Interhoods

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

My good friends at Weightshift have just launched this real-world directory for designers and developers. Log in with your Dribbble or Github accounts and identify your location in New York, San Francsico or Chicago (more cities coming soon). It’s pretty neat to be able to see who is physically near you, neighborhood by neighborhood, and will be even more useful if it achieves critical mass. Nice idea. Check it out and register your location at Interhoods.org.

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Someone Could Make a Lot of Money with Personal Finance Software

Mark Hedlund, the founder of shuttered personal finance Web app Wesabe, has written a fantastic post-mortem on his experience entitled “Why Wesabe Lost to Mint.” It offers tremendously candid insight into what they did wrong at Wesabe, what Mint did right, and the surprisingly persistent myths around failures and successes in both camps.

This is a story that is of course full of valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and anyone trying to create a product in a competitive marketplace. What’s even more interesting for me is that the last chapter has hardly been written in this category of software. This is not a case where Wesabe lost and Mint took the market, lock, stock and barrel. There’s still tremendous opportunity in personal finance software, mostly because, in its current state ca. 2010, most of these applications don’t fulfill their true purpose.

This is a point that’s very fresh in my mind. Having recently left a job with a healthy salary to hobble together income from multiple smaller sources while raising a young family, personal finance software has, unsurprisingly, become much, much more critical to me, and its failures much, much more evident.

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What Gestures Do People Actually Use?

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

I thought this was interesting. Luke W. writes up some notes on a talk given last week in Chicago at the Design for Mobile conference by Dan Mauney, Director of Human Factors and Research at design consultancy HumanCentric. The subject was a study Mauney and his team did on what gestures forty people in nine different countries intuitively and comfortably use when interfacing with mobile devices. One point was particularly interesting to me:

“The study didn’t find see a lot of variability between experts and novices — move and zoom had the biggest variability.”

If true, that’s a world of difference from the paradigm of desktop computing. Hopefully Mauney will make his presentation available in full, but in the meantime you can read Luke’s notes here.

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Duffy: The Third Man

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Happening in London at the Lucy Bell Gallery right now: a retrospective of the work of British photographer Brian Duffy, sometimes referred to as “The Man Who Shot the 60s.” Duffy captured indelible portraits of iconic figures and is responsible for the unforgettable “Aladdin Sane” image of David Bowie, among others. The amazing thing about his work is that, aside from the tell-tale fashions of the era in which he photographed, his compositions and sense of life remain remarkably fresh — many of them look like they were shot yesterday.

Brian Duffy

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The Only Thing a Router Is Good For

Like many people reading this, I have a broadband connection in my home that manifests itself as a router — a vaguely futuristic, plastic box attached to a cable that runs into my wall. To that router, I’ve attached an Apple AirPort Extreme, a VOIP router and a switch for additional Ethernet connections. It’s a bit of a mess, and it could probably be simplified, but for the most part it works fine.

I make whatever minor adjustments are needed to these devices through software; either browser-based interfaces or Apple’s own AirPort utility. In fact, the only time I ever have to physically touch the whole setup is on the rare occasion when something goes wrong with the cable connection itself. Admittedly, in recent months that’s been more often than I’d like with my current Internet provider, but for the most part it happens rarely.

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Tee Franklin

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

A beautiful cut of the classic typeface Franklin Gothic created by the Finnish company Suomi Type Foundry. Its almost excessively elegant details and availability in thin, light and ultra light weights are explained by the fact that it was originally commissioned by British Vogue, though the magazine ultimately never used it.

Their loss is your gain — the complete family is available for just US$200 from YouWorkForThem. A steal.

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First Look at New Alvin Lustig Book

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The design blog Grain Edit offers a quick write-up and some snapshots of the interior of “Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig” by Steven Heller and Lustig’s widow Elaine Lustig Cohen. I’ve been looking forward to this book since I first heard about the project, as there’s too little available about this Modernist master. However, Alvinlustig.com from my friends at Kind Company is a fantastic starting point. Read the full entry here.

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Annals of Crime

Manhattan’s Film Forum cinema house kicks off a three-week festival of classic heist flicks on 1 Oct, a celebration of that oddly comforting movie genre that provides the vicarious thrill of watching the planning, execution and (usually) unraveling of elaborately conceived crimes. You can find the full schedule and more information at Filmforum.org. These sorts of movies were among the first films to really capture my imagination as a kid, and I have a great fondness for them. In fact, in more highfalutin moments, I like to claim them as a minor inspiration for my interest in design — there’s a vague but visceral connection between their emphasis on puzzle-like narratives and the act of designing.

At its most basic, the structure of a heist film is an echo of the design process: a problem is identified, plans are developed, a team undertakes its implementation, and the story climaxes on the heist or the execution of the design itself. The dramatic tension of that final act defines the genre, but it’s the lead-up, the intricate preparation, the clever inventions and novel insights into the problem that provide the bulk of its raw pleasure to me. As a designer, there is for me a familiar echo of the work that I do in creating a solution when I watch on screen a cadre of experts — the safe-cracker, the sharp-shooter, the explosives expert — gathered around a blueprint of a bank, running through their plan of attack. Who doesn’t secretly want their work life to be like that?

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Radiohead on Options for Releasing Their Next Album

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Bassist Colin Greenwood pens a lengthy and very thoughtful reflection on the band’s experiences with the pay-what-you-like model under which their last album, “In Rainbows” was released, and how that experience informs their current thinking on ways to release its follow-up.

“Traditional marketplaces and media are feeling stale… and we are trying to find ways to put out our music that feel as good as the music itself. The ability to have a say in its release, through the new technologies, is the most empowering thing of all.”

It’s a very interesting essay on digital distribution from the vantage point of a content creator, albeit a highly privileged content creator. Definitely worth reading in its entirety here.

I’m not very forthcoming about my attitude towards Radiohead mostly because it doesn’t seem that interesting for one to declare that one is a fan of the band. But I’ll say: I can’t wait.

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