Machined from solid aluminum, brass or titanium stock, these striking cases give your iPhone that 70s sci-fi television show look. Via Thrillist.

Not actually a resource for typographic grids in New York City, but rather “a photo blog dedicated to exploring and discovering the City of New York block by block and corner by corner. Updated every weekday, each post covers a new block with a focus on the mundane and ephemeral.” I got a little nostalgic looking at today’s pictures for 7th Street between Avenue A and 1st Avenue, where I lived for several years. Sniff.

Just a quick appearance note: next Tuesday evening, 28 Jul, I’ll be speaking at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. The event is part of Galapagos’ Career Camp, a five-part series running through mid-September that brings together New York City-area professionals (employed or otherwise) for networking, discussion, and brief lectures (conveniently, drinks will be available at the cash bar, too). Also onstage will be my frequent partner-in-crime Liz Danzico, up-and-coming design technologist extraordinaire Erin Sparling and — last minute addition! — the amazing designer Jason Santa Maria. It’s going to be fun! Tickets are just US$5 and are sure to go quickly, so register right away here at this link.

Excellent and thoughtful look by writer Mark Lamster at the experiences offered at New York’s two new cathedrals of baseball. “Both buildings ply the kind of nostalgic aesthetics that reinforce fans’ bonds with their chosen team… In each case, the feel-good design is the lipstick on the pig of a massive commercial project, financed in large measure by the public and unabashedly aimed at liberating fans from the contents of their wallets.”

I haven’t yet been to the Mets’ Citi Field, but I’ve watched one game at the new Yankee Stadium (Yankees beat the Tigers, 5 to 4). It’s certainly a pleasant upgrade from the creaky grandeur of its predecessor, and I could hardly complain when I saw that lots of problems from the old ballpark had been corrected (having lines of sight from the concessions to the field is fantastic). But in its museum-like — almost mausoleum-like — devotion to nostalgia, the new architecture and the experience it provides just feels to me like a huge missed opportunity. It could have been something new and marvelous created specifically for 21st Century baseball fans; instead, it preoccupies itself and its fans with thinking about the last century. That’s a waste.

This is a completely genius promotional video for the coming relaunch of NPR.org featuring the voice — and face! — of their marquee broadcaster Scott Simon experiencing the redesigned site for the first time. There’s nothing revolutionary in these three minutes and six seconds, but the simple, elegant use of their core storytelling strengths combined with the demonstrative power of the screencast format is just really, really smart. It’s a rare example of an ‘old media brand’ doing something genuinely surprising in a new medium.

A review of Yahoo’s new home page design, currently available as an opt-in beta. “After spending some time trolling around the new Yahoo.com, I think there’s a strong possibility that the redesigned home page will fall short of its lofty goal of being the ‘center of people’s online lives.’”

Last gasps for a dying medium: as the printed newspaper’s future looks increasingly precarious, some noble — but not necessarily game-changing — attempts are being made to revisit its former glory. This summer two different projects have ambitions to resurrect the long suffering funny pages, i.e., newspaper comic strips printed in a broadsheet (or broadsheet-esque) format. Even as newspapers seem to be continually shrinking, whether in page count or in the actual dimension of their pages, these comics are making efforts to look big.

At least I think that’s what this is. It’s posted on a site, This Recording, that has no shortage of interesting content covering the pop cultural landscape, but is sorely lacking for just a little bit of explanation about what it is they’re trying to do with it — and they could use a little bit of design help making each bit of content more readable, too. I had a good time clicking through the site, but I have no idea what it is.

Just a very quick post: I can’t stop looking at these shots of Ill Studio’s design and art direction for Magazine Issue 47. The muted yet sumptuous tone of the photography, the generous yet judicious use of white space, and the exquisite yet unfussy typography is really something to aspire to. Amazing.

I just got around to watching this tongue-in-cheek, movie trailer-style promotional for a forthcoming new release of the behemoth productivity suite. Its surprisingly high production values and not so surprisingly embarrassing action movie conceits belie the core truth about anything Microsoft does: they have more money than they have sense. Or rather, they have more money than they have taste.

The latest exhibition at The New York Times art department’s 7th floor gallery space is called Sketchbook Obsessions, and it opens tomorrow evening, Thu 16 Jul, at 7:00p. If you’re in New York and can make it, you’re more than welcome to do so — just send an R.S.V.P. as soon as you can.

This show is all about sketchbooks, and it features a blizzard of pages from the sketchbooks of some of the brightest names in design and illustration. I’ve been watching my colleagues here as they’ve been hanging the show over the past couple of weeks, and it looks great. The wall is literally covered with countless amazing doodles, and it really captures that immediate, raw energy of unconstrained sketching, the instantaneous transmittal of ideas to paper via pencil. It’s going to be a fun show, and best of all it’s free.

Here’s a rant. Thanks to the power of randomness and that old ‘my ears were burning’ sensation, I somehow happened across a comment on a blog the other day in which my Twitter habits were called into question. The remarks, which were about me only in part, contend that “although [Khoi] hasn’t Twittered in months (again), he’d be worth following if he ever embraces the medium.” Well.

First of all, I’m flattered, really, that anyone considers what I have to say interesting enough in any medium to lament my absence from it, which is one way I interpret what this commenter meant. However, my other interpretation goes a little something like this: “Khoi is not keeping up with his busy work. Tsk. Tsk.”

Two decades of changes to the corner made famous by the cover of The Beastie Boys’ much-heralded second album, as seen through photographs submitted by fans. Now nearly unrecognizable, maybe the most interesting thing to note is how unremarkable the change has been — the original ’Paul’s Boutique’ was a completely unassuming sporting goods store, and today it’s a completely unassuming shawarma and falafel joint named Three Monkeys.

“Current technology can break Web type free from the Georgia/Verdana prison, but getting all the stakeholders — Web designers, type designers, font vendors, and browser vendors — to agree on a standard may be a bigger challenge than the technology.” Good overview of where things stand today.

“Public Enemies,” the new film about the notorious bank robber John Dillinger, is an amazing movie. Then again, I freely confess a predisposition to liking the work of its director, Michael Mann. I’ve seen nearly every movie he’s released, and there’s not a single one of them that I’ve found to be less than completely engrossing.

Over the course of his career, Mann has produced a taut, stylistic and often brutally impersonal filmography that seems most interested in the concept of work. His movies are preoccupied with how men (almost always men) of extraordinary skills practice their craft — and the price they must pay for doing so. “Public Enemies” is no exception, and for those who are expecting a florid character portrait set in a bygone era, make no mistake: this movie is about how John Dillinger robbed banks and about how G-men hunted him down, and only that. It is resolutely disinterested in its principal subjects’ family backgrounds, romantic histories or psychological makeups.

The Times architecture critic makes an impassioned case for preserving this exemplar of the postwar Metabolism school of Japanese architecture. Nakagin Tower is fascinating at least as one of the most fully-realized expressions of modern design’s love affair with modularity: “Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.” However, over the years, it has decayed from disuse and impracticality, which leaves me conflicted on whether even architectural failures deserve preservation. On the other hand, in photographs at least, Nagakin Tower has an unearthly, almost perverse beauty like few others buildings, and what a shame it would be to lose that forever.

I’ve been trying to think if there’s ever been a consumer experience that’s quite as much of a mess as watching video at home is today. What was once so simple now seems inordinately, hopelessly complex. The old paradigm of simply buying a television set, attaching an antenna or a coaxial cable and turning it on seems like a ritual from a lost epoch, something far less evolved humans settled for in order to enjoy scraps of primitive entertainment. In these more sophisticated, digitally-enhanced times, the living room has become a mess.

Now, watching television requires a complex orchestration of sources, devices, meta-systems, cables, asset management and general confusion. Currently in my living room, I have a veritable cat’s cradle of a setup, including two DVD players, a home theater system, a secondary speaker system, an Apple TV, a MacBook, and a putative ‘universal remote’ that nevertheless fails to obviate the many additional remote controls that linger on the coffee table. (Yes, there’s a lot of redundancy there, but sadly there’s some kind of resigned argument for all of it.).

“After beating the drum for giveaways throughout most of his book, Mr. Anderson eventually acknowledges that his idea is in fact not viable. Such are the perils of his sloppily constructed sweeping argument.”

A brief appraisal of the design environment at the Bronx Bombers’ newly minted home. “The new Yankee stadium… like most retro stadiums, bears the burden of being faux, a recreation, like a Disney version of reality. It works and it doesn’t.”