Calling All Famous People

If you haven’t yet seen it, the reigning lion of design criticism blogs, Design Observer, recently launched a new visual make-over. At long last, the tiny white type on dark gray background of their old look and feel has been cast aside, and now it’s finally possible to read the text without incurring lasting corneal damage.

It’s not a revolutionary design, but it’s exactly what it needs to be. The new look is austere, tasteful and orderly, and I like it quite a bit even if I do wish the text was larger still (I’m somewhat prematurely succumbing to that inevitable decline in the power of the eye to make out teeny tiny designer typesetting). I’m not going to get into a big review of it, though — for that, you can turn to the excellent roundtable discussion on this subject over at Speak Up.

Mainly, I point it out because I want to piggyback on a great piece that Michael Bierut published on the site a few days ago about the recent, unfortunate passing of photography great Arnold Newman.

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Mirror, Mirror

A design flourish whose time is clearly now — or maybe it was fifteen minutes ago — is reflectivity, that very popular style of making objects cast a reflection on a horizontal plane directly beneath them. The most notable example of this, and to my mind, the apex of the trend, is Apple’s iChat AV release from last year, which renders video conferences of three or four people as if the concurrent screens are arranged in a virtual room. Beneath each of the video conferencing screens is a beautifully rendered, dynamic reflection.

It’s a very slick look that creates a dramatic spatial illusion — the kind of illusion that, in the recent past, digital design has been skittish about. The conceit of virtual spaces — rooms, cities, etc. — being used as metaphors for information display is something that fell out of favor with the passing of CD-ROMs as a viable medium; three-dimensional space in user interfaces became cheesey, basically, and we’re only now starting to think of the approach as not cheesey. But it may be too late.

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Pictures of People

This photography course that I’m taking is only about four weeks long, so I thought I would follow up with updates on each week’s progress. I’m not going to write extensively about the lessons taught each week, but at least I’ll be posting new photos to Flickr — now organized neatly into their own set, called “Photo Class” and making some brief comments. Don’t worry, if it bores you to tears, we’re already near the halfway point, and it will all be over before the Fourth of July.

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Bug Me Not

Raise your hand if you’re with me on having had it up to here with ‘helpful’ software update reminders, those increasingly pervasive, automated notification systems built into applications that let you know when you need to download a new revision. They’re meant to be helpful, but I find them intrusive and nagging.

Through these systems, it seems that I’m constantly confronted with entreaties to download and install new versions of everything I use, and those versions have been coming with greater and greater frequency, and have been weighing in at larger and larger megabytes totals. It’s become the norm rather than the exception for me to be confronted, each time I log into my computer, with pop-up reminders or system messages letting me know that a newer, better, more crucial change to my software is ready and waiting for me to grab.

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