GQ: Interview with Aaron Sorkin

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2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The screenwriter is out to promote the forthcoming, 10th anniversary re-issue of his fantastic, under-appreciated “Sports Night” series on DVD. Regarding his more recent, failed series “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” he says: “I made too many mistakes. I would give anything to go back and get another bite of that apple. Basically, to use a sports analogy, you can have the best team in football playing the worst team in football. But if the best team in football throws four interceptions, they’re not going to win.”

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Speak Up: Dear Lulu

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Armin Vit reports on a student-produced test book for the online, print-on-demand system Lulu. Its pages include photographs in CMYK, RGB, grayscale and half-tone, line and pattern tests, type specimens at varying sizes, and even crop marks — all so that designers working with Lulu can get a sense of what its digital presses are and aren’t capable of. Best of all, anyone thinking of using Lulu can purchase their own copy.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Art Supplies

There has been some changing of the seating chart at my office recently, and in the process, I’ve seen some of my colleagues — art directors on the print side of the organization — moving the contents of their flat files back and forth along with their seats. Watching them do this in the background, I realized that since we first took up residence in our our new building last year, I’ve barely paid attention to those file cabinets, which store critical samples of printed pages and reference material in wide, shallow drawers. But for a print designer, they’re critical tools.

In fact, I realized, it’s been years since I’ve paid attention to or felt the need for flat files at all, to say nothing of ‘traditional’ art supplies of any kind. This is what it means to practice design on the Web, I guess. On the digital side of the business, we’re admittedly still a long way away from a paperless office, but we’re getting there. I rarely ever print out my own work these days, and I’ve made it a habit to throw away nearly every single piece of paper handed to me by colleagues before the end of that same day — and I can’t recall a single time that practice has made it harder for me to do my job the next day.

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