gods among us surely can too. I look up to the ones that can. Fuck the others.

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Robots, Rats and La Ragazza con la valigia

I’m back from my miniature sabbatical and rested up. What did I do on my time off? I took a lot of walks with Mister President, hung out a lot in my new neighborhood with various friends, and managed to catch a movie or two, including one that was on my list.

Here’s my advice on seeing “Transformers”: if you find yourself falling asleep in the middle of its two-plus hours running time due to the movie’s crushingly dull story line, monotonously unrewarding visual pyrotechnics, and director Michael Bay’s apparent disinterest in characters, don’t fight the feeling. Instead, just do I what I did and let yourself nod off. You won’t miss a thing.

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Holiday at Home

This week I extended my Fourth of July holiday by taking today, Thursday and tomorrow, Friday, off from work. The idea is that I’ll stay home and do nothing. It’s the vacation that most people, myself included, never allow themselves: luxuriating in an uninterrupted stretch of free time, without the hassle of travel, packing, site seeing and social commitments, and in the comfort of their own home.

I’ve been kind of burnt out for a few months, so I’ve been looking forward to this with great anticipation. So far I’m just hanging out, doing whatever I want to do, whether it’s watching television, or catching up on my reading, or hanging out with Mister President or fooling around on the Internet. It’s terrific; I’m letting myself off the hook for stuff I don’t feel like doing, and crossing off long-procrastinated items off of my list of things I’ve been wanting to do. I recommend it.

Unfortunately, the agenda for this miniature sabbatical does not include a heck of a lot of blogging. It just takes too much time to write these posts, and for this five-day weekend, anyway, I’d rather be doing other things. I’m not saying I’m not going to be blogging at all (or posting links to Elsewhere). I’m just saying the posts may be short. Like, this short.

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My First and Lost Weekend with iPhone

Here’s an update: my iPhone is now working after a rather tortuous weekend in which I was barely able to use it for anything. It wasn’t until Sunday night that my account was activated, allowing me to actually use the features on the phone at all. But even then, the telephone coverage wasn’t working (it was able to access Wi-Fi networks, though), and only this morning was I able to place a phone call with it. All told, that was some sixty hours or so after I originally bought it. Nicely done, Team AT&T, nicely done.

There’s so much iPhone coverage out there that I fear I won’t be able to add much of a unique perspective here, at least not today. I’m compiling a list of review points in my head, but here are my immediate take-aways.

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