MetroChange

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

This concept for “a charity donation platform using New York City subway cards” is a project from students at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. The idea is to capture the bits of monetary value that often remain on MetroCards but that are too insubstantial for many riders to bother with. The students envision a kiosk-like device where a rider can swipe their card and the remaining value gets transferred to a centralized charity fund.

It’s a nice idea. I haven’t been to a senior thesis show at ITP for several years, but this concept seems more sophisticated and less superficial than many of the others I’ve seen from that program. However, I have my doubts as to whether the Metropolitan Transit Authority is really looking to help its consumers direct those bits of remaining value to a charity fund. Given their seemingly chronic budget shortfalls, I can’t imagine the “lost” money isn’t already accounted for in their spending.

Anyway, find out more at MetroChange.org. There’s also lots of content about what went into the project at the accompanying blog.

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Me Talking with Zeldman on “The Big Web Show”

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?
The Big Web ShowThis week I was lucky enough to be invited by the venerable Jeffrey Zeldman to be a guest on his podcast “The Big Web Show.” We jumped on Skype yesterday morning and recorded a ~45-minute conversation that covered such topics as my experience at art school, how I got started doing design, my career co-founding a design services business, my tenure at The New York Times, and of course my work on Mixel, the social collage app we launched last month. It was lots of fun, and many thanks to Jeffrey for the invitation.

You can get an overview of our discussion, audio of the episode itself and a link to subscribe to “The Big Web Show” over at Jeffrey’s blog.

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Sir Ernest Shackleton in the Antarctic, 1915

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Chris Wild’s Retronaut is an amazing compilation of visual artifacts from the musty past. I came across this entry tonight: a shockingly beautiful set of photographs from Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated voyage to Antarctica in 1915.

Sir Ernest Shackleton

They look like they may be hand-tinted but apparently they are in fact color photographs, with an ethereal, almost ghostly quality. See the full blog post here.

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How Signage Is Made

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The venerable design magazine Eye has a great blog that highlights fascinating stuff from the world of graphic design. This post looks at how an acrylic storefront sign is actually made, and includes step-by-step photographs from press to machine-tooling to hand-cutting.

Signage

I’ve seen countless signs like this all over the world, but I was surprised to realize that, before reading this article, I really had no idea how they were made. In fact, I have no idea what happens inside a sign-making shop, which is pretty embarrassing for someone who claims to know a lot about typography.

Read the full blog post here.

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Kindle Fire Does Not Fire the Imagination

For obvious reasons, I’m an iPad partisan, but I do want to see the tablet market get more competitive. For that reason, I was excited about the Amazon Kindle when it was announced and so I pre-ordered it immediately.

When it arrived, I had an out-of-the-box experience that, as it turns out, would be indicative of my feeling about the device in general: good, not great. As I powered it up for the first time, the Fire spent about five or ten minutes downloading and installing a software update, leaving me unable to even use it. Not great. But it installed the update just fine, and thereafter it was mostly a glitch-free experience. Good.

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What I Learned When I Started a Design Studio

Earlier in the year, I wrote a bit about the design services industry in two blog posts: first, I wrote “The End of Client Services” in July, which outlined my thoughts on why the best interaction design is done outside of the studio/agency model. Then in August I followed up with “In Defense of Client Services,” which expands a little bit on why I believe services is such a difficult way to earn a living as a designer. I had meant to write a third post, but getting Mixel out the door got in the way. Over the past several days I was finally able to find the time to hammer out this follow-up.

Actually, I’ve been making notes for this blog post all year long, because it was ten years ago that I co-founded an interaction studio here in New York City, partnering with some colleagues from a previous employer. I stayed with the studio for four years, and I learned a lot in that time. Building that business significantly changed my outlook on the design industry, but I haven’t written too much on why. A decade later seems like the right opportunity.

What still strikes me the most about that experience was how little my former partners and I understood at the outset about what it takes to build a successful services business. In the years since, I’ve met lots of designers who have either founded or had the ambition to found studios or agencies of their own. Most of them, it seems to me, are laboring under misapprehensions very similar to the ones that hobbled my former partners and myself.

So here are a few of the key lessons that I learned from co-founding my own design studio. The usual caveats apply, of course, in that everything about business is contextual, and so your mileage my vary.

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