Herewith, the last of the photos from my “Digital Photography Shooting Workshop” class at New York University. Tonight was the last night, sadly, but I learned a hell of a lot, a hell of a lot. And I had a tremendous amount of fun, too, which doesn’t hurt at all. All of which is the result of the easy-going yet comprehensive expertise of our instructor, Joe Holmes; he’s going to be teaching this course again in the fall, and if you own a digital SLR camera and want to become a better photographer, I highly recommend signing up. Worth every penny.

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As of the beginning of this month, I became a member of the board of directors for the New York chapter of the AIGA. Notwithstanding the fact that I find their recent, subtle re-branding efforts confusing — mothballing the explicit translation of the organization’s acronym as “American Institute of Graphic Arts” and opting instead for a more global-minded, less literal tagline: “The Professional Association for Design” — I’ve always had great respect for the AIGA.

Over the past several years, I’ve been involved with the organization at various levels, including designing micro-sites like Gain 2.0 and helping to re-architect their Design Forum (a job that, in retrospect, I wish I’d pulled off better), and I’ve been good friends with some of the staffers at the organization’s national office.

As corny as it is, I really do believe in the AIGA’s mission: “To identify and define issues critical to its membership and the graphic design profession; to explore and clarify these issues for the purpose of helping to elevate the standards of the business of graphic design; and to create a forum for the exchange of information, views, ideas and techniques among those engaged in the profession.” In many ways, the organization is uniquely positioned to do a large amount of good for graphic designers and to create the conditions under which great design can flourish.

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There are just two more classes to go in the “Digital Photography Shooting Workshop” course that I’m taking at New York University with the noted street photographer Joe Holmes, who happens to be one of the most relaxed yet effective instructors from whom you could ask to learn photography.

It’s been enormously fun and I’m still learning loads every session but… thank goodness it’s coming to a close, because meeting twice a week is kicking my ass. The class has been spending six hours a week together, half spent on Wednesday evenings and the other half on Saturdays. But this past week, I had to redo an entire shoot on Tuesday night, and, in a selfless and unpaid bit of overtime, Joe extended our mid-week class by about ninety minutes to teach us some night shooting techniques. Now, I’m up early on a Saturday and preparing to leave for the first of these last two classes — we’re meeting out at Coney Island to take photographs at the annual Mermaid Parade. If I’m not exhausted enough already, I’m sure to be by the time I’m back from Brooklyn.

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It took me a little while to get this together, but I’ve just uploaded the May 2006 entry in my ongoing “Illustrate Me” project, which I debuted last month. As a refresher: at the end of each month I’m inviting one illustrator to create artwork to illustrate at least three of the posts I wrote in that month. The only stipulations are that the piece must be black and white, and it must feature the title and dates of the posts it’s representing.

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Blockwriter, my concept for a reduced-functionality word processing application that acts just like a manual typewriter, is slowly but surely inching its way to reality. Just two weeks ago, an editor from the Britian’s Guardian newspaper asked me to write about the idea for their Office Hours section, which runs on Mondays. The article ran in today’s edition of the paper with the somewhat over-promising title “Strokes of Genius.”

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If you haven’t yet seen it, the reigning lion of design criticism blogs, Design Observer, recently launched a new visual make-over. At long last, the tiny white type on dark gray background of their old look and feel has been cast aside, and now it’s finally possible to read the text without incurring lasting corneal damage.

It’s not a revolutionary design, but it’s exactly what it needs to be. The new look is austere, tasteful and orderly, and I like it quite a bit even if I do wish the text was larger still (I’m somewhat prematurely succumbing to that inevitable decline in the power of the eye to make out teeny tiny designer typesetting). I’m not going to get into a big review of it, though — for that, you can turn to the excellent roundtable discussion on this subject over at Speak Up.

Mainly, I point it out because I want to piggyback on a great piece that Michael Bierut published on the site a few days ago about the recent, unfortunate passing of photography great Arnold Newman.

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A design flourish whose time is clearly now — or maybe it was fifteen minutes ago — is reflectivity, that very popular style of making objects cast a reflection on a horizontal plane directly beneath them. The most notable example of this, and to my mind, the apex of the trend, is Apple’s iChat AV release from last year, which renders video conferences of three or four people as if the concurrent screens are arranged in a virtual room. Beneath each of the video conferencing screens is a beautifully rendered, dynamic reflection.

It’s a very slick look that creates a dramatic spatial illusion — the kind of illusion that, in the recent past, digital design has been skittish about. The conceit of virtual spaces — rooms, cities, etc. — being used as metaphors for information display is something that fell out of favor with the passing of CD-ROMs as a viable medium; three-dimensional space in user interfaces became cheesey, basically, and we’re only now starting to think of the approach as not cheesey. But it may be too late.

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This photography course that I’m taking is only about four weeks long, so I thought I would follow up with updates on each week’s progress. I’m not going to write extensively about the lessons taught each week, but at least I’ll be posting new photos to Flickr — now organized neatly into their own set, called “Photo Class” and making some brief comments. Don’t worry, if it bores you to tears, we’re already near the halfway point, and it will all be over before the Fourth of July.

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Raise your hand if you’re with me on having had it up to here with ‘helpful’ software update reminders, those increasingly pervasive, automated notification systems built into applications that let you know when you need to download a new revision. They’re meant to be helpful, but I find them intrusive and nagging.

Through these systems, it seems that I’m constantly confronted with entreaties to download and install new versions of everything I use, and those versions have been coming with greater and greater frequency, and have been weighing in at larger and larger megabytes totals. It’s become the norm rather than the exception for me to be confronted, each time I log into my computer, with pop-up reminders or system messages letting me know that a newer, better, more crucial change to my software is ready and waiting for me to grab.

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After flailing around for about a year and a half with my Nikon D70 digital SLR camera, I resolved several months ago to finally take a proper class and learn how to use it for real. I found one that suited me at New York University: “Digital Photography Shooting Workshop,” taught by Joseph O. Holmes of the noted photoblog Joe’s NYC. As its title implies, the course allows me to forgo any education about the chemical processing of traditional photographic film — I have zero interest in that — and focus on shooting, handling the camera and responding to different shooting environments. Perfect.

Class meets twice a week: on Saturday afternoons, we make our way to select spots around New York City and take photos, with Holmes giving impromptu talks along the way. Then we choose five selects from those shots and review them, unmanipulated by Photoshop or any other process, in a group critique on Wednesday nights. It’s a short course lasting only about a month, and I’ve just come back from my first Wednesday night.

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It’s not explicitly a design problem, but since I have something of a soap box, I’m just going to use it: I’d do most anything to lighten the load of extraneous crap stuffed inside my wallet — not the dollar bills, of course, but rather the various faux credit cards that have instantiated themselves in my billfold. I carry a few proper credit cards — one personal card, a debit card, and two issued to me by the Times — but I’m also burdened by lots of cards foisted on me by marketers: stored value cards that act more or less like gift certificates, and membership cards — to museums, to professional groups, to my local video store — that try to impart a greater sense of worth than the membership itself probably deserves.

Add to that a handful of business cards, my subway fare card, a map of the New York City subway system, my driver’s license, health insurance card, and some wallet-size photographs carried for posterity, and the wallet is already three-quarters of an inch thick — and that’s before I add a single dollar bill, even. It’s a constant annoyance.

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For the past few days I’ve been playing around with a beta account of Six Apart’s Vox.com, a somewhat late entry into social networking for the pioneering company behind Movable Type and Typepad. (My account came courtesy of Anil Dash, who, magnanimously, bears no apparent grudges from my earlier, less than kind remarks about Movable Type, circa 2006.)

Vox follows the by now familiar interaction model for social software: buddy lists, comments, photo sharing, blogging, etc. If you’ve used Friendster, Flickr, MySpace or any of their competitors, you probably already understand how Vox works sufficiently well to get up and running with little learning curve. Apparently, one of the site’s intended key differentiators is its tiered approach to functionality. ‘Starter’ users can do more or less what you can at, say, Friendster: create a profile, build a buddy list and participate in comment threads and discussions. So-called ‘standard’ — and presumably paying — customers will also be able to blog, manage media (photos, audio, video) and choose from various built-in themes to skin their presentation in the Vox universe — those features haven’t yet been released to everyone, but Six Apart promises them in the near future.

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Here’s an update on Blockwriter, my concept for a text editor that’s as reductive and productive as a typewriter. After a fair amount of reader interest, I was disappointed to find that no Cocoa developers actually stepped up to claim the idea and run with it. Of course, it’s presumptuous of me to assume that any idea I throw out there will ignite a flurry of developer activity, but still, you can’t blame me for hoping a similar application would magically appear on Version Tracker one day.

Then I got a note from David Goodman, a MetaFilter reader who liked the idea enough to post it to Ask MetaFilter, in the hopes that someone could point him to a similar product for Windows. A respondent to that post, apparently, decided to take up the challenge and, according to David, has begun to code a prototype in Python.

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