The Illustrator Bob Peak

Illustration history blog Today’s Inspiration is in the middle of a few posts highlighting the powerhouse 20th Century illustrator Bob Peak, whose distinct style reconciled mid-century concepts of modernism and expressionism into powerful commercial visuals.

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GQ: Todd Levin on His Days with Conan

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

A friend of mine, comedian and writer Todd Levin, has an article in the most recent issue of G.Q. about his experiences writing for, first, “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and then, after moving to Los Angeles, O’Brien’s brief tenure on “The Tonight Show” from its launch to its very public demise. It’s a fascinating and personal peek behind the scenes at one of the more bizarre incidents in television history — and very well written, to boot, which you can tell from this excellent kicker:

“If you’ve ever seen a criminal standing before a firing squad and felt jealous of all the attention he was receiving, then you would have loved writing for Conan O’Brien.”

And then this bit from when it became evident that the network had decided to bring Jay Leno back to late night:

“[Conan] entered the studio unceremoniously, dressed in a leather jacket and baseball hat — like someone getting ready to leave — then slumped into the guest couch and fixed his gaze on the far wall as he addressed us, never really making eye contact. It was a sight that shook your faith a little, like seeing your dad on crutches.”

Read the full essay here. By the way, Todd has also just co-written a book called “Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk,” which he describes as “a parody of all those cringe-inducing sex manuals our parents had lying around, and featuring charcoal illustrations of hairy hippies getting to third base.” Mmm.

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Contractual Basis

Since I left my job at The New York Times in July, I’ve been working with a few companies in various capacities, and each of these relationships has in their own way required me to sign paperwork of some kind. Non-disclosure forms, independent contractor agreements, tax forms and the like.

The thorniest ones have been the contracts, which require not just my signature but a counter-signature too. This stuff typically comes to me via email attachments. I’ll print them out, initial each page and sign on the dotted line. Then I’ll run the whole document through my indispensable Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M document scanner, which creates a PDF version in practically a blink of the eye, and send it back to the other party as an email attachment. If that party has scanning capabilities, then they’ll send me back a new PDF with their signature; just as often as not, they’ll have to put final copies in the mail or defer the handoff until we next meet face-to-face.

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Pixar’s “Day & Night” in Hardcover

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Moviegoers who saw Pixar’s “Toy Story 3” in theaters will surely remember the studio’s delightful animated short “Day & Night,” a typically brilliant lead-in to the feature that has now been adapted into a hardbound children’s book (already available for sale on Amazon.)

To my mind, this is the kind of thing that separates Pixar apart from all other film studios, whether producing animated or live action fare: they respect the stories and characters they create enough to find appropriate expressions for them in other media even when, as is the case here, there’s probably not a lot of money to be made. Compared to the large-scale public appetite for Buzz Lightyear tie-in products, there were probably very few who were clamoring to see the “Day & Night” characters get their own book, yet Pixar went to the trouble of making it happen anyway.

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Penguin Classics Repackages Fitzgerald

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of my favorite authors and I make no apologies for being yet another of his countless fans who considers “The Great Gatsby” to be my favorite book of all time. In fact, I own, in some form or another, most of Fitzgerald’s works, but these new editions from Penguin Classics are so aesthetically striking — and smart in their execution — that I would seriously consider buying them again. In fact, the new packaging for “Gatsby,” is in my mind such an improvement over the original, iconic yet highly imperfect cover illustration that I would gladly own it just so I don’t have to look at that old one anymore.

New Fitzgerald Editions from Penguin

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Train Wreck in D.C.

From the age of five to the age of seventeen, I lived in the D.C. metropolitan area, where I spent a lot of time riding the Metrorail subway system. In retrospect, I have to credit the repeated exposure to the system’s beautiful modernist architecture and typography for influencing my design sensibilities. It featured a distinctive pylon-based signage system that was originally designed by Vignelli Associates, though it had already been somewhat corrupted from its original form with additional wall signage by the time I was riding it. (I actually found the wall signage helpful, I must admit.)

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iPad Gripe Session

After a few months of owing it, I keep finding more and more uses for my iPad, many of them not possible on my Mac or my iPhone, and my affection for it keeps ratcheting up accordingly. At the same time, there are at least a handful of irritating shortcomings on the platform that I’m impatiently waiting for Apple to address. I know it’s been less than a full year since the iPad debuted, and perhaps there’s a significant upgrade due soon, but for now, I find that using the iPad is more frustrating than it needs to be.

In large part this is owing to the fact that iOS 4 is so good, making its current unavailability for the iPad feel particularly vexing. In the few short months since I’ve owned my iPhone 4, I’ve become thoroughly reliant on the iOS 4 unified inbox within Mail, for instance — I’m amazed that I ever lived without it on my iPhone and annoyed that I have to live without it still on my iPad. Also, the major efficiency gains that iOS 4’s multitasking makes possible have become second nature to me on the iPhone. Meanwhile, switching between apps on the iPad and having to wait for each app to load from scratch every time I access it seems like an archaic custom leftover from the first decade of the century.

Among features that the iPad does share with the iPhone, the ability to undo actions seems more rote than useful. As a gesture to invoke the Undo command, shaking a handheld device the size of an iPhone is clever and workable. Shaking a much larger device like the iPad is awkward at best and violates one infrequently violated but nevertheless important law of good user interface design: don’t force the user to look like a fool [original euphemism deleted in deference to British sensitivities] in order to use any given feature.

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Take the Money and Stand Still

Last week I tweeted this eye-opening guide to spotting an ATM skimmer published by the invaluable Snopes.com. Like a lot of people, I’d heard of ATM skimmers before — duplicate card readers and wireless cameras surreptitiously attached to cash machines with the intent of stealing your card number and PIN — but I had no idea what form they actually took. The visual evidence was striking; skimmers are uncanny mimics of the visual language of ATMs. The colors, shapes and peculiar plasticity that we’re all familiar with are faithfully reproduced in their ersatz forms. I had no idea they could blend into a cash machine’s hardware so expertly.

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LA Times: Did “Star Wars” Become a Toy Story?

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

On the thirtieth anniversary of “The Empire Strikes Back” — the high point in the trilogy — producer Gary Kurtz talks to The Los Angeles Times about his participation in the films. Kurtz was the producer for the first two installments and parted ways with creator George Lucas on the third over differences on its narrative direction.

“I could see where things were headed… The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It’s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.”

That explains everything, including the sense of tedium that hung over large swaths of “Return of the Jedi” and the miserable pall that hovered over all three of the franchise’s miserable, pathetic prequels.

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