Mixel and Primitive Tools

The actual art-making tools available in our social collage app Mixel are pretty basic, with no modes and no calibration options. We shipped them that way for a good reason: we didn’t want people to feel that Mixel is a software application that they have to ‘master.’ A few moments is all you need to learn how to use all of the tools in the app, top to bottom.

Some people say that the tools are primitive, especially the cropping feature, which is downright imprecise. That one in particular is something we definitely want to improve, and we even intended to make it more powerful before we shipped the app but we ran out of time. We also left it as it was because we saw something really interesting in our beta testing that informed our whole attitude towards creative tools: imprecision is liberating. No one who tried to use Mixel’s crop tool to cut out a foreground image from its background ever felt that they were somehow “not using it right.” The tool is so rough and inexact that people believe there’s really no getting it wrong.

For us, that was a powerful realization, and one of the key insights that helped us make something fundamentally different from all of the other art software out there. The hugely constraining limitations of our toolset in effect let people off the hook, unburdened them of the pressure to make things perfect. It lets users create mixels in a few minutes, casually, almost without time to let their inner inhibitions about Art-with-a-capital-A take over. That’s exactly what we were going for.

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Mixel Day One

Mixel, our social collage app for iPad, debuted at around midnight Wednesday, and so I barely got any sleep last night. I spent a long, tiring, exhilarating day today watching new users pour into the network, as well as responding to tweets and emails and generally trying to keep tabs on everything Mixel-related. We got some really terrific, very generous press coverage from lots of different outlets, and I’ll try and gather those in one place soon for those interested.

At about 6:00 I went home, read a few stories to my daughter and gave her a long hug before putting her to bed. Laura and I had a nice dinner together and then we sat down to watch some television. Just before we went to turn on the set we both checked into Mixel — and suddenly it was an hour later.

I’m just stunned and flabbergasted and deeply, deeply humbled by all the activity on Mixel during this, its first day. There was a constant stream of likes, comments, new mixels and remixes flooding in, and it kept me completely transfixed. I should really be sleeping right now, but I couldn’t turn in without acknowledging what this means to me.

Many of you may know that developers cannot freely send out pre-release versions of native iOS apps to alpha and beta testers — Apple imposes distribution limitations — so for the past eight months my co-founder Scott and I have been using Mixel with just a few dozen other (awesome) people. To now see thousands of people join in, many of them doing amazing and beautiful work, and many of them apparently having a great time, is very much like a waking dream for me. In fact, I think I’m avoiding sleep because I’m secretly afraid that will put an end to it.

In short, I’m touched by the enthusiasm and the experimentation and the feedback and even the criticism. We’re very proud of what we built but we’re also very cognizant of the fact that not everything we did was perfect, not by a long shot. There are many things that we did right, many others that we executed in less-than-ideal ways, and even some things that we got just plain wrong, and there’s even an already pretty healthy debate over which ones are which. I’m going to address some of these in the coming days and weeks, and we’re going to fix everything we can as soon as we can — maybe not to everyone’s satisfaction, but we are listening closely to what is being said about Mixel, I can assure you of that.

Right now though I just want to say thank you to everyone who gave even a tiny fraction of their waking hours to Mixel during its debut day. It means a lot to me.

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Introducing Mixel

MixelIn my post from August titled “What Comes After Reading on iPad,” I argued that while the iPad is a game-changing reading platform, there has been perhaps too much emphasis on that one particular aspect of the device. Apple’s “magical and revolutionary” tablet brings with it many other transformational qualities that are being undervalued at the moment, and at least a few of them will spawn new businesses and maybe even new industries.

I talked about a few of those opportunities in that post, but the one that interests me the most, and the one that I’m betting on in a big way, is the fact that iPad is an ideal digital art device, one that requires little or no training — no mouse to master, no pen and tablet to plug in. Straight out of the box, it’s a powerful, completely intuitive tool for self-expression: just use your finger to make a mark.

Even better, for the very first time in decades of personal computing history, we have an ideal digital art device in the hands of a mass audience, a huge and still-growing user base composed not just of professional artists and early adopters, but of people from all walks of life who are embracing the liberating simplicity of this new platform.

That’s big. It changes what’s possible for visual self-expression in a huge way. Now anyone can do this — anyone. They just need the right software. Creating that software is what my co-founder Scott Ostler and I are trying to do with our new company.

Our app is called Mixel. It’s a collage-making tool and a social network rolled into one. With Mixel, anyone can create and share digital collages using images from the Web, Mixel’s library, or your own personal photos from Facebook or what’s right on your iPad. You can watch a video (directed by the inimitable Adam Lisagor) that describes all of this over at our site, Mixel.cc.

Why watch it when you can try it out for yourself, though? As of today, Mixel is available for download in the App Store. And it’s free.

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Domus: Paola Antonelli on Contemporary Type Design

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

A terrific overview of contemporary type design written by MoMA design and architecture curator Paola Antonelli. Antonelli believes that “font design might just be the most advanced form of design existing today,” which I agree with, but she says “Verdana is a paragon for a perfectly executed functionalist typeface,” which I disagree with. Still, it’s a great article. Read it here.

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A Short Film About Me

Last year director Raafi Rivero of The Color Machine asked me over email if I would be interested in being the subject of a short film project. By way of an example, he showed me this beautiful short that he had made about cinematographer Bradford Young. Flattered, I said yes, and not long afterwards he and a small crew filmed an interview with me in the beautifully arcane MEx Building, located on a still-ungentrified stretch of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

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Batgirl

Batgirl

I generally try to avoid foisting my own preoccupations on my daughter, as I think such habits are a great way to guarantee her resentment when she’s older. Still, I found myself lobbying for her to dress up as Batgirl for Halloween this year, and my girlfriend indulged me.

Don’t be fooled though; this is no store-bought get-up. Laura made this costume — including the ears! — almost entirely from scratch. The only pre-fabricated item was the tights, which came from American Apparel. Yes, American Apparel makes shiny spandex tights for kids.

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Where Are All the Ed-Ex Designers?

There’s a small but meaningful number of really, really good user experience designers in the world. I’m talking about the sort of individuals who can create a highly effective, truly immersive architecture around the way real users interact with software — and who have the skills and wherewithal to roll up their sleeves and get it done. Those types are not abundant, but they’re not uncommon either.

There’s also a reasonable number of really, really good editorial designers in the world, thanks to decades of publishing tradition and best practices. I’m talking about designers who know how to enhance and even maximize an audience’s understanding of published content. They’re comfortable working with writers and editors to help shape what we read, and they create unique value out of the combination of the written word and graphic language. Even given recent difficulties in the publishing industry, there are still lots of these people out there.

But there are very few designers who have both of these skill sets.

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Japan’s Zombie Preparedness

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Artist and writer Johnny Strategy takes a sobering look at the island nation’s preparedness for any potential crises of the undead.

On the one hand, Japan offers relative safety in that its reserves of zombie-sustaining resources are scarce: “With a cremation rate of 99.85% (2008 data), Japan and their corpse count, or lack thereof, would seem an ideal place to to ride out a plague of the undead.” On the other hand, the country’s geographic characteristics are fraught with post-apocalyptic risk: “Densely populated urban areas serve as ideal feeding grounds. And very little land to actually run to, coupled with the likely probability that other countries would deny you entry due to fear of contamination, certainly raises questions…”

Also included are some fascinating thoughts on the contrast between Eastern and Western zombies. Read more here.

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NYT: New York City Lags in Recycling

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Like a lot of New Yorkers I’m proud of the fact that, by walking or taking the subway almost everywhere, I consume far less gasoline than many residents of other cities. But this article suggests that smugness is not well-founded, as it’s also apparent that I’m probably generating much more non-recyclable waste than I could be. New York ranks sixteenth among twenty-seven cities in Siemens AG’ Green Cities Index and currently recycles just 15% of waste collected by the sanitation department, down from 23% a decade ago.

Numbers aside, the reporter’s own tally of non-recyclable waste products she collected after a week of take-out dining is sobering, and sadly familiar:

“I ended up with three plastic yogurt containers, a paper salad box, a paper cereal bowl, two Styrofoam plates, one plastic salad-dressing container and seven plastic food containers — the rigid ones with snap-on lids. Also, five plastic cups (each with a plastic straw), a paper cup with a plastic lid, a plastic water bottle and a plain old paper cup (it held milk for my cereal). Also, one plastic fork, one plastic knife and two compostable plastic spoons, which I threw out rather than composting.”

Read the full article here.

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Crayola Trace & Draw

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

In the past I’ve written about my daughter’s fondness for my iPhone and how it makes a great toy for her, aside from the fact that it’s way too expensive and delicate to be treated as a toy. It’s no surprise that she feels the same way about my iPad, which is similarly perfect for her yet not perfect for us to give to her.

Griffin Technology and Crayola have a solution: their Trace & Draw “is both protective case and art table in one.”

Crayloa Trace & Draw

Its “shatter-resistant” polycarbonate shell snaps onto an iPad 2, and a free app lets the kids trace and interact with Crayola-provided content. If nothing else, it makes for a kid-friendly case, which I welcome. I only wish it fit the original iPad model as well, since I still have one of those and I’m not quite ready to hand over my still-pretty-new iPad 2 to a two year-old. Find out more here.

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