Really good video tutorials on draughtsmanship from artist Matt Busch, illustrator of the book “You Can Draw: Star Wars.”

“In celebration of our fifteenth anniversary, FSI FontShop International has released a delicious 352-page hardcover FontFont showcase filled with illustrations, real-world examples, and essays.”

Sigh.

My favorite, OmniWeb, comes out on top for speed.

Yes!

“ Horizontal eye movements are thought to cause the two hemispheres of the brain to interact more with one another, and communication between brain hemispheres is important for retrieving certain types of memories.”

Excellent post on play and software.

A 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.

An informative screencast.

The Wall Street Journal technology coverage in a freely available, public site. It’s a kind of a strange initiative, but it’s done very well.

“…As a rule, bottled water is no safer or healthier than the H2O that flows from municipal water systems.”

Why 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.

The company will now offer Logoworks’ cut-rate graphic design services to their small business customers.

Pretty funny, and a little sad.

A little opaquely organized, but informative.

I’ve never worked in an architecturally significant building, never really stood inside of a structure designed by one of the world’s architectural greats and been able to see a future for myself within its spaces. But that changed today when I showed up for work at the new Times building at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan’s midtown. It was designed by Renzo Piano, and whether it fits your taste or not, it’s hard to deny that it’s the most notable new skyscraper to rise on the island this decade.

“…Attendee comments on 10 different elements of the event. These blurbs tend to represent the general tone of the dozens of comments we received in this particular area. SXSW response to this feedback is also posted in italics beneath each heading.”

Can someone explain to me how this is different from kerning? Via Daring Fireball.

It’s never too early to develop good habits, I guess. At least that’s what I thought when, here visiting my sister, I saw this to-do list taped to the wall in my nephew’s room.

Short on plot, but impressive, all-CGI short film from Marco Spitori at Cee-Gee.

This oversized balloon attached to an exhaust pipe is a physical visualization of an automobile’s pollution output in a typical day.

Beautiful and (no longer just) for Mac OS X only, but you can view the demo.

Very good post from the creator of Ren & Stimpy on translating drawing skills learned at school into professioonal work.

Steven Heller on the Third Reich’s use of iconography.

I’m flying out to California to see my sister today, but if I weren’t, I’d definitely be going to the Apple Store in SoHo at 6:30p, where Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith of the design studio Giampietro+Smith will be speaking and taking a few questions.

This is the first installment of Design Remixed, a series of talks developed by AIGA New York in collaboration with Apple (a parallel series exists in San Francisco, produced by that chapter), and there will be an introduction by the inimitable Liz Danzico. Plus, admission is absolutely free with the purchase of any 8-core MacPro! Just kidding, it’s free for everyone, even if you’re not a Mac fan whatsoever.

Rob and Kevin will show a small selection of their many, many beautifully designed projects, going in depth on the motivations, challenges and inspirations that brought about the end results. It’s going to be terrific. This is a young studio with a big future; they’re doing some of the most intelligent work in the field today and they’re barely getting started. If you want to see what the early part of a long career looks like, this is your chance. As you can probably tell, I’m extremely disappointed in my own inability to plan my trips sensibly enough so that I could be there tonight, but alas, I didn’t. Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made in life, is all I can say.

“When people meet us for the first time, before we even open our mouths, they get excited. They want to work with us. It’s a certain atmosphere that we bring, a certain aura. It’s all very connected.” I don’t know who these guys are, but this is the most absurd interview with designers I’ve read ever, I think. Ridiculous. Update: Dimitrious’s design work turns out to be quite good. Thanks to Mike Essl for the link.

Unconfirmed photographs suggest the shoe company has developed prototypes for the sneakers worn by Michael J. Fox’s character in “Back to the Future II.” (Update: it⁏s just a rumor. See McFly 2015 for more information.)

Early raw data looks strong.

Here and there for the past few months, I’ve been finding spare time to work up a new design for my dog’s Web site at MisterPresident.org. Now it’s done. The fact that I have this site at all is worrisome enough, I’m sure, but the newly added Twitter feed “written” by an anthropomorphized Mister President is sure to be the straw that broke the back on the camel of my dignity… or something. What can I say? Dog peoples is crazy.

“Even if you’re not a developer, there are some really cool things buried within the Apple Development Tools [that ship free with the operating system].”

In the wake of that photography class with Joseph O. Holmes that I took last year, I’ve only been able to make halting further progress in developing my camera skills. There just hasn’t been a lot of time to continue to take pictures as often and as intensively as a class environment allows, is one excuse. The other is that I’ve been dissatisfied with the lenses I’ve had for a long while now.

Aside from the absolutely middle-of-the-road 18-70mm lens that shipped with my Nikon D70, I’ve been using two others for about eighteen months now. First is a 50mm f/1.8 that produces beautiful results but works satisfactorily under relatively few conditions. It functions well with little light and its depth of field is evocatively abstract, but it’s visual range is fairly narrow and it’s not really the kind of lens that matches my aesthetic.

I’ve also got a highly imperfect but otherwise likable 70-300mm f/4-5.6 Nikkor telephoto zoom. As it turns out, I’m really a telephoto zoom kind of guy; I feel very comfortable with the reach of these lenses, the way they allow me to traverse great distances to capture small details and, let’s face it, to gently invade people’s privacy from afar. (A friend worries that if I upgrade to a longer lens, I’ll become a full-fledged pervert.) What’s more, I’m crazy for the spatial flattening effect that these lenses produce. Composing photographs through a telephoto lens feels very much like designing to me; the lens compresses space dramatically, reducing depth to a shallow, almost flat phenomenon, and the result feels akin to shifting nearly geometric shapes around on a plane.

Very nice illustration work.

Also see this account of other missing Welles films.

Terrence Rafferty on Robert Altman’s wonderful movie, “The Long Goodbye.” This is one of my favorite Altman films, and an essential detective movie. A fresh print will start showing on Friday for a week at Film Forum in New York.

Amazing results of new ban on billboards in Brazil. Via Boing Boing.

Mortifying.

Armin Vit’s review of Gary Hustwit’s “Helvetica: A Documentary Film.”

Nice tutorial from Antonio Carusone.

My old boss and the co-founder of i/o 360 enters the blogosphere.

Nominations for this year’s Webby Awards are out, and I’m here to shamelessly plug a couple of favorites. First off, NYTimes.com is up for an award in the somewhat odd category of Best Home/Welcome Page. Suffice it to say, I’d encourage everyone to vote for everything Times-related, including our excellently written The Caucus, up for Best Political Blog; DealBook, our indispensable breaking news outlet covering the world of high finance; NYTimes.com Real Estate, our highly addictive index and marketplace for homes you can and can’t afford; and These Times Demand the Times, the companion site to our marketing campaign that debuted last year, which is up for an award in the category of Best Copy/Writing.

But that first award I mentioned for Best Home/Welcome page is the one I’ve got my eye focused on most keenly. It would be a very satisfying affirmation of the work we all do at NYTimes.com to have our front door, so to speak, recognized for all the hard management, debate and tireless tweaking that goes into it; it would be nice to get it, is all I’m sayin’. So please go cast your vote.

Also, I want to cite Design Observer, up for for best Culture/Personal Blog, as another nominee that I think deserves special attention. (It has no affiliation with The New York Times.) Though not without its flaws — I sometimes take issue with its reserved embrace of the conventions of online publishing — it’s nevertheless a remarkable site. The fact that this kind of critical design thinking is published regularly and for free is still hard to believe even though the site is in its fourth year of publishing. Over that time, it’s come to occupy a unique and indispensable position in the blogosphere as a platform for some of the most engaging, most provocative and, crucially, most accessible serious design discourse around. They have my vote.

The most fun physical computing demonstration I’ve ever seen.

In last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Pamela Paul reviewed “Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole,” a new book by the political theorist Benjamin R. Barber. (It has a very good cover.) In reading it, I was struck by one phrase she wrote:

“Children’s lives are reduced to shopping excursions in which their identities are subsumed by brands — they’re the Nike generation, Abercrombie kids, iPod addicts.”

Hold up, “iPod addicts”? I haven’t read Barber’s book yet, so I don’t know if he in fact includes Apple and its ubiquitous iPod among his list of corrupting, infantalizing and, ahem, swallowing culprits. But the mention of everyone’s favorite fruit company alongside what I consider to be less seemly brands — Nike and Abercrombie are two of my least favorite companies anywhere — was a surprise.

In reading this, I was also reminded of a scene from “Fight Club,” an admittedly much less serious critique of modern capitalism, in which the characters embarked on a casual vandalism spree, targeting various consumer brands. For a very brief moment, an old-style Apple logo is displayed prominently in one of the targeted window displays. It’s not a flattering guest appearance for a logo, as the message is clear: Apple is an enemy.

Adrian Shaughnnesy says, “I’ve found nothing in the digital arena that offers a viable alternative to a well-designed CD or vinyl album cover. Instead, I”ve discovered… dozens of tiny record labels determined to hang onto physical packaging and expressive cover art, no matter what.”

“People ask me, more often than any other question by far, where to go to learn about wine… What I’m about to propose is a do-it-yourself method that has a lot to offer to just about anybody who loves wine, or wants to learn about it.”

Round-up time. If only each day was a few hours longer than twenty-four, I wouldn’t be so behind in posting these three items. If only!

First, I was lucky enough to be sitting about fifteen rows back from the third base line at Yankee Stadium on Saturday afternoon when Alex Rodriguez hit that game-winning grand slam against the Baltimore Orioles — in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs and two strikes. I acknowledge that even an event as unique as that is flirting the edge of what readers of this weblog are generally interested in, but I just wanted to say it was one of the coolest, most exhilarating things I’ve ever seen.

As it happened, my Saturday turned out to be a great day for seats at live events. Later that evening my girlfriend and I had front-row seats to see “Jack Goes Boating,” a two-act production from Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz’s LAByrith Theater Company — both actors appeared in it as well. It’s currently in its original run right now at The Public Theater in downtown Manhattan. Even if it’s not a groundbreaking entertainment, John Ortiz’s confident, commanding and highly watchable performance reaffirmed my contention that he’s currently the best kept secret going in the world of acting.

Finally, I’m very, very late to the party on this one: Wow, have you seen “The Shield”? I’d completely missed this FX Network original series until now, but it’s unbelievably good. Oh, and while we’re talking television, one more thing… Sci-Fi Network’s Battlestar Galactica is the most overrated television show ever.

“A common misconception is that WebKit is another web browser, but it’s not a browser. WebKit is a browser engine. Safari is a browser which uses that engine.”

One question I get from time to time is, “What do you think of so-and-so’s redesign?” People ask me this about many sites of all kinds, but most often, the inquiry regards the redesign of a news site of some sort. As it turns out, my position as Design Director at NYTimes.com suggests that I might have a halfway interesting answer.

To be honest, I don’t like to comment on our competition, mostly because I think it’s inappropriate for me to make remarks that could so easily be confused as an official New York Times view on what another news outlet is doing online. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion on what they’re doing, I just think it wouldn’t be productive of me to air my thoughts publicly (catch me in private if you really want to know), even if those opinions are generally positive — and they frequently are, as lots of companies in the online news space are doing exciting work.

I do make an exception, though, for those instances where I think a competitor has really hit it out of the park, and when I like a design enough to be effusively positive about it. One example of this, from last September, is the discussion between Liz Danzico and myself over last fall’s redesign of The New York Post’s site. It’s not without its flaws, but I still stand by my contention that it’s a nearly pitch-perfect expression of that paper’s brand and journalism. Nicely done, I say.

Today I want to talk about another example of a newspaper that, I think, is doing really wonderful work online: The Times of London’s recent redesign beautifully translates (versus simply transferring) its broadsheet aesthetic into something vibrant and native to the Web.

Can I have one? (Thanks to Mike Essl for the link.)

Article by Wilson Miner.

Wieden & Kennedy’s recent poster bears a striking resemblence to work done for Olivetti’s Tetractys printing calculator in 1956. (Thanks to Manuel for the link.)

One of the better design school projects I’ve seen.

March’s Illustrate Me is by Liz Danzico, the multi-talented interaction designer, writer, editor and information architect who is partly responsible for, among other things Boxes and Arrows and AIGA Voice, serves as a senior development editor at Rosenfeld Media, and on the advisory board for The Information Architecture Institute. Whew. To say that she’s prolific is an understatement; there are about a dozen other significant things on her résumé that I don’t have room to mention here, but somehow she made time to produce a really wonderful, whimsical interpretation of three of my posts for last month. Go see it right now on the March 2007 archive page.

Web site for the new Miranda July movie is as clever and cute as her previous work, for better or worse.

Overview in today’s New York Times. Jeff Jarvis responds.

On the occassion of AIGA New York’s screening of “Helvetica: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit,” Michael Bierut waxes nostalgiac on the art of typesetting.

“A graphical dissertation on the number one song in America.” Very clever and hilarious. Thanks to Mike Essl for the link.

Aza Raskin argues that the latest version’s new tabs configuration “…takes a giant step backward by actively concealing information.”

“Problem: Climate change is a complex and sometimes contested topic; nevertheless, it cannot be ignored. Designers, in particular, must examine how our practices impact the environment.” Sort of like a Flash-based Al Gore presentation. Very nicely done, but I didn’t make it to the end.

Since its debut late last year, there’s been no shortage of adulatory commentary about the Nintendo Wii, which is probably the reason I’ve abstained from writing about it here.

Suffice it to say, I think it’s a home run of a console, a real breakthrough device that has expanded our collective idea of what non-gamers — regular people — can expect from video gaming. I know, because while I’ve long been a huge technology enthusiast, video games had left me cold for about fifteen years. Before the Wii was introduced, I never gave a serious thought to owning a PlayStation or an Xbox.

Now I own a Wii. Or rather, my girlfriend does, because I bought one for her as a gift in February. We play it regularly, and we consistently marvel at its elegant learning curve and high degree of fun. It’s a wonderful example of smart, empathetic design.

But I think I’ve found a flaw in it: it has the wrong form factor.

A look at what’s supposedly happening Web-wise at the Gray Lady. No comment from me.

Time for a quick round-up of matters relating to AIGA New York, of which I am a board member. When last we left our story, I had endeavored to bring more digital design into the fold when it comes to programming the New York chapter’s events. We started last fall with a Jeffrey Zeldman Small Talk which was quite successful, I think.

Things have been a little quiet since, but only because it’s taken some time to cook up some more interesting things. First off, we’re nearing the final stages of a new redesign of the AIGANY.org Web site. You may recall that I sent out an open call for New York-based design studios interested in helping us with this project last August. I got disappointingly few replies to that call, but as it turns out, one of the respondents — a terrific shop called Kind Company — was the perfect fit. Look for a brand new site from them soon.

“I read dozens of blog posts on[the Kathy Siera incident], and I still had no clue who might or might not be guilty of what. Each new post I read tangled the web further, layering misinformation on top of disinformation.”

Open source software that functions as “a PDF Reader and note-taker for Mac OS X. Skim is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF.” Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Hypothetical redesign.

“The anticipated battle between Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 for videogame console supremacy has become a sideshow to the unexpected rise of Nintendo’s Wii as the new-generation game console of choice.”

One sure sign that you’re getting old is when you notice yourself stubbornly refusing to move up to newer versions of your software. For instance, I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop version 7.0 more or less since it was first released. And though this version was released five years ago in 2002, and though I own a full version of Adobe Creative Suite ( newer, but no spring chicken, itself), it’s still the version that I prefer to launch every time I sit down to work in front of my Intel-based iMac.

I realize that, compared to more recent editions, version 7.0 is quite feature-limited. But in some ways, I prefer those limitations, especially its inability to nest layer folders. I know, that’s a little nuts, but I find that being restricted to a single level of layer folders helps me keep all the constituent layers in my files organized. I’m the kind of obsessive nut who likes to properly name every layer in my files, and to keep them neatly organized; I’ve found that nesting those folders works against that.

Most of all, I stick to Photoshop 7.0 because it’s fast. It boots up almost as quickly on my aging 12-in. PowerBook G4 as it does on my much newer, much faster iMac, which lets me work on the same files whether I’m at home or at work. I’ve long considered the secret to using Adobe software to be to run older versions on newer hardware, and this is my primary evidence that doing so works.

Steve Jobs and EMI Group head Eric Nicoli on why they went D.R.M.-free on their iTunes deal.