Frustro

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Designer Martzi Hegedus’ Frustro typeface is a well-executed implementation of the kind of idea that occurs to most type students at some point or another: letterforms that appear as if they’re facing in more than one direction.

Frustro

The banality of the idea doesn’t take away from the fact that the end result is really quite handsome. I like it a lot, and expect to see it on a record sleeve or movie poster at some point. See the full project here.

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The Mad Men Fairytale

I bet I know what many of you will be doing this Sunday night: tuning into the season 5 premiere of “Mad Men,” AMC’s pop cultural (if not exactly popular) hit about the advertising world of the 1960s. Anticipation for this delayed season has been running high; I know at least one person who has been re-watching the previous season’s episodes to ‘get ready.”

That level of dedication astounds me. I count myself as a “Mad Men” devotee, but personally I couldn’t justify spending another thirteen hours of my life simply studying up on it. But, hey, more power to those who can afford the time.

It’s still not exactly clear to me why this show, whose ratings are modest, exerts such a strong pull on our collective imagination. I tried to unpack some possible reasons for this last year when I wrote that “Mad Men” was really about furniture, and suggested that it taps into the interior decorator fantasies that many of its fans hold. I still think that’s true, but I think the larger point may be that the series is not really a daydream that all of its fans share, but rather it’s a daydream of old media. In this age when the old brands that once ruled American commerce are now diminished, and with so much of the coming century feeling unsettled and uncentered, “Mad Men” is a kind of bedtime story that media tells itself about how powerful it used to be. It’s something like the inflated tales of lost motherlands that immigrants tell their children; we’re in an age now when the landscape of “Mad Men” seems like a grand old folktale of kings and queens. This is what happens when old ways die; we start telling nostalgic fairy tales about what they used to be.

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Get on the Bjango Wagon

Marc Edwards over at Bjango is an extremely knowledgable and talented app designer and developer. If you make apps and you’re not reading his blog, you’re missing out on a great education. Last year he wrote a phenomenally helpful article on “pixel-perfect vector nudging” in Photoshop that was probably the single most useful tip I read anywhere in 2011. These articles are free, but I’d pay real money for them, just as I paid for his excellent Skala Preview, a Mac OS X desktop application and iOS app that lets you send real-time previews of your Photoshop work to your iPad or iPhone. It’s simple, elegant and awesome. This morning he also updated his shockingly comprehensive iOS Photoshop Actions and Workflows to version 1.2, with some minor tweaks and support for Photoshop CS6 (already!). In short, Marc is making incredible contributions to the field; give him a bit of your attention and, if Skala Preview strikes your fancy, a bit of your money. You’ll be well rewarded.

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Mag+ on Retina iPads and File Size

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

One of the creators of the Mag+ platform for publishing content in the form of magazine-like tablet apps has some thoughts on the new iPad and the file size implications of its high-definition screen. This is in response to some speculation that when Retina-optimized magazine apps hit the market, the file size of these already bandwidth-hungry apps will balloon even further. The writer argues:

“I don’t believe people actually give a flying frog about file size — they care about value.”

Personally, the only tablet magazine app that I still use with any regularity is The New Yorker’s iPad app. As I’ve said before, I only download it to read the text and could care less about whatever value-add that its enormous download size is supposedly delivering. I’ve also said many times before that I believe most people don’t care about the value-add, that they would be just as happy to get a plain text version of the content without all of the design fussiness that these apps seem to think is indispensable. In fact, I would prefer a plainer version of the content, as I can’t tell you how often its heavy download demands have proved to be inconvenient; few things are as irritating as trying to get out the door in the morning when this app is leisurely downloading superfluous ads that I could care less about.

That said, Mag+ is essentially right that file size does not matter — or at least that it will matter less in the long-term. Eventually we will get enough bandwidth so that we can download the 150 megabytes or more that these apps ask us to retrieve. Though what I fear is that when we have that capacity, publishers will be asking us to download gigabytes per issue; this is after all an industry that cannot resist imposing greater and greater demands on its users in order to impress itself.

Read the full blog post here.

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When High-Def Goes Low-Res

It used to be that we assumed companies had access to better technology than consumers did, and therefore understood it more deeply than us, but I think that’s no longer the case. Very often, it seems to me that ‘regular’ people now understand technology better than many companies do.

This occurred to me over the past few days as I traveled to Austin and then Minneapolis. In each city I stayed in a pretty nice hotel, both of which had flat-screen televisions in the rooms. Of course it’s not unusual that hotels will have LCD or plasma televisions these days, but what I’ve found is that no matter how nice the hotel is or how many stars it might rate, they all fundamentally misunderstand what a flat-screen television is for.

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Moebius, R.I.P.

Ratings

5 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The artist and comic book illustrator Jean Giraud, known to most as Moebius, passed away Saturday at the age of 73.

Moebius

As a young comic book reader I remember how striking his work looked in comparison to his contemporaries. Comics are by nature fantastic, or at least they strive to be, but in Giraud’s hands even the most mundane took on a beautiful, otherworldly quality. The truth is that he was a true visionary of science fiction and fantasy, not just in comics but in concept work he did for major films like “Alien” and “Tron,” among many others. It would’t be an overstatement to say that he has had a profound effect on the way we all picture the future. More here.

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