My Appearance on the Design Details Podcast

Design Details

Bryn Jackson and Bryan Lovin were kind enough to invite me onto their “Design Details podcast” last week and the episode is out today. We talked about honesty on the Web, juggling multiple projects, cards, “How They Got There” and Kidpost, among other topics. The episode is called “Extravagant Shallowness,” which is apparently something I said during the recording of the episode (I haven’t gone back to listen to it) and not a judgment of what I had to say, the hosts assure me.

Listen to it at designdetails.fm or in your favorite podcast software.

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Society of News Design Honors Tom Bodkin

Tom Bodkin at SND

Over the weekend, in Washington, DC, The Society for News Design honored New York Times design director, chief creative officer and a deputy managing editor Tom Bodkin with its Lifetime Achievement Award, the international organization’s highest honor. Tom was my boss during my tenure at The Times, and I’ll be forever grateful to him for his invaluable mentorship and friendship. There’s a big crew of talented designers who labor every day to make The Times the pillar of design that it is, but Tom is responsible for pointing them all in the right direction, and that guidance over the past three and a half decades has been a critical part of the organization’s continued prestige. Congratulations, Tom, the honor is well deserved.

More at snd.org, where they also feature this Q & A with Tom about his tenure at The Times.

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Co.Design Is Running Excerpts from How They Got There

How They Got There on Co. Design

Fast Company’s design-focused imprint Co. Design is running three excerpts from my new book, “How They Got There: Interviews With Digital Designers About Their Careers” starting today.

The first interview is with infographics designer Nicholas Felton, who talks about “his first job rejection, his fling with Facebook, and the fraught future of data.” It’s a pretty extensive excerpt, but there is lots more in the book both from Felton and thirteen other notable designers, so get your copy today at howtheygotthere.us.

Update 3 May 2015: The second installment is live at Co. Design; this one is an excerpt of my interview with Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest. Sharp talks about the challenges in managing design as the enormously popular site scaled up. Read it here.

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Paper Craft Designer at Work

Lobulo Design

London paper craft designer Lobulo offers a few peeks into his process in these videos. They are a little on the precious side, what with their dreamy indie soundtracks, soft focused imagery, and, for some reason, a meandering spell of low-intensity skateboarding. Nevertheless, it’s mesmerizing to watch the simple rudiments of the art form—little more than incredible manual dexterity with X-acto knives and glue—produce wonderfully elaborate miniature sculptures from just sheets of paper.

More work at lobulodesign.com.

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What to Do After You’ve Watched John Oliver

This past Sunday’s episode of John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” is a hilarious call for a conversation around the impending renewal of the Patriot Act. The host even traveled all the way to Moscow to sit down with Edward Snowden himself, and managed to get Snowden to frame the imperative for a conversation around whether or not the government has a right to access any pictures of your genitals that you might transmit over the Internet. The episode made the rounds yesterday but in case you haven’t seen it, you can watch the entire thing here:

That Oliver was able to sit down with Snowden, whom history will surely remember as one of the most remarkable figures of the decade, makes this episode exceptional. But in other ways it was no different from the many episodes that preceded it: Oliver makes an invigoratingly well-reasoned and thoroughly hilarious case for why a given matter of public interest is headed in the wrong direction and deserves attention and engagement from the citizenry. And then that’s it.

That’s what frustrates me so much about “Last Week Tonight”: its lack of follow-through. Oliver’s video essays are made with so much sustained wit, verve and insight that they almost incite viewers to action…almost. Instead, in just about every case, these impassioned arguments stop short of providing a productive outlet for the justifiable outrage that viewers are made to feel.

You can say that Oliver is not an activist but an entertainer, and that it’s his responsibility only to bring these issues to light for their comedic value. For me, that argument worked for “The Daily Show,” but not for “Last Week Tonight.” The former airs four times a week, and each topic is dealt with in relatively cursory detail; “Daily Show” segments are very clearly produced for maximum comedy and maximum expediency. “Last Week Tonight,” by contrast, spends at least a week on each topic, and puts tremendous effort into building each case and presenting it to the public in not just the most comedic fashion but also the most convincing fashion. To me, that crosses over into advocacy. Humorous advocacy, but advocacy all the same.

It’s also remarkably effective advocacy. Last year, when Oliver called on his audience to voice their opinions on net neutrality, he was rewarded with a significant response.

Clearly, not every episode can produce results as effective as that one, especially when the subject matter is less immediately appealing—getting his audience to act on net neutrality was basically low-hanging fruit. Still, there must be a happy medium between the two extremes, between massive action and no action. When I watched Oliver’s episode about America’s declining infrastructure, for instance, I was startled and moved, but it left me with nowhere to direct my energies. It’s not that Oliver should be issuing marching orders along with these reports, but even an on-screen mention of where to go for more information or to connect with similarly-minded advocacy groups would be a meaningful improvement. Without even that level of follow-through, it seems like such a waste to get people to actually care about important topics and do nothing with it.

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Furious

This poster for the seventh “Fast & Furious” movie has been all over town for the past month or so. It depicts a downcast Vin Diesel seen in an over-the-shoulder profile, and a stony-faced Paul Walker standing across from him.

Poster for “Furious 7”

For a franchise that has always thrived on fast cars and pyrotechnics, the posters for the past several sequels have often been much more understated and less showy than one would expect, and the solemn tone of this one is consistent with what has come before. Any poster for this movie would have been tinged with sadness, of course, given the untimely death of key actor Paul Walker in an auto accident in 2013. What I find odd is the strange disconnectedness of Walker’s gaze in this composition; he seems to not be actually looking at Vin Diesel. Or, put another way, he doesn’t really seem to be there at all, which he almost assuredly wasn’t; the poster was very likely composed in Photoshop long after Walker’s death. If that’s the case, it leaves a lot to be admired in terms of craft, but it’s also a strangely appropriate acknowledgment of his passing. The way that Diesel doesn’t seem to see Walker, and the way that Walker doesn’t seem to be there with Diesel, makes it clear that Walker is a kind of ghost.

All the same, it doesn’t deter me from wanting to see this movie. When a film franchise hits its seventh installment, it’s a safe bet that it’s also entered the territory of the absurd. This is certainly true for “Fast & Furious”—it’s been true since at least the third sequel. But these films have a strange, visceral allure. They’re resoundingly nonsensical, blithely retrograde, and embarrassingly simplistic. Yet, at the same time, they’re still remarkably heartfelt and unabashed in their depiction of a makeshift family that genuinely cares for one another, even if that family is possessed by a sociopathic need to put themselves and others at extreme physical risk, usually inside or in close proximity to speeding automobiles. These characters are monsters, in truth, but they are so loving in their monstrosity that they’re irresistible.

It’s also worth noting that the “Fast & Furious” series is the first monumental film franchise of the 21st Century. Sure, we’ve had “Harry Potter,” “Hunger Games” and others. But this is the first franchise that has a decent shot of being a mainstay for the next several decades, even when its core actors have moved on. It seems likely that there will be “Furious” entries long past Vin Diesel’s tenure, just as there have been countless James Bond movies since Sean Connery left the role.

More to the point, “Fast & Furious” is the first major film franchise to actually look like the 21st Century. Its ever-expanding cast is practically a model U.N., full of non-white characters who are often of unidentifiable descent. They spend their time in the kinds of places that more traditional Hollywood characters don’t like to go: East L.A., Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the U.S./Mexico border, among others. And, behind the camera, the films are helmed by a surprisingly non-white roster of directors: John Singleton, Justin Lin and now, for “Furious 7,” James Wan. That’s an unprecedented record of directorial diversity—it’s also the only instance I know of that a major Hollywood franchise has been handled by not one but two Asian directors.

I have to admit that I was very dismissive of these movies for a long time. I’m not a fan of Vin Diesel’s mealy-mouthed school of acting, and I found their lizard brain approach to storytelling to be not a little offensive. But somehow I ended up watching each of the six movies to date and getting caught up in their convoluted contemporary mythology and their genuinely inventive action choreography. They are base entertainments, it’s true, but like the best genre movies they don’t settle for merely hitting their expected marks. They work very hard to deliver the kinds of things you want most from film: action and thrills, yes, but also the sense that the people on the screen and the people behind the camera genuinely care about their work and about each other.

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Ray Collins

Ray Collins Photography

Photographer Ray Collins, who used to be a coal miner and who bought his first camera only eight years ago, has achieved acclaim for his shockingly unfamiliar images of the ocean. His shots capture water as fleeting monuments with almost otherworldly qualities. Collins’s four-minute video profile below is a little overfull with slow motion and self-serving histrionics, but it does provide worthwhile background on his technique.

More samples of his photographs:

Ray Collins Photography
Ray Collins Photography
Ray Collins Photography

Prints of his work are available at raycollinsphoto.com.

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