Subtraction

Far be it from me to pretend I really know what makes for good rock ’n’ roll. Beyond the music and musicians that I like, I have no idea, really, what does or does not make sense for the rest of the listening public. But I sincerely do believe that, past a certain age, most acts really should stop releasing albums and just let their back catalogs stand as the definitive statement of who they are. There are plenty of good reasons for this, not the least of which is that the youthful theatrics of rock music are just an embarrassment when pantomimed by nearly anyone over, say, forty years old. Maybe forty-five.

Another reason is that, past a certain age — or perhaps a certain stage in a career — most acts’ new album cover designs lose that singular, epochal quality that was so common to their early releases. That is, where an act might once have released iconic albums replete with cover art that not only reflected their time but also defined it, those acts’ older, mid-life incarnations tend to release album covers that only lamely follow ripened trends.

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Let’s face it, I’ll probably never create an iPhone application of my own. I don’t have the time, for one, and even if I did, I haven’t got the programming talent. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t have some ideas for some applications. And because I’m one of the lucky few who have a blog, I’m not just going to let these ideas go to waste — no, I’m posting them right here instead. To be sure, none of them are game changers, but all of them would find a place on my iPhone’s home screen if someone out there makes them.

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There must be something good about “Battlestar Galactica,” because in spite of how basically crap I find it, I tune in faithfully every week (though sometimes, like this evening, I do so belatedly thanks to the convenience of my DVR). Usually, I spend the hour sneering or rolling my eyes as the episode unfolds; the show is fascinating to me as an intersection between an old guard of cheap and not particularly good television making, and a new frontier of narratively — though not intellectually — complex and ambitious television writing.

Actually I think that I want to like it. But week in and week out, the show fails so spectacularly in its chintzy sets, its hyperbolic scripts, its crushingly serious sense of its own importance (has anybody ever cracked a joke on this show? If so, has anybody ever laughed?), that I can’t turn away. It’s too easy to compare it to a car crash that you can’t turn away from. It’s perhaps more accurate to compare it to watching a car that you know is going to crash.

Imagine some futuristic, fantastical auto dreamed up by some crazy genius. Except this mad inventor forgot to attach one of its front wheels, or just couldn’t afford to pay for the tire. Undeterred, the car careens down the street anyway, a kind of souped up, time-traveling Delorean with its wheel-less front bumper violently dragging along the ground, scraping a frightening wave of sparks off the ground as the metal chassis screams in agony. Sooner or later this thing is going to collide with a telephone pole. That’s what “Battlestar Galactica” is to me. How can I not watch?

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Here’s how much I like Apple’s Keynote presentation software. I just used it the way I might have used QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign: to create a document intended not for the screen or projection, but for printing, and being held in one’s hand.

The document is my final, outgoing treasurer’s report as I finish up my two-year term as a board member for AIGA New York. (My work isn’t quite finished yet, though, as I’m moving on to the national board.) When I started to create the report, I originally tried to use InDesign and Illustrator, but the prospect of using those lumbering programs seemed slow and tedious compared to Keynote, where all of the charting and graphing tools are built right into the application and are lightning fast.

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Let me admit a real prejudice that I have, and maybe you can try to convince me that I’m wrong: it’s my belief that you just can’t get great design out of a design agency with a staff larger than a dozen or two. Design doesn’t scale well, in my opinion, or at least it doesn’t do so easily.

This craft, and whatever pretensions to art it can pull off, rests so much on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. This means that in its ideal form, it works best when practiced by a single person. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish — a straight shot from the right brain to the wrist — maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout.

Of course, as an economic matter, this is impractical. For design to work as a business, it almost always has to scale to some degree. The smaller the scale, though, the more efficient the practice of design; transmitting ideas among a small number of people is much more effective than transmitting them among a large number.

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Designers needed at NYTimes.com. Read this post…

Follow-through is everything in consumer-friendly packaging. Read this post…

RSS readers are like junk drawers that won’t listen to you. Read this post…

Taking a comeback seriously, but the absence lightly. Read this post…

Ask me questions about NYTimes.com Read this post…

UnBeige: Help Debbie Millman Interview Michael Bierut

Suggest queries for their joint appearance at next week’s How Conference.

Sleevelessness: Review of the Book “Band ID&#*221;

Extending Album Art

Humorous takes on famous album covers.

NYT: Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82

A very sad day.

NYT: Ikea Opening in Red Hook, Brooklyn on 18 Jun

Not germane to everybody, I realize, but a big deal for New Yorkers.

Opposites Attract ’08 at the New York Art Directors Club

New speaker series from UnderConsideration LLC.

Cooper-Hewitt 2008 National Design Awards Winners Announced

Congratulations to Michael Bierut and Scott Stowell, among others.

IHT.com: Neat Trick for Eliminating Typographic Widows

NYT: Primary Pen & Ink, Raleigh, N.C.

Reporter Campbell Robertson’s comics from the North Carolina primary.

Start Here

“Linkable notebooks and accessories.” Exquisite paper products from my friend Tina Chang.

“Penguin Classics” Theme for Tumblr

Very witty.

NYT: A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search

Digital Motion Detection Cameras

Shots triggered by motion sensor. Via Photojojo’s Mother’s Day Gift Guide.

Designing Record Sleeves for Spiritualized

Interview with band leader Jason Pierce and designer Mark Farrow discussing the beautiful packaging they’ve worked on together for the band’s past decade of releases.

NYT: BlackBerry’s Quest to Fend Off the iPhone

“Since the iPhone went on sale last summer, amid long lines of shoppers and media adulation, the contours of the smartphone market have begun to shift rapidly toward consumers… R.I.M., which has historically viewed big corporations and wireless carriers as its bedrock customers, needs to alter its DNA in a hurry.”

Official Google Blog: What Makes a Design “;Googley”?

Uh-huh.

Emily Katz Fashion

Nice.

We All Hate Quickbooks, Do You?

Cleverly designed marketing site from LessAccounting, cited by Dan Cederholm as a nice example of parallax scrolling.

TechCrunch: Is Keyword Search About to Hit Its Breaking Point?

An overview of an excellent presentation by Nova Spivack.

NYT: Profile of Stern Pinball Inc.

“A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.”

Massimo Vignelli Updates His 1972 New York Subway Diagram

Signed copies are on sale now.

Macworld: What’s in a Mac Clone?

Eric Karjaluoto Interviews Debbie Millman

Marcel Dzama

Rejected Book Covers

Klas Ernflo’s stunningly beautiful but torpedoed designs for a series focusing on classic artists. Via Aisle One.