Subtraction

This made the rounds last week but it’s worth playing with — or at least watching the video. It’s a novel and quite startling concept in object-oriented drawing that’s fascinating to see in action. Via Chunk Anderson.

A sobering diagnosis of how extensive the crisis is for journalism as something people need in their lives. Stijn is a technologist working in journalism and has an apparently keen understanding of the situation that he expresses clearly and urgently. Full blog post here. Via Mike Davidson.

From MIT Technology Review, a summary of the publishing industry’s ill-fated dalliance with iPad apps, including first hand experiences.

“And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted US$124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.”

If the moment is not here already, then it’s getting very close to the time when we can definitively declare the first generation of iPad magazine apps to be a failure. Full article here.

An ingenious proposal for speeding up text editing on iPad’s notoriously un-fast software keyboard (I sometimes joke that the kind of input you can do on it should be called ‘artisanal typing’). Instead of forcing the user to reposition the cursor directly on the text where it appears in the document, Hooper’s idea is to use a combination of a modifier key (shift) and dragging to move the cursor indirectly — oh never mind, I can’t explain it nearly as well as his very convincing YouTube video does. Go watch it here.

If you had a passion for new sounds in the 1970s, 80s or 90s, you knew the name John Peel. He was a pioneering British disc jockey who, over the course of a long career on the air at the BBC, championed the early careers of many of pop music’s most influential acts. When he passed away in 2004, he left behind a record collection consisting of some 26,000 albums on vinyl and tens of thousand additional singles and compact discs. In short, one of the most amazing record collections ever.

Now his family, in conjunction with The John Peel Centre for the Creative Arts, is digitizing a huge portion of that collection — not the whole thing, but enough to give us a good idea of what treasures lay within.

“The project will release the names and song titles of 100 records a week from the collection, for 26 weeks between May and October, featuring the first records from one letter of the alphabet each week.”

The first hundred, from the letter A, are out now. Unfortunately, it appears that you can listen to the actual music only if there is a corresponding album available on iTunes or Spotify, which is a shame. Still, having a peek at what Peel collected is a bit like getting to peek behind a magic curtain. Read more about the project here, and browse the collection here. (The interface is disappointingly literal, but in case you can’t tell I’m too excited about this to complain.)

Totally wonderful image from Spanish design studio Mr. Simon.

Visit the project and the studio’s site at mrsimon.es.

“Every day Comic Strip Tees will showcase a comic by a different cartoonist. It will also allow you to purchase a t-shirt with that comic’s artwork printed on it. Each shirt is limited edition and only sold for 7 days. The artists receive US$2 for every shirt sold and retain full rights to their work.”

Some of the artists featured so far include John Martz, Simon Fraser and Mike Allred. Find out more here.

Simon Garfield’s populist introduction to the world of typography was released last year to good reviews and, for a book of this subject matter, surprisingly strong sales. I haven’t read it, but I really liked the idea of such a book; design has long needed a best-seller on the order of Lynne Truss’ “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” which popularized punctuation, to help demystify typography for the masses. Unfortunately, designer Patrick Barber doesn’t think much of Garfield’s work. Read the full review here.

The Center for an Urgan Future argues that “New York City graduates twice as many students in design and architecture as any other U.S. city, but the city’s design schools are not only providing the talent pipeline for New York’s creative industries— they have become critical catalysts for innovation, entrepreneurship and economic growth.” Download the full report as a PDF here.

Using the recent Chardon High School shooting as a starting point, New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore looks at the history of gun rights in America. Before the late 20th Century, the widely accepted understanding of the Second Amendment was that it provided for the people’s right to form armed militias to provide for the common defense, not for the individual right to bear arms. In fact, The National Rifle Association did not, until the 1970s, consider that individual right to be part of its mission. The article quotes former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger as saying that the contemporary interpretation of the Second Amendment is:

“one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Lepore also reports on several other recent, harrowing and thoroughly heartbreaking tragedies in which relatively easy access to handguns has played a central role — including of course the recent shooting of Trayvon Martin.

I highly recommend you read this article for yourself, but the entirety of its arc is perhaps best summed up in this quote from David Keene, president of the N.R.A.:

“If you had asked, in 1968, will we have the right to do with guns in 2012 what we can do now, no one, on either side, would have believed you.”

Read the full article here.

If you have a 3-D printer you can fabricate for yourself this iPhone case that recreates that classic look of a 1980s-era cellular phone. The source files produce four pieces that snap together; plug in your headphones and it’s fully functional. The design even reproduces the belt clip. It’s free and Creative Commons licensed, to boot.

Find out more and download the files at Free Art & Technology.

There is a lot of great stuff on Vimeo and the video sharing service aims to celebrate it. For the second (?) time, the site is holding a festival and bestowing awards on the best short films in about a dozen categories of filmmaking. You can watch and vote for your favorites at the festival site, but I’m unlikely to make it through all of them, at least not in Web site form. What I want is a Vimeo app that highlights these nominees, and I want it to run on my television, so I can sit back in my living room and experience the festival — and the voting process — from the comfort of my own living room.

The School of Visual Arts’s Masters in Design Criticism program is holding its annual D-Crit Conference on 2 May. The headliners are moderator Julie Lasky, Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, 2x4 founder Michael Rock, and Harvard metaLAB director Jeffrey Schnapp, among others.

However, the real meat of the conference will be the thesis presentations from this year’s graduating class. Yesterday afternoon, I went to the D-Crit space on 21st Street in Manhattan and joined Nicola Twiley as a guest critic for a dry run of the class’ conference presentations. I was very pleasantly surprised by how unusual, inventive, fun and substantive they were. They are definitely not your run-of-the-mill thesis presentations; rather they’re out-of-the-box proposals for taking design criticism out into the real world, where it can reach audiences who would otherwise be completely indifferent to such things. I’ll be there on 2 May and you should be too. Get your tickets here.

The St. Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest known, still-intact book of European origin just sold for about US$14 million to The British Library in London. It was placed in a coffin about 1,300 years ago, which partly explains why it’s apparently very well-preserved. The Library’s curator says the book is “…the starting point of our evidence for the history of the Western book.” Pretty amazing. Read more here.

Israeli-born, London-based Nadav Kander won the 2010 Prix Pictet, a relatively new photography prize that focuses on environmentally conscious work, for this photo series. It focuses on the environmental impact of China᾿s rapid development, and how it intersects with the lives of countless families who live on the great Asian river’s banks.

These are powerful images, but I think there’s an even more interesting subtext here if you think of them as the kind of photos that Westerners seem to expect to come out of China — images of tremendous poverty juxtaposed with aggressive industrial growth. See more of them here.

Former head of the Transportation Safety Administration Kip Hawley writes:

“More than a decade after 9/11, it is a national embarrassment that our airport security system remains so hopelessly bureaucratic and disconnected from the people whom it is meant to protect. Preventing terrorist attacks on air travel demands flexibility and the constant reassessment of threats. It also demands strong public support, which the current system has plainly failed to achieve.&#8221

Hawley believes that the current system is too preoccupied with looking for prohibited objects, where is should be more focused on managing risk. He outlines five changes that he thinks will make a difference.

Interestingly, he notes that the system we have today is a result in part of recommendations made after 9/11 by firm Accenture. I think it’s about high time that management consultants took their place alongside lawyers in the pantheon of justly disliked professions.

Read the full article here.

This new Photoshop plugin lets you preview FontShop’s library of 150,000+ typefaces directly in your working Photoshop document. I just installed it and gave it a try, and it’s a very well done implementation, even if it’s not the most elegant execution one could hope for. (Note: I had to update my Adobe Extension Manager software before I could install it.)

Here’s how it works. You create a type layer within Photoshop with any of the existing fonts on your system (it doesn’t matter which) and type in your content. Then, from the FontShop plugin palette, you select any of FontShop’s fonts and click on the preview button. The plugin then reaches out to the FontShop server (I’m guessing) to generate a new image layer with the content from your type layer, rendered in the desired font. To be clear, the new layer is an image layer, so you cannot manipulate it the way you can a text layer, though it can of course use any standard Photoshop layer effects you like (drop shadows, embossing, etc.).

In the past I’ve lamented the fact that it’s not easy to try typefaces before you buy them, a problem that the Internet should have solved long ago. Though of course I would’ve liked it if this solution gave us access to the real fonts, the fact that it makes it significantly easier to try out new ones in the context of our existing workflows is a big deal. FontShop did a great job on this. Download it here.

The United Kingdom’s cabinet office tasked with transforming government digital services recently published this draft list of ten principles for digital design. As one might expect, none of them are particularly controversial, and so the whole batch seems somewhat bromidic. Still, it means something that a government office values design enough to put a stake in the ground about how it approaches the discipline. Read them all here.

I’m in San Francisco today, where I gave a talk at the super-fun TYPO Talks San Francisco yesterday. Alas, I have to get on a plane in a few hours, so I’ll miss the conference’s second day, which makes me sad because it looks terrific.

Anyway, for the plane ride back I just downloaded a rental of documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock’s latest: the awkardly but I guess appropriately named “Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope.” Spurlock tracks five super-dedicated fans as they make their annual pilgrimage to the immense Comic Con festival in San Diego.

Geek subject matter aside, what’s notable about the release of this movie is that it’s being made available online on the same day and date as it’s being released to theaters. It’s certainly not the first film to try this approach, but to me it seems like the first film for which such a forward-thinking release strategy makes perfect sense. This is a independent movie with limited theatrical distribution, but it has the kind of built-in audience that is geographically distributed but nontrivial. So if you’re in one of the bigger markets that can support theatrical releases you can see it at your local movie house starting today. But for geeks in smaller markets, having same day availability via online services is obviously a huge plus; like Comic Con itself, it pulls together a meaningful, focused audience out of a widely dispersed subculture.

Find out more about the movie, including where you can see it and/or rent it, “at its official site” For added color, you can also read about my one and only visit to Comic Con in 2006 too.

Designer Martzi Hegedus’ Frustro typeface is a well-executed implementation of the kind of idea that occurs to most type students at some point or another: letterforms that appear as if they’re facing in more than one direction.

The banality of the idea doesn’t take away from the fact that the end result is really quite handsome. I like it a lot, and expect to see it on a record sleeve or movie poster at some point. See the full project here.

Information porn at its finest: this mesmerizing animated map visualizes “the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the U.S.” in real time.

It was created by Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, who work for the Google Big Picture Group, though this project appears to be an independent production. Read more about it on the site. (Via Infosthetics.com.)