Lined & Unlined

I’ve made a few improvements to the site over the last few weeks, and now that they’re working the way they should I figured I’d let everyone know that they’re there to use. I envisioned L&UL as a big collection of resources, readings, and (hopefully) useful information, and I think both of these upgrades are in keeping with that spirit. A big thank you, as always, to Renda for her help and advice.

Google Search
The first major improvement is that I’ve swapped out Wordpress’s search engine for a custom search engine (or CSE) powered by Google. I got this idea from Khoi Vinh of Subtraction.com, who’s switched his site over and written thoughtfully about that process in this post. The Google CSE is free and the only downside is that visitors have to deal with a few Google ads off to the side, which at this point I think everyone’s used to. The benefits, though, are huge. You can now search the library and the recommended readings much more comprehensively, for potentially long-lost things like this reading about the Hausdorff dimension or maybe a book by Clifford Stoll.

Designers, Booksellers, and Broadcasts
Delicious is an incredibly powerful tool for storing information, and one of my favorite things they offer is a Linkroll bookmarklet, which allows you to feed any set of links with a particular tag to your own blog or website. With this tool, I’ve built three new pages—one for Designers’ websites, another for Booksellers’ websites, and a third for Blogs and Podcasts—each of which will be dynamically updated anytime I tag a new site. I love scanning blogrolls for valuable new links, but often times lists can get so long that they become unwieldy. Hopefully this approach alieviates this problem by focusing the content a bit, as Delicious itself does.

Buckminster Fuller: “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

“Such neotraditional projects are beginning to challenge the American habit of ceding community design to traffic engineering. Their popular acceptance and favorable economics show that the opportunities they create for ‘negacars’ and ‘negatrips,’ for convivial communities, for safer and better places to raise children can be welcome both to the yearnings of those who live there and to developer’s bottom lines.” The concept of “negacars” from Paul Hawken’s excellent book Natural Capitalism.

One of my new favorite words is “walkshed,” defined as “A one-mile perimeter [that] defines [a] pedestrian travel zone.” The word was coined in 2006 by blogger Alan Durning. WorldChanging’s Alex Steffen expands on Durning’s idea in an excellent post here.

I was having burgers with some friends a few nights ago and when the subject of Joy Division and the new movie Control came up, they were talking about how much they loved the cover of Unknown Pleasures and wondered if I knew who the designer was. Of course it was the great Peter Saville, and, in pulling some links together for them, I found some great factoids on Saville’s Wikipedia page, another great bio at the Design Museum’s site, a fantastic write-up about the cover of Unknown Pleasures in Tate ETC by Jon Wozencroft, and, best of all, an essay called “The Dark Prince” by Alice Twemlow.

Just a little shout-out today—artist David Dodge has created a great new site called Portable Document, which offers PDFs by artists for free download. I’m so excited he’s chosen the pamphlet Justin Beal and I worked on together as one of the projects. Read more about Justin’s and my collaboration here.

“It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.” William Gibson, writing in the NY Times op-ed page on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of George Orwell’s birth.

Hosted by Alice Twemlow, Chair of SVA’s new D-Crit program, this historic evening with Wim Crouwel and Massimo Vignelli was an inspiring and energetic journey through two outstanding lives in design. Rob Giampietro and Laura Forde co-chaired the event for AIGA/NY, which was made possible by Presenting Sponsors Imagination, Parsons The New School for Design, and Knoll. After the event—Crouwel’s first in New York since 1965 and one of the few times he and Vignelli have spoken together—the two speakers offered AIGA/NY their responses to the famous Proust Questionnaire: Crouwel’s is here, and Vignelli’s is here. The event has gotten some coverage already. Over at DESIGNY, the AIGA/NY blog, Michael Brenner has a great write-up of the evening’s conversation. More write-ups on Monoscope and Unbeige, along with the charmingly titled People for the Ethical Treatment of Typography and Swiss Legacy. The photo above is taken from Kevin McCauley’s write-up, and Andy has perhaps our favorite response on his blog Reference Library. More photos from Laura Forde on Flickr.

“Forget limited edition,” says Alissa at UnBeige. Kidrobot has launched a toy you can’t even buy. You get him for a temporary time based on your display of creativity with him. His name is Nuke. His blog is here. His MySpace profile is here. Viva la gift economy.

Recent critiques of Olympic Games imagery have understated the difference between identity and symbol.

A game’s identity embodies a specific place and time, while its symbols are placeless and timeless. London 2012’s jagged neon constitutes those games’ identity, while the International Olympic Committee’s five rings are the institution’s enduring symbol of global unity. The IOC insists on this distinction, laying claim to its symbols explicitly, which triggered the recent rethink of Chicago’s Olympic bid.

Read More →

The new NYC TAXI logo is ugly and unsuccessful. Before I get to why, however, we should all be grateful that none of its many contributors—Smart Design, the Taxi & Limousine Commission, or NYC & Company and their designers at Wolff Olins—considered changing the taxi’s signature yellow color. The reason why cuts to the heart of what actually constitutes a taxi’s “idenitity” and what doesn’t. An identity is something we use to identify something out in the world. McDonalds’ golden arches help us to identify the fast food chain from the highway. The fact that it’s a McDonalds of Greater Cincinnati isn’t really part of its identity. We probably know we’re in Cincinnati and all we care about is getting something to eat.

The idea of a logo for NYC TAXI fails along the same lines. It’s an NYC TAXI because it’s yellow and we hail it in New York. It’s not an NYC TAXI because it says NYC TAXI on it, no matter what form those letters might take. Many designers, if faced with this brief, would question the need for this particular logo in the first place. The logo probably matters more to the Taxi & Limousine Commission as a sign of driver complaince than it does to people hailing a cab. It’s secondary to the customer’s experinence, so its placement, size, and form should indicate as much.

Read More →

We all have our good days and bad days with clients. On the bad days, read this and feel better.

“All my books until now have been about love, land and memory, but now I wanted to write a book about the opposite, about people for whom love wasn’t sufficient and money was enough; who were lost and who had no connection to history or place; yet for whom tomorrow wasn’t a promise but a growing threat.” Author Richard Flanagan talking about his book The Unknown Terrorist on Ramona Koval’s The Book Show. More on Bookworm.

“Typically, when I asked him about choosing between cinema and architecture, he replied that the two fields are more alike than they are different. ‘You are considering episodes, and you have to construct the episodes in a way that is interesting and makes sense or is mysterious,’ he said. ‘It’s about montage also—whether it’s making a book, a film or a building.’” From Arthur Lubow’s NYT Magazine article, “Rem Koolhaas Builds.”

This trip to the Cloisters with my girlfriend Susan was my third trip. I have now been there a total of five times, but we have only gone together once. Most of our visit that day was comparable to my other visits. Here again was the studied precision of the religious icons and illuminated manuscripts. Here again I felt the serenity of the abbeys and the reconstituted chapels. Like anything brought brick-for-brick across the ocean, the Cloisters retains the feeling of being somewhere else. It is equal parts unnatural and magical, a place grafted onto its surroundings but somehow still living, even blossoming, as a result.

Read More →

An ingenious Stephen Conley has compiled a database of ads from old comic books, where, as we all know, you could buy anything from Sea Monkeys to a Polaris Nuclear Submarine.

The pleasantly visual, charmingly original, totally abstract blog of Nicolaj.

On a trip to the island of Murano off the coast of Venice last summer, I made this little film at one of the touristy glass shops of a craftsman pulling a horse from a ball of molten glass.

Via the wonders of Wikipedia, we can experience a tesseract through a variety of descriptions: by its Schlaäfli symbol, Coxeter-Dynkin diagram, or an animated computer projection. I first experienced the word “tesseract” in the great book A Wrinkle in Time. Its author Madeleine L’Engle has recently passed away, but her wonderful book endures and its fourth-dimensional musings seem all the more poignant in her passing.

From Carnegie Hall’s “Sound Insights” Podcast comes a great quick interview with composer Steve Reich as he deconstructs his famous piece “Drumming.”

For the love of God, Simpsonize yourself (thx, Kevin).