From several months ago but still worth a read. The magazine’s music critic Sasha Frere-Jones interviews Greenwood on the quality limitations of today’s dominant music delivery format.

“I’d feel frustrated if we couldn’t release CDs as a band, but then, it only costs us a slight shaving of sound quality to get to the convenience of the MP3. It’s like putting up with tape hiss on a cassette. I was happy using cassettes when I was fifteen, but I’m sure they were sneered at in their day by audiophiles. If I’m on a train, with headphones, MP3s are great. At home, I prefer CD or vinyl, partly because they sound a little better in a quiet room and partly because they’re finite in length and separate things, unlike the endless days and days of music stored on my laptop.”

Though he’s talking specifically about the esoteric world of high-fidelity sound, Greenwood is effectively casting a critical eye on the whole idea of high definition.

“I find this sound quality stuff both fascinating and ridiculous. It’s like the pixel resolution of digital cameras: higher numbers are better, but that discussion always pushes the actual photography to one side, somehow.”

The essence of his argument is dead on: superior fidelity and resolution is terrific but overrated in comparison to convenience. As a parallel example, I couldn’t be happier with my HD-TV and I wouldn’t mind owning a Blu-Ray player one day when the prices are more reasonable. Meanwhile, I’m consuming tons of not particularly high-resolution content via streaming media. It’s the convenience of media formats that matters so much more. And you could re-interpret the idea of convenience as a format’s interface — if it’s easy to use, if it provides affordances commensurate to the needs of real users in actual use cases, then it will win over higher resolution. Actually, it’s the content that really matters.

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Gawd, I’d kill to be able to do this: “Spend two weeks studying visual communication — especially typography — in Venice and Rome, the birthplace of Western typographic tradition.” This is another outpost in Steve Heller formidable design education empire, and he’ll be teaching there, but the rest of the faculty roster looks damn impressive on its own.

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In this terrific rebuttal, Antonio Carusone smacks down the flagrant inaccuracies found in this article at Webdesigner Depot. The article purports to list the various “advantages and disadvantages” of designing with a typographic grid. Carusone does a measured, even-handed job of calling bullshit on the author’s arguments, even while the article’s fundamental misapprehension about the entire subject begs for a much less gentle rebuke.

As an example, here’s just one of many gems, with the author’s original emphasis included:

“Generally speaking (very generally), creative designs should stick to more freedom and not use a grid — or at least use a very lenient one.”

I’d never read Webdesigner Depot before, but based on the quality of this article, I’m pretty sure I’m not missing anything.

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The legendary designer and partner at the landmark studio Chermayeff & Geismar answers questions for Logo Design Love. Among the brands on his C.V. are Mobil Oil, New York University, Chase Bank and National Geographic.

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The Book Cover Archive surveys the best covers from each of the last ten years. Includes John Gall’s crowd-pleasing cover for “A General Theory of Love,” which is among my favorites.

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