How to Shoot People (and Places and Things)

Thu 8 Jun 200601:35 AM

After flailing around for about a year and a half with my Nikon D70 digital SLR camera, I resolved several months ago to finally take a proper class and learn how to use it for real. I found one that suited me at New York University: “Digital Photography Shooting Workshop,” taught by Joseph O. Holmes of the noted photoblog Joe’s NYC. As its title implies, the course allows me to forgo any education about the chemical processing of traditional photographic film — I have zero interest in that — and focus on shooting, handling the camera and responding to different shooting environments. Perfect.

Class meets twice a week: on Saturday afternoons, we make our way to select spots around New York City and take photos, with Holmes giving impromptu talks along the way. Then we choose five selects from those shots and review them, unmanipulated by Photoshop or any other process, in a group critique on Wednesday nights. It’s a short course lasting only about a month, and I’ve just come back from my first Wednesday night.

Card Sorting Exercises

Tue 6 Jun 200608:31 PM

It’s not explicitly a design problem, but since I have something of a soap box, I’m just going to use it: I’d do most anything to lighten the load of extraneous crap stuffed inside my wallet — not the dollar bills, of course, but rather the various faux credit cards that have instantiated themselves in my billfold. I carry a few proper credit cards — one personal card, a debit card, and two issued to me by the Times — but I’m also burdened by lots of cards foisted on me by marketers: stored value cards that act more or less like gift certificates, and membership cards — to museums, to professional groups, to my local video store — that try to impart a greater sense of worth than the membership itself probably deserves.

Add to that a handful of business cards, my subway fare card, a map of the New York City subway system, my driver’s license, health insurance card, and some wallet-size photographs carried for posterity, and the wallet is already three-quarters of an inch thick — and that’s before I add a single dollar bill, even. It’s a constant annoyance.

Crazy Like a Vox

Tue 6 Jun 200601:47 AM

Overcoming Roadblocks to Blockwriter

Thu 1 Jun 200604:24 PM

Here’s an update on Blockwriter, my concept for a text editor that’s as reductive and productive as a typewriter. After a fair amount of reader interest, I was disappointed to find that no Cocoa developers actually stepped up to claim the idea and run with it. Of course, it’s presumptuous of me to assume that any idea I throw out there will ignite a flurry of developer activity, but still, you can’t blame me for hoping a similar application would magically appear on Version Tracker one day.

Then I got a note from David Goodman, a MetaFilter reader who liked the idea enough to post it to Ask MetaFilter, in the hopes that someone could point him to a similar product for Windows. A respondent to that post, apparently, decided to take up the challenge and, according to David, has begun to code a prototype in Python.

Little Orange Icons

Wed 31 May 200612:37 AM

The world of XML syndication is still a soup of acronyms and counter-intuitive terminology — RSS, Atom, XML, feeds, aggregation, ’casts, etc. — but at the very least, we’re inching towards visual standardization in how we represent it iconographically. Microsoft, in an uncharacteristic but laudable show of cooperativeness, agreed late last year to adopt Firefox’s orange RSS/XML icon — a rounded little square with featuring what might be best described as ISO-style broadcast waves — for its Internet Explorer 7 browser.

I like this icon, but it has its shortcomings: First, it too neatly sidesteps the issue of what flavor of XML feed it’s representing, which would require, in some instances, that it be accompanied by a text label. No standards or guidelines exist for such text labels, as far as I know. And second, even with a text label, it can be fairly diminutive on a page, causing it to get overlooked easily.

Museum-quality Design Talkin’

Fri 26 May 200601:41 AM

Last night I went to a lecture by Paola Antonelli, the Museum of Modern Art᾿s Curator in their Department of Architecture and Design. The event was part of the AIGA New York’s long-running series of “Small Talks,” which features various luminaries of design speaking in relatively intimate venues — a really great program, by the way.

Antonelli is responsible for a series of acclaimed design exhibitions at MoMA over the past decade or so: “Humble Masterpieces,” which examined objects modest in size and price that also happen to be indispensable design accomplishments; “Workspheres,” which examined the evolving ideas behind the spaces in which we work; and a comprehensive retrospective of the legendary designer Achille Castiligioni, among others. They’re all original and impressive curatorial visions, but they also all focus on design in three-dimensions; architecture and industrial design have benefitted the most from the museum’s surveys of the design arts, while graphic design has suffered the most by neglect. In fact, the museum’s own permanent graphic design collection is somewhat narrow, devoted almost exclusively to twentieth century posters, which doesn’t exactly make for comprehensiveness.

Museum-quality Design Talkin’

Fri 26 May 200601:41 AM

Reading About Talking About “Getting Real”

Wed 24 May 200605:30 PM

The Adobe Design Center, an online magazine exploring all manner of digital creativity, has just published an interview that I conducted with 37signals front man Jason Fried. At first glance, the presentation of the article looks misleadingly as if it focuses on me, when in fact it’s actually a serious conversation about Fried, 37signals and their “Getting Real” approach to Web application development. I tried to pose a string of serious questions as to the practicality of “Getting Real,” both to satisfy my own curiosity and also to try to get Jason to respond to some of the contradictory experience and feedback that I’ve heard about the approach. I think I did a pretty decent job that sheds a little bit more light on this emerging developmental philosophy, but you be the judge. You can read the interview here.