Confirmed: Blu-Ray Not for Moms

When I was visiting my mother earlier in the month, I helped her upgrade her ‘home theater’ — I hesitate to call it that because her needs are not nearly so grand as replicating a theater viewing experience inside of her home. She just likes to watch the occasional movie and maybe tap into her granddaughter’s Flickr stream and that’s about it.

She had an old 30-in. CRT television that weighed about a ton, but I managed to kick it to the curb and bought her a new, inexpensive Vizio LCD television. Setup was a breeze, but of course her old DVD player was not capable of upconverting to the new TV’s greater resolution, so playing movies looked terrible on it. I went to the store with the idea of buying her a new, simple, US$50 upconverting DVD player.

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Music at the Speed of Hype

A few weeks ago, fan site Radiohead At Ease — among other sources — reported on an unsubstantiated rumor that Radiohead’s long-awaited eighth album was already complete. Then, this morning, the Internet woke up to find that apparently the album is finished after all and fans can pre-order it immediately. Physical copies of the new record won’t be available for a few months, but the songs will be available for download this Saturday. Wow.

This is the way music works in the 21st Century: no waiting through months and months of unconfirmed deadlines, no release dates announced several quarters in advance, no slogging through interminable marketing campaigns trying to build up anticipation, no manufacturing timelines holding up the delivery of the songs, no record companies just generally getting in the way. When the music’s done, it ships. This will soon be the norm for record releases but at the moment it still strikes me as kind of amazing. Now, if the band could just finish recording their records a bit more quickly, we’d really be living in the future.

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MORE/REAL Stylus Cap

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Depending on whether you think a stylus tool would make for a much needed complement to your iPad or a heretical corruption of its original idea, you may or may not like industrial designer Don Lehman’s new Kickstarter project: The MORE/REAL Stylus Cap attaches to either end of standard-issue Sharpie markers, Bic ballpoints or Pilot Fineliner pens, giving users greater precision for sketching and drawing.

Find out more and pledge at the Kickstarter page.

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Santa Marta

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Aristic duo Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, working with local youths, repainted the buildings surrounding a square in this poor Rio de Janeiro neighborhood with a striking, multi-color ray design. The project took a month, with the local workers receiving an education in painting craft (“As every wall, every house needs another solution, the painters learn to work with all kinds of material.”) as well as a paycheck.

Read more about the project here. Via Claire Desjardins.

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Where Did the Korean Greengrocers Go

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Over at the urban-policy magazine City Journal, writer Laura Vanderkam takes a fascinating look at the shifts in economics and immigration that led Koreans to dominate the greengrocer industry in New York City for a generation and then, almost as quickly, start to leave it behind. Read the full article here.

This brings to mind two related projects. First is Virginie-Alvine Perrette’s little-seen 2008 documentary “Twilight Becomes Night,” a look at the dwindling number of independent, neighborhood-oriented businesses in New York. Second is the more popular coffee table-sized book “Storefront: The Disappearing Face of New York,” which photographs the same phenomenon, beautifully capturing some of the mom and pop shops remaining throughout New York’s five boroughs. (It’s a huge book, but also recently made available in a smaller format.

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Comics’ Greatest Logos

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Veteran comic book letterer and type designer Todd Klein assembled this list of the “greatest” comic book logos in history. The intention was to identify the marks that “have had the greatest impact, are instantly recognizable and have withstood the test of time.” There aren’t a lot of surprises here, but the list really does show how iconic many of these logos have become, how deeply ingrained into our collective pop cultural memory they are.

It’s not just a list, either. Klein, whose grasp of the typographic history of comics probably has very few peers, identifies the designer of each logo and each logo’s various iterations. Fascinating stuff — well, to me at least. See the whole list here

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An Archive for Interaction Design

Designers are terrible at saving what we do. Most of us know that we should take the time to document what we’ve done for our own portfolios, if not for posterity. Yet few of us take the trouble. We usually wait until we leave our jobs and a portfolio becomes an imperative, or when a potential client spurs us to write a case study of a finished project.

In the analog world, this is merely an inconvenience. We scramble to dig up old mock-ups, assets, tearsheets, samples, and digital files. It’s tedious, but the definitive nature of analog design — the fact that there’s a canonical version of every brochure or book jacket — makes the archival process a straightforward one.

Archiving digital design, on the other hand, is far less clear-cut. It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating that digital media is a conversation. To design for digital media is to design systems within which wildly varying kinds of interactions can happen, virtual systems that are conducive to great conversations. Conversations, however, are notoriously difficult to fully capture.

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Uncommon Cures for the Common Cold

I was thinking about medicines this morning. As I’ve complained before, it’s been a terrible winter and so I’m fending off what seems like the fourth or fifth cold of the season already (having a toddler who brings home germs from play groups is part of this too).

My medicine cabinet is full of open boxes of cold remedies like Cold-Eeze, Zycam, Robitussin and others. Most of these over-the-counter medicines would taste neutral, bitter or worse were it not for the window-dressing of artificial flavorings like cherry, citrus or that generic, unidentifiable kind of sweetness you might associate with Smarties and other completely unnatural candies. Similarly, they’re all far too sweet for my taste; almost all of them make me a little nauseous.

Part of the reason for this of course is that it’s probably unwise, for obvious concerns, to make medicines so tasty that you look forward to the next dose. Still, it seems possible to me to create a sub-class of cold remedies that have more subtle, less powerful flavorings. I’d probably buy a cough syrup that tastes like some kind of lightly sweetened tea, for example, or a throat lozenge that has the flavor of rice candy, or a zinc supplement that comes in butterscotch. These could and probably should still taste a little bit unpleasant, but they don’t need to be as brutally sugary as they are now.

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Morning in the O.C.

Morning in the O.C.

We just spent the past five days visiting my mother in Orange County, California. It’s a strange place in many ways but at the very least it was nice and warm.

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