Out of the Office

What’s happening on this blog? Let me explain: for the past several weeks, I have been deeply engaged in an experiment I call “not blogging.” It’s a weird, wild alternative style of living in which I refrain from posting long, rambling diatribes on poorly-researched design topics close to my heart. Additionally, I have even abstained from the indulgence of publishing those shorter, no less inconsequential regurgitations of links you can already easily find elsewhere on the designy Interweb. In short, nothing’s going on here.

Instead, I’ve used most of this month to turn my attention instead to three other projects that have preoccupied my time. Two of them I can’t really speak about at this point, except to say one involves a new Web site and another involves ink printed on paper, the way they used to do it way back in the early years of the twenty-first century. You’ll be hearing more about both within a few months.

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A Metallic Taste

AnvilGenerally I’ve no truck with heavy metal music and like it that way, as there’s almost nothing about the genre that appeals to me. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of Sacha Gervasi’s 2008 documentary “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” which I watched a few nights ago. The movie tells the sometimes hilarious, somewhat sad and shockingly heartwarming story of an indefatigable Canadian metal band that, some three decades after their initial, minor brush with success, continues to plug away in search of rock stardom. It’s surprisingly well made, being gorgeously photographed and incisively edited, and is also universally appealing, even if like myself you prefer a lot fewer serifs in your music, if you’ll permit me to contort a metaphor for novel purposes (you know what I mean!).

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Newton Virus

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Nothing to do with MessagePads, but rather a clever hack in the form of a benign virus or screen saver that subjects all of the elements on your screen — icons, menus — to the forces of gravity, as if they were physical objects. The brief demonstration video explains it much better than I can. Via Creative Review.

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Layer by Layer

Truth be told, I was pretty nervous before facing off against Nicholas Felton in our Layer Tennis exhibition match last Friday afternoon. I’d never played the game before, and its structure, in which two visual artists volley a collage-like series of images back and forth under the scrutiny of a stopwatch, seemed very high pressure. Plus, my opponent was none other than Feltron himself (as Nicholas is sometimes better known), a designer famous for autobiographical annual reports in which he creates gorgeous visual narratives from nothing more than the statistical mundanity of everyday life.

Layer Tennis

All that trepidation wasn’t without good reason, as it turned out. You could hardly count layer tennis as physically demanding, but its breakneck speed and creative intensity do require dexterity and stamina — the fifteen minutes allotted to each volley is surprisingly intensive and vanishingly brief. Still, what I didn’t expect was how much fun the live atmosphere of layer tennis was. In the past, I’d always come to layer tennis matches after they were over and done with, perusing each match’s archive of volleys after the fact. Layer tennis in real time, though, is where the fun is.

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Charting the Beatles

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

A project dedicated to visually dissecting the Fab Four’s historical data. “These visualizations are part of an extensive study of the music of the Beatles. Many of the diagrams and charts are based on secondary sources, including but not limited to sales statistics, biographies, recording session notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings.” Some of the work is quite beautiful and, like an increasingly large portion of information graphics these days, quite useless, too. Also see the Flickr group. Via Information Aesthetics.

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A New Visual language for the BBC

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Starting last autumn, BBC Creative Director Ben Gammon led a global rebranding of the Beeb’s digital products, enlisting the help of Neville Brody’s Research Studios along the way. The effort was ambitious and the results are quite handsome; this post goes into quite a bit of detail about what they produced and give some insight into the challenges of undertaking such a massive exercise in digital branding. Truly worth a look. (Also, you can download the manual to peruse in greater detail.) Thanks to Nedward.org for the link.

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Slow to Judge

ExtractBy the time I thought to go see Mike Judge’s third live action feature “Extract” at my local cineplex it was already gone, having disappeared almost as quickly as it debuted back in September. I then promptly forgot about it — until I remembered it again, and realized a few weeks ago that it had been out on DVD for over a month already.

Most people, I suspect, regard Mike Judge’s movies with similar levels of mild interest, even those who are devotees of his unexpectedly great classic of the cubicle age, “Office Space.” At first glance, Judge’s movies are deceptively unremarkable, even generic. But upon closer inspection, they turn out to be surprisingly memorable — very nearly indelible — and his thus far brief oeuvre has already made for a directorial record that many other auteurs would envy. The satirically dystopian future he imagined in “Idiocracy,” for instance, is probably more accurate and certainly more entertaining than most of what science fiction has ever offered us. It also happens to be more hilarious than most movies of any genre.

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Layer Tennis, Anyone?

Tune in this coming Friday afternoon for Coudal Partners’ Layer Tennis, in which I will have the honor of matching my graphical prowess against Nicholas Felton of the famously self-aware Feltron Annual Reports. It’s sure to be a cornucopia of wild, free-ranging visual expressionism. ’Cuz y’know, that’s what both Nicholas and I are known for. What’s more, the venerable John Nack of Adobe will be providing the commentary as Nicholas and I parry back and forth.

Layer tennis, for those unfamiliar with it, is that curiously un-aerobic Internet sport in which two graphically adroit competitors, armed with Photoshop, swap a single image file back and forth, embellishing each volley with collage-like visual ornamentation. Oh, and it’s all done under the watchful eye of a stopwatch, so the pace can get kind of frenetic; each volley is fifteen minutes long, and the match is over after just ten volleys. Fun stuff. Check out the archive of previous matches to get a sense of what’s ahead. And point your browser to Layertennis.com on Friday to see Nicholas probably kick my ass.

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The Picture Book Report

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Fifteen illustrators each pick one of their favorite books — everything from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” to “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to “Geek Love,” and others — from which they illustrate a scene once a month. The contributors are generally young, hungry and extremely talented, and some of the work they’ve been turning in so far is superb. As far as responses to the rapidly changing value of illustration goes, this is an excellent one. Check it out here.

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