Subtraction

Gold mine of a discussion between two giants, from 1986.

Over the weekend, resigned to the couch while fighting a cold, I watched John Patrick Shanley’s movie adaptation of his own play, “Doubt.” It’s a truly superb piece of dramaturgy that’s gripping and not a little depressing, to be honest. But it’s also sure to reward any viewing, so thought-provoking and thoughtful are the plot and dialog throughout the movie’s 104-minute running time. That includes the movie’s beautifully simple titles, too. In fact, the titles of this film are so effective, they reminded me of how rare a thing is truly intelligent, rewarding typography.

These titles are not flashy at all, just quietly authoritative in their evocation of tradition and faith and understated in their suggestion of betrayal and suspicion. Though I can’t identify the typeface unequivocally, it’s almost certainly some variant of Cheltenham, a handsome serif face designed at the end of the 19th century by Bertram Goodhue.

Gallery of amazing designs from a former corporate leader in commissioning extraordinary work from seminal designers. Also see gallery two and gallery three. Via Sam Potts.

An end-game primer on how to get your hands on, shoot with and develop the distinctive, century-defining photographic film before it’s completely discontinued. And by the way, if you’re at least mildly interested in photography and not yet subscribed to Photojojo, you’re missing out.

Not necessarily essential, but nevertheless amusing and actually quite convincing argument about the centrality of architecture in the Ivan Reitman classic (and its sequel). “The Ghostbusters’ quest is not for recognition, but simply for the right to exist, to be weird, to have different theories and succeed. Standing in their way are several forces of the ‘establishment’ — from Dean Yeager, to Walter Peck of the Environmental Protection Agency, to the Mayor — who repeatedly try to shut the Ghostbusters down. This battle against the establishment, so central to the Ghostbusters’ story, is reflected throughout the film by architectural setting.”

From yesterday, a scathing condemnation of the recent turn of events in the continually controversial development project in downtown Brooklyn.

“The recent news that the developer Forest City Ratner had scrapped Frank Gehry’s design for a Nets [basketball] arena in central Brooklyn is not just a blow to the art of architecture. It is a shameful betrayal of the public trust, one that should enrage all those who care about this city… A new design by the firm Ellerbe Becket [is a] colossal, spiritless box, it would fit more comfortably in a cornfield than at one of the busiest intersections of a vibrant metropolis. Its low-budget, no-frills design embodies the crass, bottom-line mentality that puts personal profit above the public good. If it is ever built, it will create a black hole in the heart of a vital neighborhood.”

Audio slideshow from designers Prem Krishnamurthy and Rob Giampietro explains the ideas behind the design of this sort of new magazine focusing on Jewish life. They’ve done a very nice job, but Tablet’s inadvertent similarities with various other online magazines, for instance The New Yorker, underscore how difficult it can be to create a distinctive online presentation for published content.

The One Club asks a few questions of one of my longtime design heroes, Kit Hinrichs. He doesn’t seem to get as much press as some of his partners at Pentagram, but I still regard his book “Typewise” as essential (sadly it’s out of print).

Work Associates created these beautiful covers for recent releases from British pop band “The Rakes.”

The studio “based their imagery partly on Bauhaus principles and on colour theorist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack’s 1920s experiments with various apparatus that could generate moving projections of coloured light. His processes were later explained in his booklet, Farben Licht-Spiele.”

A typically thoughtful look at the promise in Jeff Veen’s forthcoming font-embedding technology which will allow Web publishers to license and embed typefaces on HTML pages. Davidson, a co-creator of the type replacement method sIFR, says, “It’s important to examine the following characteristics, in order of importance: compatibility, functionality, legality, ease of use, and hackiness,” and he proceeds to do just that, very effectively. The comments on this post are interesting too and worth a read (at least the first dozen or so were).

While we’re idly speculating in advance of having actual hands on experience with Typekit, I may as well weigh in with some speculation of my own: if in fact the Typekit business model allows relatively cheap licensing costs, that is of course ideal for everyone — independent Web designers would have access to a fully rich array of typographic options, and type foundries would both stave off illegal uses and open up new markets for their products. Unfortunately the type business has never really been a consumer business, and it’s quite possible that licensing won’t be particularly affordable for individuals — and yet Typekit could still succeed. There are enough big companies willing to pay a few hundred or a even a few thousand dollars to render their messages in their own typographic voice to make this work. However, fingers crossed that everyone involved sees the upside in affordability.

A developer at Zoho ponders why Microsoft’s products are so poorly received, while even Google’s concepts and pre-announcements are so enthusiastically received. “Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything. Take Silverlight: Microsoft pledged that they will always support Silverlight on Mac and Linux, and on browsers other than IE. Do you really, really believe their promise?”

I saw Disney Pixar’s “Up” last night at New York’s famously outsized Ziegfeld Theater, where the audience was shockingly sparse. Only half of the seats in the house were filled, if that, which I found to be amazing and, for a Saturday evening show at one of the city’s premier cinema houses, somewhat appalling too. To be sure, Pixar films do well, and “Up” is well on its way to a healthy profit. But adjusted for ticket price inflation, the movie’s opening weekend gross makes it only the fifth-best performing of all of Pixar’s theatrical releases.

In this lengthy and somewhat incredible conversation, Geoff Manaugh talks with gaming critic and author of the personal narrative and philosophical reflection “This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities” about points of commonality and departure between architecture and video games. Along the way, they explore fascinating territory, including ideas about how creativity in both fields — and by extension, design in general — is influenced by competition or the lack thereof, and the disconnect between the buildings architects design and the architectural environments the same architects might enjoy in video game worlds. Actually, there is so much good stuff in this interview that it would take me all day to excerpt and comment on everything I found enlightening or revealing. Highly recommended, and worth reading through to the end.

A blog from creative strategy consultant Richard Smith focusing on ideas for redesigning U.S. currency, with an open policy for accepting idea submissions. The proposed designs from Michael Tyznik and Michelle Haft are quite pretty. However, it seems as if most submitting designers are neglecting the very real usability problem of the lack of size distinction among the various denominations — a one-dollar bill is the same size as a one-hundred dollar bill, which means they’re practically indistinguishable from one another to many visually impaired people.

Author Phil Patton notes the allure and recent popularity of dissected, diagrammatic visualizations of complex objects, especially in three dimensions. “The exploded drawing suggests the desire graphic designers feel to move into three dimensions… [it] is a place where the graphic artist meets the sculptor.” Of particular interest is Patton’s reference to Damián Ortega’s exploded view sculptures, like this one:

A terrific disquisition on the art of creating compelling levels in single-player video games. Even for a confirmed non-gamer like myself, the author’s thoughtful analysis is a fascinating breakdown of what goes into this particular brand of user experience. Not all of these concepts are applicable to every design problem, but every designer can learn a little something about how to think about users from these principles, I think.

“‘Pacing’ is a word bandied around a lot when talking about level design, but it is actually a very complex concept to pin down. Just how does the pace affect the player’s perception of the level and what is it that sets a well paced level apart from a poorly paced one?

“With these questions ringing in my ears I was determined to try and delve a little deeper into just what constitutes level pacing, but I found very little literature on the subject. Instead I decided to focus my efforts on breaking down the core elements of what determines pace itself. In doing so I identified several key aspects of game pace: movement impetus: the will of the player to move through the level; threat: the notion of danger; tension: the atmosphere and mood of the level or perceived danger which is reflected in the player; tempo: the level of actual action currently being experienced by the player.”

Designer Grace Smith sent me an email asking if I would reveal the contents of my Mac OS X Dock― and I did!

In its latest issue, British design magazine Eye ran a feature story about the well-publicized dissolution of the trendsetting design studio The Designers Republic. I’m a longtime fan of the studio and most (not all) of its work, but as this letter to the editor points out, the story Eye published amounts to little more than further publicity for TDR’s reconstitution under the same name, in smaller form — critical analysis it was not. Kudos to Eye for having the temerity to publish this on its blog.

“FPO is a blog dedicated to both the visual stimulus and the detailing of the development and production of printed matter: annual reports, books, business cards, stationery suites, collateral materials, posters, packaging and anything else where ink meets substrate.” Brought to you by Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit, who were responsible for the recently shuttered Speak Up.

Enlightening visualization of how much ground various underground transportation systems cover relative to one another. They’re presented in an appropriately spare manner, too, though it would be nice to be able to overlay them, one on top of the other.

Wonderful, irresistibly endearing and nearly forgotten cover illustrations from a half-century ago, dug up by the folks at Asbury & Asbury.

“The Special Collections of RIT Library at the Rochester Institute of Technology is the repository for a collection of 99 posters and 4 record covers designed by Jacqueline Casey dating from 1963 to 1990. Jacqueline Casey worked as a graphic designer for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during those years and the posters promote activities and events on campus. In 1992, the MIT Museum donated the posters to RIT Library, RIT, in accordance with Ms. Casey’s wishes.”

There are some stunning posters in this collection. Completely worth navigating the amazingly inelegant, institutional-style cataloging interface in which they’re presented. Via Grain Edit. More at AisleOne.

Bam! Clunk! Whap! A visual catalog of the interstitial fight-scene titles from the old “Batman” television series. Seen collected like this, they’re actually quite beautiful. According to this blog post, the most popular titles were “Kapow!” (used 50 times) and “Boff!” (used 43 times). Now you know.

I’m a sucker for this kind of mechanical illustration.

In its original form, Muxtape, the still-influential and, at the time, insufficiently legal music sharing site was a service for users to load and share playlists of their own music. Since its demise last year, it’s been greatly missed.

In its latest incarnation, launched last week, Muxtape has been re-imagined as a service for bands, allowing them to assemble and customize promotional pages (including their own playlists) from stock parts. (For now, bands can only participate if invited by other bands.) It’s a radical makeover, but if you were to overhaul the now-iconic Muxtape 1.0, this would be a very sensible way to do it.

On Monday, Condé Nast shut down its fledgling business publication after just two years, due to a precipitous drop in advertising that magazines everywhere are experiencing. What’s amazing, though, is that the company could launch a print magazine as recently as two years ago — at a time when publishing was already clearly moving online or at least changing according to Internet-age economics — and pay so little mind to costs:

“Despite cuts at Portfolio, some of the old Condé Nast ways remained. To illustrate a November 2008 article arguing that credit derivatives were ‘the elephant in the room’ at JPMorgan Chase, the magazine spent what one staff member, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said was US$30,000 to procure the services of a real elephant to menace a model at a photo shoot.”

A handsome new poetry magazine that aims “to bring poetry to a wider audience and attempt to steal it back from school anthologies and funeral readings” — with the help of some beautiful contemporary illustration.

“Each issue contains a collection of poems written to a theme. These selected poems are individually sent out to a collection of illustrators who then illustrate the poems according to their interpretation of the piece. These illustrations are then bound together with the poems and printed onto sheets of tree pulp for your enjoyment.”