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Are Design Blogs Killing Design Writing?

Though I posted it to this site’s Elsewhere section, I want to take a moment to point out Rick Poynor’s recent article for Print Magazine, “Easy Writer.” Since its publication, this piece has stirred up a little bit of controversy because it can be fairly easily read as an indictment of design blogs and their allegedly low standards for serious writing and criticism about the practice and art of design. Right or wrong, it’s an important essay that bears a closer look. At the same time, it’s worthwhile to take at least a passing glance at the response to Poynor’s article by D. Mark Kingsley at the design blog Speak Up, too.

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Thinking and Driving

Living in New York, I can easily get by with rarely ever driving a car. Which, when I think about it, really accounts for the fact that I’m not dead.

That’s because I’m afflicted with a particular kind malady that a friend and colleague of mine calls “transportation narcolepsy.” That’s a condition in which, whenever I board a plane, train or automobile, I’ll fall asleep, almost instantly — or at least struggle to stay awake.

It’s the steady, vibrating motion of most mechanized transportation — the hum of a car on the road, the regular propulsion of a train on tracks, the muted rumbling of jet engines on a plane — that knocks me out. I’m surprisingly baby-like; rock me back and forth a little and I’ll pass right out. (It’s compounded by the fact that I rarely get enough sleep to begin with.)

This past weekend, though, I rented a car during my visit to California and discovered that having a G.P.S. unit on my dashboard is a surprisingly effective way to keep me awake. I also discovered a little something about what it takes to hold my attention.

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AIGA New York Stuff I’m Involved With

AIGAWe hit a little bit of bad luck over at AIGA New York during the weekend, when tomorrow’s Small Talks speaker, the one and only Jason Fried came down sick and had to cancel. So for those of you who have tickets to this sold out event, please don’t show up tomorrow (an official email went out to all chapter members and ticket holders this afternoon) as Jason’s appearance has been postponed. We don’t yet have a make-up date, but we’re hoping to schedule it for sometime in the next few weeks — hopefully pretty soon, actually.

Meanwhile, here are some more AIGA New York goodies to tide you over.

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The Failures Behind Success

Otis School of Art and DesignAs promised in my previous post, here is the text of the commencement address I delivered to the 2007 graduating class at my alma mater, Otis School of Art and Design.

It is, as I explained, intended to be an inspirational address rather than the sort of tactical overview I’ve been giving at my presentations thus far in my career. So at times it can be a tad maudlin, but at the very least it’s an honest communication of one of the more valuable lessons I’ve learned in my career: don’t be afraid of failure, because every success is just the result of a series of failures. You might want to have a box of tissues at the ready.

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Speech ’n’ Cheech

This weekend I flew to Southern California for a very quick Mother’s Day visit to my mom in the O.C.. While I was here, I took up a somewhat astonishing offer from my alma mater, Otis School of Art and Design in Los Angeles, to give the commencement address at this year’s graduation ceremony.

I was so flattered that I had been asked to do this at all that chances were good that I would have said yes in spite of what they told me next: that they would be giving an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts to Cheech Marin at the same ceremony. Meaning I’d be sharing a stage with Cheech Marin. THE Cheech Marin. As soon as I heard this, my response was, “Done. I’ll be there.”

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Pages Are the Problem

The names we give things can be so important because they can cause so much havoc. The fact that we call the basic organizing unit of a Web site a “page,” as in “Web pages,” has made the lives of Web designers immeasurably more challenging, and it’s a disservice to those coming to the Web from the world of print, too.

I’m not going to propose an alternative to the term page here — I may as well tape a “kick me” sign on my back if I’m going to venture in that kind of folly. I just thought it would be useful for me to articulate the confusion that I’ve seen that’s arisen from this particular terminology.

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To Wrap It Up, I’ll Take It

Here’s one of my favorite design innovations ever: there is a subtle, dotted grid pattern printed on the backside of Hallmark gift wrap that serves as a guide as customers cut away the necessary amount to wrap presents. This allows you to shear away an amount of paper that’s much closer to what you actually need to wrap a gift, and to easily do so at more or less right (i.e., ninety degree) angles — in both cases, you save paper, which is good for you, the environment and Al Gore. Everyone wins.

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Moviegoing in the Thirties

Hot FuzzA friend of mine who teaches film told me once not to misinterpret how often I went to the movies in my twenties as a sign of how frequently I’d be seeing them in the decades to come. Rather, the frequency of my moviegoing in my early thirties would be a more useful indicator, because it’s at that age when people start to form habits around whatever particular balance of responsibility and recreation suits them.

That advice is bearing itself out. Where I once saw, at a minimum, one or two movies a week, now at age thirty-five I can barely make it to the movie theaters more than once or twice a month. (I also currently happen to have two rentals from Netflix that have made themselves at home on my coffee table for more than two weeks now, unwatched, but that’s a digression.) The equilibrium I’ve achieved between responsibility and recreation tends to favor the former, and I find myself too busy to sit still for the hundred minutes or more required to properly view a film.

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The Soft Underbelly of Hardware

CanoScan N1240UWhy is the software that ships with digital hardware so frequently bad? When you buy a scanner or a printer, for instance, the software included in the box that allows you to interface with that hardware is, virtually without exception, some of the most poorly designed and difficult to be found anywhere.

I was reminded of that this evening when I spent a fruitless hour trying to reinstall scanning software for a CanoScan N1240U that I’ve had for several years. This software is categorically horrific. Even its most recent versions seem as if Canon is living in a Mac OS 9 world; scanned files cannot be named with spaces, and are restricted to thirty-two characters in length. The interface is hopelessly out of date (even though it was never particularly consistent, even, with Mac OS 9’s look and feel) and difficult to use. What’s more, the software comes in two obscurely named parts: CanoScan Toolbox and Canon ScanGear — can you guess the difference, and intuit which must be installed before the other? Neither could I.

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