The School of Visual Arts’s Masters in Design Criticism program is holding its annual D-Crit Conference on 2 May. The headliners are moderator Julie Lasky, Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, 2×4 founder Michael Rock, and Harvard metaLAB director Jeffrey Schnapp, among others.

However, the real meat of the conference will be the thesis presentations from this year’s graduating class. Yesterday afternoon, I went to the D-Crit space on 21st Street in Manhattan and joined Nicola Twiley as a guest critic for a dry run of the class’ conference presentations. I was very pleasantly surprised by how unusual, inventive, fun and substantive they were. They are definitely not your run-of-the-mill thesis presentations; rather they’re out-of-the-box proposals for taking design criticism out into the real world, where it can reach audiences who would otherwise be completely indifferent to such things. I’ll be there on 2 May and you should be too. Get your tickets here.

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The St. Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest known, still-intact book of European origin just sold for about US$14 million to The British Library in London. It was placed in a coffin about 1,300 years ago, which partly explains why it’s apparently very well-preserved. The Library’s curator says the book is “…the starting point of our evidence for the history of the Western book.” Pretty amazing. Read more here.

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Israeli-born, London-based Nadav Kander won the 2010 Prix Pictet, a relatively new photography prize that focuses on environmentally conscious work, for this photo series. It focuses on the environmental impact of China᾿s rapid development, and how it intersects with the lives of countless families who live on the great Asian river’s banks.

These are powerful images, but I think there’s an even more interesting subtext here if you think of them as the kind of photos that Westerners seem to expect to come out of China — images of tremendous poverty juxtaposed with aggressive industrial growth. See more of them here.

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Former head of the Transportation Safety Administration Kip Hawley writes:

“More than a decade after 9/11, it is a national embarrassment that our airport security system remains so hopelessly bureaucratic and disconnected from the people whom it is meant to protect. Preventing terrorist attacks on air travel demands flexibility and the constant reassessment of threats. It also demands strong public support, which the current system has plainly failed to achieve.&#8221

Hawley believes that the current system is too preoccupied with looking for prohibited objects, where is should be more focused on managing risk. He outlines five changes that he thinks will make a difference.

Interestingly, he notes that the system we have today is a result in part of recommendations made after 9/11 by firm Accenture. I think it’s about high time that management consultants took their place alongside lawyers in the pantheon of justly disliked professions.

Read the full article here.

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This new Photoshop plugin lets you preview FontShop’s library of 150,000+ typefaces directly in your working Photoshop document. I just installed it and gave it a try, and it’s a very well done implementation, even if it’s not the most elegant execution one could hope for. (Note: I had to update my Adobe Extension Manager software before I could install it.)

Here’s how it works. You create a type layer within Photoshop with any of the existing fonts on your system (it doesn’t matter which) and type in your content. Then, from the FontShop plugin palette, you select any of FontShop’s fonts and click on the preview button. The plugin then reaches out to the FontShop server (I’m guessing) to generate a new image layer with the content from your type layer, rendered in the desired font. To be clear, the new layer is an image layer, so you cannot manipulate it the way you can a text layer, though it can of course use any standard Photoshop layer effects you like (drop shadows, embossing, etc.).

In the past I’ve lamented the fact that it’s not easy to try typefaces before you buy them, a problem that the Internet should have solved long ago. Though of course I would’ve liked it if this solution gave us access to the real fonts, the fact that it makes it significantly easier to try out new ones in the context of our existing workflows is a big deal. FontShop did a great job on this. Download it here.

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The United Kingdom’s cabinet office tasked with transforming government digital services recently published this draft list of ten principles for digital design. As one might expect, none of them are particularly controversial, and so the whole batch seems somewhat bromidic. Still, it means something that a government office values design enough to put a stake in the ground about how it approaches the discipline. Read them all here.

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I’m in San Francisco today, where I gave a talk at the super-fun TYPO Talks San Francisco yesterday. Alas, I have to get on a plane in a few hours, so I’ll miss the conference’s second day, which makes me sad because it looks terrific.

Anyway, for the plane ride back I just downloaded a rental of documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock’s latest: the awkardly but I guess appropriately named “Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope.” Spurlock tracks five super-dedicated fans as they make their annual pilgrimage to the immense Comic Con festival in San Diego.

Geek subject matter aside, what’s notable about the release of this movie is that it’s being made available online on the same day and date as it’s being released to theaters. It’s certainly not the first film to try this approach, but to me it seems like the first film for which such a forward-thinking release strategy makes perfect sense. This is a independent movie with limited theatrical distribution, but it has the kind of built-in audience that is geographically distributed but nontrivial. So if you’re in one of the bigger markets that can support theatrical releases you can see it at your local movie house starting today. But for geeks in smaller markets, having same day availability via online services is obviously a huge plus; like Comic Con itself, it pulls together a meaningful, focused audience out of a widely dispersed subculture.

Find out more about the movie, including where you can see it and/or rent it, “at its official site” For added color, you can also read about my one and only visit to Comic Con in 2006 too.

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