When the first previews of Mac OS X’s “Aqua” interface made their way around the Web, I remember a designer friend of mine pronounced them to be “ass.” This was in the midst of a rage for a pixel-based aesthetic that fetishized jaggy fonts and graphics tied intimately to the display limitations of computer monitors.

Many designers then looked down upon any design element that was anti-aliased, shaded or that cast a shadow of any sort, and yet it’s since become apparent that this is the future of interface design. Soon afterwards, Windows XP copied much of the same aesthetic, and Windows applications like the recent version of AOL and new programs like Picasa have whole-heartedly embraced this direction.

I’m such a big fan of James Rosenquist that I almost couldn’t dislike the retrospective that’s been running at the Guggenheim New York for the past month, but all the same, I’m pretty convinced that it would unequivocally wow any newcomer to the old pop master’s oeuvre.

This will be of interest mostly to people who used to work with me at Rare Medium: the company, surprisingly, still lives, and not just in the perfunctory, diminished, managerial-only form in which it’s been limping along for the past two years. The old Atlanta office is actually still in the business of Web development and technology consulting, having bought all of that location’s assets from the parent company (at least, that’s what I understand happened) and adopted the URL RareMedium.net.

About a year ago, we bought four Alienware personal computers at Behavior. Alienware is widely acknowledged as the manufacturer of some of the best Windows-based personal computers on the market, and yet, as of yesterday, all four have had serious problems, and one of them has even broken down on two separate occasions. They all suffered the same problem — poor cooling requiring a fan replacement — and, at various times, each of my colleagues has been stopped cold during the course of several work days owing to this defect. It’s been a complete pain the butt, though less so for me, because I had opted instead to buy a much-less sexy Hewlett Packard earlier in the year. That one, however, has stopped running Microsoft Outlook reliably, and is such a mess of Windows patches, viruses, spyware and generally misbehaving software that I can barely use it anymore. Next week I’ll probably have to completely erase it and reinstall Windows, and everything else, from scratch.

Something about “The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were” really rubs me the wrong way. This project, which challenges “100 established graphic and fine artists” to produce album covers for their favorite musicians is like an exercise in small-mindedness, judging from the artists’ generally bathetic selections and the mostly unassuming — and often ridiculously off-base — designs produced in honor of these musicians. Forgetting for a moment the subjective matter of judging these works, I think what really irks me is the fact that fifty of these designs were shown at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, easily the most ridiculous institution I can think of.

My latest assignment at Behavior is developing a portfolio site for a commercial photographer, so I spent a lot of time today looking at various photographers’ Web sites for research. There’s no shortage of these to be found online, which means there is a fairly well-established orthodoxy of ‘best practices’ — slick Flash animation, non-scrolling presentation areas (often in daughter windows, minimal true interactivity, the same three or four major sections — but it also means that many of them are more or less indistinguishable from one another.

There have been three boxes full of my old comic books sitting in my apartment for over two years, shipped to me by my father when he moved out of his house. Every once in a while, I come across these unwieldy boxes in the course of cleaning up and think to myself that I should get rid of them and reclaim that precious Manhattan real estate for something a bit more adult.

Rarely can one can equate anything that a designer does during the course of a normal workday with a potentially prosecutable offense, but Mitch Mosallem, a former executive vice-president of graphic services at Grey Worldwide, managed to confound that common sense by landing himself in jail for about six years. According to Adweek’s account of the affair: “Mosallem pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with former salesmen at The Color Wheel, a New York-based print production house, to rig bids and overbill Grey clients such as Brown & Williamson on print work.”

It’s weird to see something as basically innocuous as graphic design have such disastrous consequences, isn’t it? What’s so disconcerting about Mosallem’s situation is that it’s almost the stuff of made-for-TV movies, and yet imagining designers in any scenario worth of popular entertainment — whether a life-threatening situation or a weepy melodrama — is generally an exercise in absurdity (all apologies to Mosallem’s family for the very real misfortune they’ve suffered). Take a graphic designer out of the context of graphic design and place that person in a much more serious context — like corporate embezzlement — and it somehow becomes difficult to take him or her very seriously. Why is that? Is there something inherently ridiculous about the job I’m showing up for every day? Should I become a fireman?

What I was thinking last night while watching “The Matrix Revolutions” at the local megaplex was, “What the fuck is this movie?!” At times I was sure it was a version of “Battlefield Earth” made for people who refused to watch “Battlefield Earth;”a bloated, brutal mess of a film obsessed only with shallow spectacle. This movie sucks. It’s fraught with the kind of decadent, rampant tedium that only multimillion dollar Hollywood budgets can buy — the kind that the original “Matrix” put to shame — and weighed down even further by miserable dialogue delivered by miserably directed actors.

NPR’s “On the Media” has got to be my favorite of the many excellent radio programs on that radio network; it’s by far the most enlightening and entertaining weekly exercise in parsing the complex motives behind media reporting available anywhere. While cooped up in the office lately, I’ve been glad to be able to access the past month of its archives on the Web site, and gladder still to see that they’ve begun offering these shows in MP3 format, and no longer solely in RealAudio. In fact, I’ve always felt that all public radio programming should be available in the open MP3 standard, rather than in proprietary formats like RealAudio or Windows Media; there’s a nice symmetry there. I hope that Marketplace follows suit.

The workday on Friday rolled right on into the middle of the night, and then I came back for more on Saturday, not leaving the office until about 10:00p. It was a rough weekend for Behavior, as we were all snowbound by an avalanche of work that had to be done by Saturday night, and it only made it worse that it had to be done while fighting the infuriating user interface of Microsoft PowerPoint. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten angrier at a program than I have at this one, so angry in fact that I began to keep a detailed list of all of my grievances — maybe I—ll clean them up and post them later in the week.

So, for that, it might’ve been a ruined weekend, but there was also something nice that happened on Sunday: our partner and good friend, Christopher Fahey, got married to his girlfriend of twelve years in a beautiful ceremony in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Congratulations, Chris. The reception was a nice excuse for a mini-reunion of all sorts of people I used to work with, and a nice respite from churning out PowerPoint slides. Still, I’m completely spent and I could use another day off.

Every company should have a page like this one, in my opinion. I’m saying this because I spent a good chunk of my day today trying to assemble presentable versions of over two dozen logos to appear in a presentation for a client. For three hours, I hunted down replacements for a host of logos swiped from Web sites at small sizes and scaled up to ungainly proportions by the magical un-prettifying powers of Microsoft PowerPoint. It would have made my life much easier to be able to find an officially sanctioned version of, say, the Lycos logo — at a decent scale and against a clean, white background — rather than having to manually retouch the one tucked into the upper left hand corner on the company’s home page.

There’s nothing particularly sexy about tomorrow’s elections, which will almost certainly guarantee that only a tiny fraction of the electorate will show up at the polls. This may explain, at least in part, why it was so hard to dig up an overview of the referendums on the New York City ballot. After some digging around, I came up with the Gotham Gazette’s overview. The hotbutton issue, of course, is Mayor Bloomberg’s quest to obsolesce partisan primaries — the Democrats are against it, and so is The New York Times.