Another great article from Design Staff, the design-for-startups blog that I wrote about earlier in the month: Writer Braden Kowitz offers one approach to interviewing design candidates:

“…Set up a well-scoped design problem and ask a candidate to solve it on the spot. It can take anywhere from 15-40 minutes depending on depth and complexity. It’s such a good technique because there’s no faking (like showing portfolio work from a big team effort) and when moderated well, it can simulate working together.”

It’s difficult to craft just the right kind of challenge though, and Kowitz suggests that the trick is to pose a problem that can’t be solved perfectly and therefore has many possible solutions.

“The point of the design exercise is not whether someone can get the right answer; it’s to see how people think. And the best way to keep people thinking is to invent a problem that’s impossible to solve.”

This is a more hands on approach than I ever used to hire designers myself, though I don’t doubt its usefulness (and in fact after reading this I may consider employing something like it in the future). In my experience, asking a design candidate to explain in great detail the origin, development, launch and aftermath of a project from his or her own portfolio was almost always enough insight into that person’s thinking processes for me to decide whether or not they would be a good hire. Still, it’s true that the problem of hiring designers, especially for startup founders not accustomed to evaluating design talent, is a tough one. I might write a bit about my own approach in the near future, but in the meantime, be sure to read Kowitz’s post at Design Staff.

I like it when a Web site chooses a name that spells out its purpose explicitly, yet still manages a bit of unexpected humor. Such is the case with Forget the Film, Watch the Titles, which showcases an eclectic array of film title design. My favorites are the ingeniously simple ones, like “The Tall Blond Man with One Red Shoe,” which is nothing more than a pair of hands doing banal card tricks, and “Ex Drummer,” which rolls back a long sequence in reverse. There are some duds, too, though, like “xXx: State of the Union,” which succumbs to the recent trend of virtual cameras flying dramatically in and out of corny CG-animated spaces. Anyway, there are almost two hundred of these at the site for you to waste an afternoon on. Enjoy!

Animation writer and historian Amid Amidi, editor at the fantastic site Cartoon Brew, takes a critical look at the “photorealistic cartooning” used in Spielberg’s adaptation of the classic Hergé character.

“Animation is evolving so rapidly before our eyes that we can barely keep pace with these changes. We desperately try to apply old labels and definitions and find them insufficient. Still, ‘Tintin’ at its core is pure animation created frame by frame. True, it was augmented by other processes, but the end result was achieved distinctly through frame-by-frame techniques. And if the mark of a true piece of animation art is the director’s control over every element within the frame, then never has this been truer than in ‘Tintin.’”

It’s an interesting perspective on the current artistry in animation, which is still undergoing massive change thanks to the advent of computer graphics. Amidi’s take is that the film is an important milestone if not wholly successful, and that it is instructive in many ways for the future of the craft. I haven’t seen “Tintin” yet, but I’m very eager to see how successful the techniques that Spielberg (and producer Peter Jackson) used are in conveying both its narrative and in doing justice to the character’s roots. Read the full post here.

This concept for “a charity donation platform using New York City subway cards” is a project from students at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. The idea is to capture the bits of monetary value that often remain on MetroCards but that are too insubstantial for many riders to bother with. The students envision a kiosk-like device where a rider can swipe their card and the remaining value gets transferred to a centralized charity fund.

It’s a nice idea. I haven’t been to a senior thesis show at ITP for several years, but this concept seems more sophisticated and less superficial than many of the others I’ve seen from that program. However, I have my doubts as to whether the Metropolitan Transit Authority is really looking to help its consumers direct those bits of remaining value to a charity fund. Given their seemingly chronic budget shortfalls, I can’t imagine the “lost” money isn’t already accounted for in their spending.

Anyway, find out more at MetroChange.org. There’s also lots of content about what went into the project at the accompanying blog.

This week I was lucky enough to be invited by the venerable Jeffrey Zeldman to be a guest on his podcast “The Big Web Show.” We jumped on Skype yesterday morning and recorded a ~45-minute conversation that covered such topics as my experience at art school, how I got started doing design, my career co-founding a design services business, my tenure at The New York Times, and of course my work on Mixel, the social collage app we launched last month. It was lots of fun, and many thanks to Jeffrey for the invitation.

You can get an overview of our discussion, audio of the episode itself and a link to subscribe to “The Big Web Show” over at Jeffrey’s blog.

Chris Wild’s Retronaut is an amazing compilation of visual artifacts from the musty past. I came across this entry tonight: a shockingly beautiful set of photographs from Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated voyage to Antarctica in 1915.

They look like they may be hand-tinted but apparently they are in fact color photographs, with an ethereal, almost ghostly quality. See the full blog post here.

The venerable design magazine Eye has a great blog that highlights fascinating stuff from the world of graphic design. This post looks at how an acrylic storefront sign is actually made, and includes step-by-step photographs from press to machine-tooling to hand-cutting.

I’ve seen countless signs like this all over the world, but I was surprised to realize that, before reading this article, I really had no idea how they were made. In fact, I have no idea what happens inside a sign-making shop, which is pretty embarrassing for someone who claims to know a lot about typography.

Read the full blog post here.

Over at the newish blog Design Staff, Braden Kowitz makes a cogent case for why fit-and-finish is important enough for a designer to fight for, even in the face of indifference from peers on a product team (a situation that I’ve encountered many times throughout my career). Kowitz lays out a few useful arguments and offers helpful tips that might help other designers convince engineers, product managers and others that such attention to detail is not just “design for design’s sake.” Read the full blog post here.

By the way, in addition to having a great name, Design Staff is an excellent addition to the design discourse. Its impressive roster of writers have built many well-known and widely used digital products, and its mission — “Design Staff is dedicated to helping startups design great products” — is laudable. Since starting Mixel and immersing myself in the startup ecosystem, I can attest that many startups struggle mightily with the kinds of design issues covered here.

Over the weekend I turned forty. Actually, not long before that I was twenty years old, and then all of a sudden it was Saturday night and I was celebrating four decades on this planet.

Forty is a kind of milestone no matter what. But it was extra special for me because I got an amazing gift. Laura corralled several dozen of my friends to each draw, paint, photograph, collage or diagram portraits of me. She pulled this off conspiratorially, so I had no idea at all that this nontrivial creative project was happening behind my back for almost two months. When she presented it to me Saturday, at a birthday dinner with some friends, I was utterly shocked. You can see the portraits over here.

Please indulge a little bit of sentimentality here, because I was overcome with emotion as I flipped through the pages. It reminded me that I have amazing people in my life, and how lucky I am in that respect. It also reminded me that somehow, in spite of nearly four decades of clumsily ambling my way around this planet, I managed to find the right person to spend my life with. Being reminded of that fact was the best possible gift I could have gotten.

I happened across these two wonderfully detailed drawings in my RSS reader today. This first one is by a third-year illustration student at Middlesex University.

Here’s he other one, by the artist David Barth.

Just sharing.