Category Archives: New York

A Subway System in Your Pocket

If you’re an iPhone owner and you live in New York City, you want to be able to carry around the official Metropolitan Transit Authority subway map on your iPhone. There are a few options for this, including using a tool like FileMarker which locally saves a PDF copy of the map to be accessed through Safari. It’s a clever approach, but it seems too tricky for me.

Instead, I prefer using Photo Albums in my iPhone to view cropped versions of the subway map, a simple but effective technique I first saw demonstrated by Mike Essl, and which doubtless many others have also used.

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Four Pictures

I’ve had family visiting all week, and I’ve been doing my duty as tour guide. We’ve seen the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Yankee Stadium, Ripley’s Believe It or Not and went around Manhattan on the Circle Line Cruise, among other things.

Throughout, I’ve had my camera with me, mostly for the sake of documenting my totally awesome nephew. Setting aside those several dozen pictures, I just sorted through a week’s worth of photography and came up with exactly four mildly interesting shots to share here.

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New Site, New Blog for AIGA New York

AIGANY.orgYesterday we officially launched a brand new version of AIGANY.org which was beautifully and smartly designed by the dynamic duo of Greg D’Onofrio and Patricia Belen over at Kind Company. They’re a small but extremely talented shop in Brooklyn that’s doing some stellar work, including a terrific and invaluable resource commemorating the work of Alvin Lustig.

AIGANY.org is the official site for the New York chapter, not to be confused with AIGA.org which was famously and wonderfully redesigned earlier this year by Happy Cog for the national organization. Naturally, our site is focused on all the design-related events that the chapter puts on in New York City during the fall, winter and spring of each year. All modesty aside, it’s really a hell of a lot of stuff; you’d have to TiVo the majority of a television season just to attend half of these events each year.

So to help keep everyone apprised of what’s going on, this redesign features a new blog called, somewhat cheekily, DESIGNY (RSS feed). Get it? DESIGNY, design-y and design-New York? Corny puns aside, we’ve staffed this blog with a hand-selected coterie of up-and-coming design tastemakers: Randy J. Hunt, Louise Ma and Michael Brenner. Between them, they’ll be covering all of the events we put on, and more.

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You Got to Move It, Move It… to Brooklyn

If you live in Manhattan and you work in media, new or old, then chances are decent that at some point you’ll move across the East River and take up a nicer, more spacious residence in Brooklyn. The environs are cleaner, the life less hectic, the population friendlier and the real estate generally more affordable. I’ve watched lots of my friends do that over the years. More power to them, I thought. But at the same time I quietly told myself that I liked it so much in Manhattan’s East Village that I’d never be one of those folks. Not me.

Except, sooner or later if you live in the East Village, chances are decent that you’ll get tired of the East Village, too. After eight-plus years, I’ve grown intensely weary of that neighborhood’s overripe scenester vibe, its unkempt landscape, and mostly its Friday and Saturday night massacres: crowded sidewalks full of drunken fraternity boys, desperate sorority girls and tragic hipsters, raucously enjoying their youth — as is their right, I admit — late into the night. Pesky kids!

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Putting the High in Highrise

I’ve never worked in an architecturally significant building, never really stood inside of a structure designed by one of the world’s architectural greats and been able to see a future for myself within its spaces. But that changed today when I showed up for work at the new Times building at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan’s midtown. It was designed by Renzo Piano, and whether it fits your taste or not, it’s hard to deny that it’s the most notable new skyscraper to rise on the island this decade.

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Lately at AIGA New York

AIGATime for a quick round-up of matters relating to AIGA New York, of which I am a board member. When last we left our story, I had endeavored to bring more digital design into the fold when it comes to programming the New York chapter’s events. We started last fall with a Jeffrey Zeldman Small Talk which was quite successful, I think.

Things have been a little quiet since, but only because it’s taken some time to cook up some more interesting things. First off, we’re nearing the final stages of a new redesign of the AIGANY.org Web site. You may recall that I sent out an open call for New York-based design studios interested in helping us with this project last August. I got disappointingly few replies to that call, but as it turns out, one of the respondents — a terrific shop called Kind Company — was the perfect fit. Look for a brand new site from them soon.

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