Blockbuster Status Eludes Current Comic Book Fare

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Box Office Mojo reports that, in the midst of what is probably the most crowded summer yet for movies inspired by comic books, the genre is failing to deliver out and out hits.

“While comic book movies continue to pack a potent punch for genre fare, it’s becoming more difficult to generate a transcendent hit like ‘Batman Begins’ or ‘Iron Man,’ much less a box office sensation like ‘The Dark Knight’ or ‘Spider-Man.’”

It’s no secret why: there are too many of them and, for the most part, they’re not very good. I count myself as a comic book partisan, and I’m almost always happy to see one of the characters from my childhood make it to the big screen, but for major studios to release four major adaptations — “Thor,” “X-Men: First Class,” “Green Lantern” and “Captain America” — within a single summer is just unrealistic.

Two years ago, in a post about “The Dark Knight,” I compared the contemporary super-hero actioner to the Hollywood western. Like that once-dominant genre, super-hero films get little respect today but, I argued, they’ll one day become a routine vehicle for serious artistic ambitions. I still think that’s true, but the western-ization of comic book movies is happening on another level: they’re becoming commoditized and stripped of any meaningful uniqueness.

Read the Box Office Mojo write-up here.

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The Making of Avatars

I’m designing a social app right now and I need lots of avatars to use in the mock-ups. Designing social interfaces is a bit like trying to visualize a party, attendees and all, which is to say the designer is challenged with representing something full of life using tools that are inherently static.

Insofar as avatars give the impression of lots of people using the system, they’re a helpful design detail. I could use one or two ‘generic’ avatars across all of the various interfaces I’m designing, but the more that the hypothetical users in my mock-ups look like they could be actual, real-life users — and the more of them there are — then the better my chances for communicating a convincing design to collaborators.

Picking up a random selection of avatars from Twitter or Flickr, which is what I’m doing now, presents several problems. First, it’s laborious. Second, the users from whom I’m ‘borrowing’ these assets haven’t granted usage permissions of any kind. And third, they’re not a great cross-section of a wide user base.

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GROUP

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

My friend Larry Legend has been working on this project and live event with composer Aaron Siegel for several months, and it’s due to take place tomorrow.

“GROUP is a collective sound work that will start on individual mobile devices and ends with participants coming together for a large-scale gathering at 12:45 PM on 21 June 2011 near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets. Anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch can download the GROUP app from the Apple App Store and be a part of this experience.

The app is free so get a copy today and head to lower Manhattan tomorrow and take part; it should be amazing. You can read more here.

By the way, this is a great example of how, like the iPad, the iPhone is remaking our notions of what art can be. Desktops and laptops were fantastic tools for artists, but iOS devices allow participation in the arts in dramatically new and different ways. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing.

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What It’s Like As a Dad

This morning I was putting my shoes on to run outdoors for a quick five-minute errand. From across the apartment my daughter Thuy saw me preparing to leave and started waving and wishing me an energetic “G’bye! G’bye!” She’s just a few days shy of twenty-two months old now, and so her mother and I still find this relatively new level of articulateness and situational acuity impressive and adorable.

I assured her I’d be back quickly, then opened the front door and started stepping out of the apartment, but just then she ran over to me with a sudden urgency and said “Kiss!” She tugged on my hand to get me to kneel down, and then gave me a tiny peck on the cheek before saying “G’bye!” again.

It was a wonderful little Father’s Day moment, but more than that it helped crystallize for me what this feeling of having this little girl in my life is like. Before parenthood I was preoccupied with escaping mundanity; in my relationships, in my work, in my ambitions of all kinds, I labored to free myself of daily trivialities and strive for bigger and better things. Now the world looks very different. When a quotidian non-event like walking out the front door can become something to cherish for a lifetime, it makes me realize that there is grand import hidden in every little detail of every day, and that in fact the mundane can be unspeakably amazing. Being a parent does this to you.

Happy Father’s Day, everybody.

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Gagosian on iPad

There’s good news for publishers of iPad magazine apps, which in the past I’ve criticized for being needlessly complicated, difficult to use and poorly realized. The good news is they’re no longer the worst offenders when it comes to presenting wonderful, valuable content within burdensome and user-unfriendly interfaces. The new champion is the Gagosian app for iPad, from the storied Gagosian Gallery. That gallery represents some of the most important contemporary artists of the past several decades, and the Gagosian brand is responsible for some wonderful contributions to modern culture. Sadly this app should not be counted among them.

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Catastrophic Prototyping and Other Stories

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

An essay from Chaim Gingold, a designer and programmer who worked with Will Wright on Spore, in which he discusses the benefits of thinking of prototypes as a learning process that produces worthwhile failures. For anyone who is familiar with the value of iterating an idea (as opposed to working towards a single, monumental expression of the idea), there’s nothing remarkably new here. But the notion of small failures as an essential component of any success is so innately counter-intuitive to human nature that it’s always worthwhile to be reminded of it again, especially when it’s articulated as well as Gingold does here. Read the full text here.

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Export Illustrator Layers as PNGs

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Lately I’ve been creating a lot of wireframes in Illustrator and outputting them as PDFs to share with others as well as to send to my iPad for portable viewing. Even though Adobe is the publisher of Illustrator as well as the originator of the PDF format, there is nothing about this process that’s elegant, to say the least.

So last week I wondered aloud on Twitter whether anyone might already have figured out a way to automate this process. (To clarify, I accidentally typed “currently visible files” in that tweet when I mean “current visible layers.”) I didn’t get any replies until today, when my friend Matt Ericson told me that my tweet had inspired him to clean up some Illustrator actions that he’d created to do something similar to what I was looking for. His script Export Illustrator Layers as PNGs doesn’t output PDFs, but a stack of PNGs can be easily enough converted to PDFs, so close enough.

Correction: Matt informs me that this script is in fact capable of outputting PDFs as well as PNGs.

Actually, I realized that what I’m really looking for is not just a way of automating the output of various layers as files, but also a feature that (I think) is missing from Illustrator altogether: layer comps — similar to what’s available in Adobe Photoshop. That handy feature lets me combine multiple layers to create specific views representing different states of an interface, without having to duplicate persistent U.I. elements (e.g., navigation buttons or a footer) across several layers. Why it is that after so many years and so many expensive upgrades that Illustrator’s layers features Photoshop’s layers feature don’t act more or less exactly like one another is a mystery to me.

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to share Matt’s terrific script, which you can download here, and also add some more gripes to the inexhaustible supply of user complaints about gaps and inconsistencies in Adobe’s Creative Suite products. Carry on.

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