Speaking of comics, Comixology, the leading platform for buying and reading digital comics, sent out a survey to its customers today. It asks a number of background questions such as, do you buy print or digital comics, how often, what device do you read them on, etc. But the nub of the questionnaire comes more than halfway through, when the company finally works up enough courage to ask what customers think of Comixology’s acquisition by Amazon.

I give them credit for asking this; it’s a question that companies almost never put to their customers. They deserve some extra credit for this, too, especially after the controversy over the removal of its storefront from its iOS apps, the management team and its new corporate parent must be aware of the substantial enmity that they’ve inspired in many of their most loyal customers. Of course, the survey also never actually asks the specific question of whether users see the removal of the in-app storefront as a negative or a positive, which would have gotten to the true heart of the matter.

During a long getaway last weekend, I somehow found the time to read all four volumes in artist Darwyn Cooke’s graphic novel adaptations of Donald Westlake’s “Parker” series. Written under the pseudonym “Richard Stark,” the books center around a brutal, lone wolf thief operating in the 1960s and the loose network of felons, thugs and mobsters he associates with.

For many years I’ve had only a passing familiarity with the Parker franchise, mostly through its forays into film: last year’s disappointingly formless “Parker” starring Jason Statham and, more famously, 1967’s cult classic “Point Blank” starring Lee Marvin and directed by John Boorman (in which the character’s name was changed to “Walker”). There’s also 1999’s “Payback” starring Mel Gibson, but the less said about that the better.

Boorman’s highly influential movie has become noted for its brilliant stylization and the metaphorical liberties that it takes with the subject matter. It’s a fantastic and fascinating film, but it isn’t quite an accurate representation of the Parker universe, which is more closely tied to the gritty opportunism of film noir and the seedy underworld of post-War America. Cooke, an animator and graphic designer as well as a comic artist, has a pronounced fascination with that time period and he brings Stark’s vision to life with great gusto in a relentless barrage of visceral, elaborate comic panels rendered in vibrant two-color inks. His art is “cartoony” in that his characters’ features and figures are exaggerated, but that quality somehow only complements the grim verisimilitude of Westlake’s writing.

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This is an excellent overview of the emerging user interface paradigm of cards from Chris Tse. It attempts to answer the basic but still open question, “What is a card?” and proposes a very compelling if still not definitive set of answers. I don’t agree with everything in this presentation, but I think Tse gets at least a few things very right: cards represent a potentially powerful link between the open web and native apps, and that the “movability” or interoperability of cards are a critical factor in their success.

Tse approaches the conceptual foundation of cards as a proponent of open standards and in opposition to “lock down.” He delivered this presentation as a preview of Cardstack.io, an effort to build “a Card Ecosystem based on Open Web technologies and Open Source ethos that fights back against rampant lock-in.”

Speaking of hollow icons vs. solid icons, while I still prefer the latter, I recognize that we are living in an iOS 7 world. So I’ve been warming up to the former.

In the past year, as I’ve been working on a slew of new projects, I’ve faced the decision to go with one style or the other again and again. For solid icons, I’ve been using Drew Wilson’s Pictos, which is still the most widely useful icon set that I’ve found, even if it hasn’t been updated in a few years. That it comes in font format is particularly helpful, too.

For hollow fonts, I’ve tried a few options, but the one that I return to repeatedly is Vincent Le Moign’s massive Streamline Icons (full disclosure: affiliate link). Incredibly, the set boasts over 1,600 individual forms—and that’s not even counting all of the variants and file format duplicates. Its sheer breadth has made it a repeatedly useful resource, and though I might quibble with the renderings of a few specific icons, on the whole I find them to pretty pleasing.

Of course, there’s also The Noun Project, a wonderful and continually growing resource. I do find myself turning there regularly, as they offer an amazing breadth as well, and of course they offer icons in a number of different styles too. But when it comes to assembling assets for designs, I find I’m rather lazy, and it’s hard to beat having Streamline’s large collection available right on my hard drive in so many different variants.

Google’s newly announced design language is called “Material Design.” It’s an evolution of the company’s Holo framework, made more elegant with closer attention paid to typography and spacing, and injected with healthy new amounts of highly fluid transitional animations. This video demonstrates its highlights, and this creative manifesto declares the high-minded principles that drive it (to be frank, I couldn’t make sense of anything it was saying).

I’ve watched the video several times, each time trying to step outside of the point of view of an interface designer, putting myself in the shoes of an “average” consumer of technology products with little intimate understanding of what makes interface concepts like this interesting. That’s not the primary audience for the marketing of Material Design, of course, but it’s useful for designers to think about this stuff from the perspective of non-designers, at least as much as we can.

From that vantage point, what I take away from Material Design is that it emphasizes modularity and consistency across platforms, that it’s spare, spacious and orderly—especially in contrast to what Google has been known for in the past. In fact, Material Design seems most interesting in relation to the Google of old, almost as if the company is still shaking off the aesthetic dissonance that used to be so deeply integrated into its products.

There was an amusing moment for me watching the video stream of Material Design’s public debut, when Google showed what happens when a bit of the new design language’s thoughtful spacing is applied to its Gmail product. I chuckled because I had implored the company to do just that in this blog post from 2008. Google’s new version is much more thoroughly considered, of course, but it’s indicative of how far the company has come in six years.

Google’s transition from a company that used to think about design the same way as it thought about human resources—as a cost of doing business—to a company that prioritizes design is remarkable, at least insofar as its products look and feel and work so much better today than they used to. The company is writing a fascinating case study for how to retrofit design into a tech giant’s DNA. And in that context, within the framework of reinventing something massively successful yet aesthetically wanting, their work is amazing. But it still feels like a work in progress; Material Design is markedly cleaner than what came before, but that seems to be about as far as it goes. Material Design still strikes me as being fairly anonymous, lacking in uniqueness or personality or point of view, and still short of being truly beautiful. It’s nice work, but like many things that Google does, it feels iterative, and in that light, it might be more important in that it paves the way for a true aesthetic breakthrough somewhere further down the line.

This is “This Is Pollock,” a beautifully produced, highly readable, witty, 80-page overview of the master abstract expressionist’s career written by Catherine Ingram and illustrated by Peter Arkle.

“This Is Pollock” is part of a series from Laurence King Publishing that takes a visual approach to telling the stories of famous artists. Ingram also wrote “This Is Dalí” and “This Is Warhol,” both of which were illustrated by Andrew Rae. Notwithstanding the irony that the works of these massively popular and influential artists had to be mediated through much more populist illustrations, these books are incredibly vibrant and alive, and make for a laudable alternative to traditional art history texts.

Later in the year “This Is Bacon” will be released, written by Kitty Hauser and illustrated by Christina Christoforou. I’ll be giving away at least one set of all of these books for the holidays.

Anticipation for Apple’s rumored iWatch is getting higher and higher. In fact, I’m in the market for a new watch, and the idea of a connected, multi-sensored, paradigm-smashing new device is tempting. But I’m also a little skeptical that, if this device ever ships, Apple will be able to deliver something I’ll actually want to wear.

That’s not to say that I don’t believe that an Internet of things-native wearable device will turn into a legitimate market; in fact, I do. The question is how long will it take? In my view there are some major hurdles to getting there, not the least of which is surmounting a challenge that the technology industry has never really mastered before: creating fashionable goods. That’s a very different problem from creating goods that are fashionable, which is more typically what tech companies are capable of.

The iPod was fashionable, to be sure, but its cultural cachet started from the inside out, from the very innards of the technology, which drove the form factor. Smartphones have done an arguably even better job of getting closer to the ideal of an object’s physical appearance dictating its technological composition, but at the end of the day it’s still very much the way these objects work that govern how they look.

Things that you wear are a wholly different proposition. There is almost literally no reason why we need collars on a shirt, frills on a blouse, pleats on a pair of pants (actually, there is no good reason for pleats on pants for men, at least until the winds of fashion decide the opposite), or any of the countless design details that make what we wear compelling to us as things that we want put on and walk out the door with. These things are designed from the outside in; they’re fashion first and goods second.

When technology companies look at goods that are built from the outside in, they generally see irrationality and inefficiency, a broken market just waiting to be corrected and “disrupted.” They believe that they can engineer so much value into these items that people will be swayed to buy goods built from the inside out, that the promise that drives hardware and software—“adopt this and benefit from its utility”—will convince people to upend their sartorial habits. This is how you get products like Google Glass, which assumes that consumers prize utility so much that they’re willing to look like they have no interest whatsoever in having intimate relations with another human being.

I’m kind of joking about that, but I’m kind of not joking too. The things that we wear aren’t just an expression of who we are, they are an expression of who we want to be with—as friends, as neighbors, as fans, as lovers. A shirt, a pair of glasses, a necktie, a pair of shoes…these are methods that we use to make a connection between our inner selves and other people. We use fashion to signal our particular humanity to other human beings. Fashion can be trite and superficial and, in my experience meeting members of the industry, it can be a magnet for some of the least interesting human beings on earth. Nevertheless it satisfies a deep-seated need for connectedness, and it’s an indispensable part of living in society.

Part of that indispensability, at least in consumer culture, is fashion’s endless variability, even within the dress codes that align us together into tribes. We could all choose to wear the same thing, and yet we don’t, even within groups who feel very much the same way about the same things. We need what we wear to both signal our belonging and highlight our apartness, to emphasize our individuality. And we find it intolerable when it promises to do that and fails, when someone else shows up in that same cocktail dress at that party that we’ve been waiting all season for.

This is a key economic challenge to making wearables: how do you create variability at scale? It’s very difficult to do that until your components are commoditized, until the materials that you use to make a fashionable good are so plentiful and source-able from so many vendors in so many different variants that you can afford to offer your garment, or your shoe, or your eyeglass frames in literally dozens of different styles and color ways. Until you have a commoditized supply chain—which is in many ways the anathema of Apple’s business model—the best that you can do is offer your phone in three or four basic colors.

That kind of limit to personal expressiveness will work fine for Silicon Valley, a place where it’s the height of fashion to walk around with a cleanly pressed dress shirt left untucked. But for the rest of the consumer world, it’s going to be very difficult to sell tens, much less hundreds of millions of any given wearable device in the exact same style. The first few dozen, or even few hundred, devices in this category will almost certainly all be designed to be as broadly appealing as possible, will take the least offensive approach to their form factors, and so will appeal to relatively few of us. At some point circumstances will allow this to change, and designers of wearable devices will be able to create products much closer in spirit to the garments and accessories we know today. Maybe Apple will even be able to leapfrog its way there, or accelerate the journey. But in the meantime it seems unlikely that the road to a truly robust wearables market will be a smooth one.

Last year, when iOS 7 debuted, Aubrey Johnson made a contention that users are slower to recognize hollow icons than solid ones. Curt Arledge decided to put that to the test with a custom-built Rails app that tested participants’ ability to recognize icons of the two types, and ran the trial over 1,000 times. His conclusions revealed that Johnson’s assertion could not be supported in fact.

My ultimate conclusion is one that most designers probably felt intuitively upon encountering the solid/hollow debate: designing icons to be both semantically clear and visually attractive is a complex exercise that doesn’t lend itself to simple binary rules. In fact, a closer look at Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, which lay out its recommendations for solid/hollow icon design, acknowledge that some icons simply won’t work well in both styles.

Read the full post at Viget.com.

My wife and I have some very creative friends who hold an annual sandwich party in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. What’s a sandwich party? The rules are: invent a brand new sandwich, give it a clever name, and make enough of that sandwich to feed “bigger-than-bite-sized pieces” for about twelve people. The result is a usually delicious and occasionally bizarre feast.

This year, Laura and I invented The Crisp Christie Bridge Scandal. Ingredients: mortadella, provolone, salami, parsley, potato chips and spicy red pepper and raspberry mascarpone cheese on an unglazed donut (we wanted to use a Krispy Kreme donut but we don’t live close to one so we settled for a donut from Dough)—once assembled, we cut the sandwich in half so that each side forms a vaguely bridge-like shape.

So that was my weekend.