Kirb Your Enthusiasm

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The site HiLobrow is running a series on seminal comic book artist Jack Kirby. Each installment examines one panel — not one issue, but a single panel — from Kirby’s body of work and discusses it in detail. Essayists include Douglas Rushkoff and Mark Frauenfelder. This series runs in conjunction with “Cosmic Debris: Kirby in the 70’s,” an exhibition of enlarged Kirby art over at 4CP, which I wrote about last August.

There are nineteen installments so far. Read them all here.

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Long Live the Design Director for NYTimes.com

Everyone gets replaced sooner or later. Roughly seven months after my departure, I’m told that my former colleagues at The New York Times have just hired someone new to take over my old job heading up the NYTimes.com design team. The very talented new design director is my good friend Ian Adelman, who, of course, was also the very talented design director who has helmed NYMag.com for the past four years or so. He did an incredible job there and he’s going to do an incredible job at The Times too. In fact, I slightly envy Ian this opportunity: there are lots of great projects there, and lots of great opportunities to do really meaningful design, and I sort of wish I was still there to work on them. Anyway, I expect great things. Congratulations to Ian, and continued good luck to my old colleagues at The Times, too.

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The Sad Story of Illustration on the Web

I’ve argued that you can’t design for digital publications the way you design for print publications, but that doesn’t mean that what we leave behind in the print tradition is not missed online. One of strengths that print designers have long brought to their publications is illustration, where artists are commissioned to create visual translations of an article’s most salient or provocative concepts. Print publications have a long, long history of truly great illustrations that became indelible companions to the content they accompanied. Not so much online.

In fact, in digital media, illustration is missing in action, and its absence is palpable. I can’t think of a single, regularly publishing, large-scale digital publication that uses original illustrations prominently, much less pays illustrators a working wage for their efforts. By and large, digital publishing traffics in photographic images, most of them literal — an article about President Obama will be accompanied by a photo of President Obama. Occasionally, when the subject matter of an article doesn’t inspire obvious photo selections, a bit more imagination becomes necessary. This is where, given different economics, digital publishers might turn to illustrators. Instead, they turn to stock photographs, usually with awful results. Here are a few I found this morning.

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Home Alone…with All My Stuff

Every serious adult should have an inventory of the possessions in his or her home in case of fire, flood or alien attack, but I don’t. This is one of the things that I’ve been meaning to do forever, and I’ve always thought that software should be able to help me do it. But home inventory software has always struck me as being unrealistically data entry-oriented. That is, most of the packages I’ve seen are predicated on the idea that the user is going to be very thorough and record every data point around each possession: not just the make, model and serial number, but also date of purchase, price, a scan of the receipt, notes on any servicing that might have happened, even a photograph of it… I mean come on. Who’s going to do that?

Part of the problem is that almost all of the home inventory software I’ve seen is intended to live on my hard drive. It’s packaged software (or, now, downloadable from the Mac App Store) that resides locally, tied to a specific computer, with little or no awareness or acknowledgment of the network. In reality, it should live on the cloud where it would make much more sense as a service, and not just because keeping this data physically off-premises is in keeping with the whole point of tracking it in the first place.

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The 2011 Muriel Awards

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

For the fifth year in a row, this virtual awards ceremony, which plays out across several blog posts over two and a half weeks, tallies the collective wisdom of a loose-knit band of cinephiles and critics to honor the best in film. In addition to the expected “best of” categories, The Muriels make note of several interesting superlatives, including the year’s best body of work and the best film from a decade ago. More awards will be announced until 06 Mar, helping to fortify you with some thoughtful criticism and film writing until the Oscars comes along and spoils your appetite.

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The Interactive TV You Already Use

We have been waiting forever for interactive television, but Peter Yared of Webtrends argues that it’s already here. It’s just not happening on our television sets, where we had always imagined elaborate user interface layers would be superimposed onto the channel-tuning paradigm we’ve been familiar with for so long.

Instead, consumers have opted to leave their televisions relatively untouched — and simple — while supplementing their viewing experiences with other digital devices: laptops, smart phones and tablets. You’ve probably done this yourself: in the middle of watching a movie at home you spot a an actor or actress who looks familiar but whose name you can’t recall; out comes the laptop or iPhone, where a quick Internet Movie Database lookup scratches that itch. Or, you’re catching up on the back catalog of a popular television show that’s particularly engrossing, so you go searching the Web for commentary, background material, and hypotheses about why the heck there was a polar bear on that island.

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TD 63-73

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Boutique design publisher Unit Editions have announced their latest book: “TD 63-73: Total Design and Its Pioneering Role in Graphic Design.” An “insider’s account” of one of the more influential design studios from the height of mid-century graphic design.

“Written by Ben Bos, a key member of the studio, the book describes how a group of idealistic Dutch designers came together to form a multidisciplinary design studio that helped shape the future of graphic design. Total Design began in Amsterdam in 1963. Ben Bos joined the founders (Wim Crouwel, Benno Wissing, Friso Kramer and the Schwarz Brothers) from the outset. Together, and individually, they set new benchmarks for identity design, cultural design, exhibition design and product design.”

Preview images look very promising, and the cover is gorgeous.

Pre-orders will receive free international shipping (the book is sold from the U.K., where Unit is based). Of course, ordering means figuring out the company’s Web site, which is just good enough that it really should be much more usable and better designed than it is. Start deciphering the ordering process here.

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Fast Co.: User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Apple and Ikea demonstrate that user-centric design is a fallacy, argues this opinion column by design professional Jens Martin Skibsted. He insists that “user insights can’t predict future demand,” “user-centered processes stifles creativity,” and that “user focus makes companies miss out on disruptive innovations.” He also (anonymously) quotes members of the Apple design team regarding their view of user-centric design:

“It’s all bullshit and hot air created to sell consulting projects and to give insecure managers a false sense of security. At Apple, we don’t waste our time asking users, we build our brand through creating great products we believe people will love.”

This is a healthy debate within the design profession. I hope it becomes a bigger and bigger debate, too. Read the full piece here.

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