Authentic Jobs Turns Five

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

About a week ago, I rejoined Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs network for creative professionals. If you look to the right column of this site, you’ll see a “Help Wanted” module with links to five recent postings on the AJ boards. As it happens, this month also marks Authentic Jobs’ fifth anniversary. To commemorate that milestone, the network is promoting charity: water, “a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing clean water to millions of people in developing countries.” The goal is to raise US$20,000 for the Bayaka tribe in Africa; that amount will provide clean, potable, life-sustaining water to a thousand people — which is pretty remarkable, really. Find out more and donate today.

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The Movie Posters of Stephen Frankfurt

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Courtesy of the excellent indie film site Mubi, a quick overview of a seminal designer from the formative era of American advertising: “Frankfurt was a brilliant designer as well as a great ideas man, and his most innovative marketing concept, starting with ‘Rosemary’s Baby̵ in 1968, was to see the packaging of movies as a totality — designing the titles, posters, trailers and ads with one common look and theme.”

In addition to “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Downhill Racer,” shown above, Frankfurt contributed to a host of films from the 60s and 70s, many of which you’re sure to recognize. And yes, of course, the write-up includes the obligatory reference to “Mad Men,” so rest assured Don Draper fans, you can continue to view that era through the lens of that show — much as your knowledge of “Happy Days” rounds out your view of the 1950s. I kid! Read Mubi’s write-up here.

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Freitag am Donnerstag

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

FREITAG am Donnerstag is “a breakfast lecture series” organized by the bag and accessory designer/manufacturer FREITAG in collaboration with my good friend Tina Roth Eisenberg, better known as swissmiss. The series is meant to highlight their new Reference collection of media-inspired messenger and city bags, and they’ve invited a few speakers — including myself — to give talks about the state of journalism and the media. The first event is next Thursday morning in Zurich, Switzerland in FREITAG’s very cool-looking Reference Editorial Space.

FREITAG Reference Editorial Space Exterior
FREITAG Reference Editorial Space Interior

Zurich is a bit far for many of my readers, I know, but if you’re in Switzerland next week and can make it, you can read more and sign up here.

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Print: An Interview I Conducted with Mark Porter

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

I came across this interview I conducted in 2008 with former Guardian design director Mark Porter and realized that I had never linked to it here. It ran in the December 2008 issue of Print Magazine (where I now write a monthly column) but that site is notoriously difficult to navigate. The interview is a bit of a relic of history now, as neither Mark nor I are still helming the design groups at our respective news organizations, but I thought it was still interesting enough to post here. Mark recounts his experience acclimating himself to the digital environment after spending most of his career as a print designer, and has some illuminating things to say about where the two schools of thought overlap. Read the full interview here.

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Ars Technica: Delicious Library 2 Tried to Do Too Much

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The publisher of the once well-regarded media cataloging application confesses that feature creep and a lack of follow-through subverted their ambitions for its second major release, leaving many customers frustrated and disappointed where the company had intended to wow them.

“Let’s say, for instance, 80 percent of these features worked great. I’d think, ‘Yay, I did good, I added a bunch of great stuff to the new version, it was definitely worth US$20 to existing customers.’ But, that’s not how the customers see it — they see the 20 percent that’s buggy, and they think, ‘This is crappy? he released software that didn’t work.’“

This is an object lesson in how success, ambition and even good intentions can lead to a bad product even when the business is fully aligned with the customer experience. It’s also a clever bit of mea culpa-style media spin. Not that I think it’s dishonest; I just find it very savvy. Read the full article

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Apple Blinks in the Living Room

AppleTVNo one’s happier than I am that Apple hasn’t thrown in the towel with its living room efforts. After much neglect, the new Apple TV, announced today, is a step in the right direction: sleeker in size, more capable in content access, network savvier in its diskless approach to media, and — the clincher — more wallet-friendly at US$99. That’s a winning combination, I think.

On the other hand, this new generation of Apple TV doesn’t appear to do too much more that I can’t already do with the older Apple TV and the Netflix Instant Watch-capable Blu-Ray player that I currently have in my living room. In fact, it’s telling that it’s still called just “Apple TV” without some new suffix indicating that it’s a second generation product. For all intents and purposes, it’s the same as what I already have.

That’s fair. I’ve always thought the core Apple TV feature set makes for a device that can do well in the marketplace, and its new price point and other alterations give it a fighting chance.

However, when rumors of an Apple TV reboot first started gaining momentum, what I hoped for was that Apple would undertake a bigger challenge than just making it a more attractive device for consumers. Much in the same way that they fixed the mobile space with the iPhone, and much in the same way they’re trying to fix the problem of true consumer computing with the iPad, I hoped that they would also try to fix the living room. This is a challenge that I wrote about in a general way a year ago in a blog post called “The Living Room Problem,” but luckily for those reading now, I’m going to revisit those sentiments here.

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Time Tracking Tweets

Last week I asked my followers on Twitter if they could recommend a good application to help me track the billable time I’m spending on various client projects. Reaffirming the power of tens of thousands of similarly geeky compatriots, I was quickly deluged with answers, for which I’m very grateful.

I had originally asked for suggestions for software both on the desktop and on the Web, but most of the replies focused on the latter. Which is kind of amazing to me. I remember entering work hours in a hoary old package called Timeslips when I started working as a designer; it ran on one Macintosh in the design studio where I was employed, and the staff had to take turns with it to enter our project hours. It was poorly designed and really painful. Of course that was a long time ago but even five or six years ago, when I was researching time tracking solutions for my old design studio, the pickings were slim.

Now time tracking software is available pretty much anywhere and at any time; a number of the packages suggested to me have iPhone components as well. That’s a lot of progress.

In my cursory review of the links sent to me, I definitely feel that I’m more attracted to a Web-based app, mostly because I think the short-term economics are better for me. I haven’t really settled on which is the best fit, but several folks on Twitter asked me to reflect back on the suggestions I came across, so here we go in no particular order.

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Secret Lives of Comic Book Panels

I’m so thankful for the day that someone had the idea to combine blogging and comics. For instance, for the past several months I’ve been really enjoying 4CP, a tumblelog-style site that examines vintage comic books — or parts of them — with a curatorial eye. Each post is a detail from a decades-old comic book panel, shown in a kind of extreme focus that reveals the beauty of the ink lines, the textures of the paper and of course the distinctive color halftone screens that are the hallmark of cheap four-color printing.

The images are cropped with great artfulness, and manage to find moments of quiet and restfulness within a style of artwork that has always been about frantic motion, kinetic energy and physical action. Some of the pieces look downright still, as if they were somehow captured from the hidden moments that occur between panels. Even better: clicking on the images reveals high-resolution versions of many of them, where you get an even closer look at the fine details of the substrate and the effect becomes even more immersive.

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Dowling Duncan’s Proposed Redesigns of U.S. Currency

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Graphic design studio Dowling Duncan created this attractive entry to The Dollar Redesign Project which proposes a Modernist take on U.S. currency. Some nice usability considerations have been factored into these designs: the bills are varied in size, with the larger denominations being longer; and the designs are oriented vertically. “When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically.”

Notwithstanding the fact that American popular taste has moved so far away from the International Style for design of government collateral that these proposals haven’t a prayer of being implemented in the real world, they’re nice works nevertheless.

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