Manhattan in Black and White

Woody AllenIn order to recover a bit from a recent feeling of exhaustion, I spent a significant amount of this past weekend diligently sitting on my ass, in front of the television. On Saturday night, I popped in my copy of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” which, among other things, is as stunningly designed a movie as I’ve ever seen. This is largely thanks to the work of Gordon Willis, a master cinematographer who, apart from his incredible work on this film, was also responsible for photographing an alarmingly high share of my favorite movies of all time: “The Godfather,” “The Godfather Part II,” “All the President’s Men,” and “The Parallax View,” among others.

If you’ve watched these films, then you know what I mean: they strike an uncanny balance between the naturalism that dominated film discourse during the 1970s and a kind of visual abstraction, an artful sense of framing that treated actors and scenery alike as stark compositional images. On the other hand, if you haven’t seen these films, take a look at these captures to see what I mean…

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Talking at Length About Brevity

It’s no accident that editor Liz Danzico and I came up with the idea for and launched A Brief Message this year, of all years. Brevity is a meme with a lot of currency today. You can see it not just at our site, where the design opinions and the reader responses run no longer than two hundred words a piece, but at completely different sites like Twitter, Pownce and Tumblr too, where the economy of words is so sparing that it might take hours before you come across a sentence with a fully formed subject-verb-predicate construction. Similarly, Very Short List offers a kind of editorial curation that, in years past, might have run much longer than its two- or three-paragraph average length. Think Suck.com

People’s attention spans are shorter, for sure, but there’s an argument that, by accommodating shorter attention spans, sites like ours are only compounding the problem. Some people, in fact, find the whole trend alarming (a prominent design writer whom we invited to contribute to A Brief Message politely replied, and I’m paraphrasing, that he was ‘against everything we stood for’). And if you look at an outlet like Brijit, even champions of brevity like myself might give pause.

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The Elements of My Style

Setting aside whether the aesthetic or style of my design is particularly original or not, I have a way of solving design problems that’s predictable, at least. For better or worse, there are certain tropes, tendencies, tricks and clichés that I repeatedly enlist in the pursuit of a design solution. I thought to myself the other day, wouldn’t it be fun to list them all out?

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The More the Merrier at NYTimes.com

Wait, I have more job openings to add to the two I mentioned previously. One of the talented visual designers at NYTimes.com has decided to leave our design group for a terrific position elsewhere. I’m very sad, but her new job represents an exciting new stage for her career so I can’t stand in the way. I’m also proud of the fact that she’s the first among the many talented folks I’ve hired over the past eighteen months to leave the company, and her decision was borne not out of dissatisfaction but rather opportunity. Or that’s what she told me, anyway.

In any event, we’re now looking for a visual designer, too. If you᾿re devotee of beautiful design in all media but have a particular affinity for clean, highly usable interface design for text-heavy content online, you’ll want to apply right away.

As usual, we’re looking for a full-time employee to fill that spot. But in an unusual (for us) turn of events, I also have the budget for a freelance designer to help us out with some special projects for four- to six-months. We’re looking for the same skills in this freelancer as in the designer position above, but if you value the pleasures of independent contracting and the thrill of paying for the escalating monthly costs of your own health insurance, this might just be the gig to get you through the winter. Do up your résumé and submit it via our wonderful enterprise job board.

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