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EW’s Must-See Must List

There’s been plenty of discussion lately about how print magazines have been swinging big and missing big on the iPad, how their attempts at translating the value of their printed pages into apps have been ill-advised or clumsy. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson sums it up best, I think, in a recent blog post in which he declares that he prefers content in a browser rather than in an app, and I tend to agree.

However, I think it’s worth pointing out that one publication, at least, has gotten it right: Time Warner’s Entertainment Weekly has a terrific app called EW’s Must List. Unexpectedly, it’s a user experience winner. It may never achieve recognition for bringing penetrating content to the app space, but in my mind it nails precisely what a print brand needs to do in order to win a share of the attention market on this platform.

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Boston Bound

This coming Wednesday, I’ll be giving the 36th Annual William A. Dwiggins Lecture in Boston, Massachusetts for The Society of Printers. It’s an unbelievably humbling honor, as past speakers for this event have included Milton Glaser, Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter and Sumner Stone, among other luminaries. Gulp.

If you’re in the Boston area, I hope you can make it, especially as the event is in fact free, with a reception following the lecture, to boot. Details follow after the jump, excerpted from the poster.

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Show Me the Money (for Art Direction)

Speaking of magazines, I’ve just started writing a regular column about interaction design over at Print. If it seems a bit retrograde for me to publish my thoughts on digital media in that forum, believe me the irony is not lost. In spite of its somewhat anachronistic moniker, though, I still find Print to be incredibly vibrant as a showcase for great graphic design — and in spite of all my pooh-poohing of the fitful and awkward migration of traditional graphic design values into the digital space, I still think that digital designers have a lot to learn from print — just as print designers have a lot to learn from digital.

My first column will appear in the June 2010 issue, which will be on newsstands in May, but the editors have graciously decided to publish it in advance on the Web in full here.

Almost inevitably, the topic is Apple’s “magical and revolutionary” iPad and so the column has some overlap with my harsh criticisms of the Popular Science magazine app from earlier in the week (catch up on that blog post here). Specifically, I try to wrestle with the iPad’s prospects for ushering in a return to the visually and expressively rich values of traditional art direction.

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A Popular Misconception

Popular Science on iPadThough I opted for a 3G-enabled iPad that won’t be delivered until later in the month, I was able to get my hands on a Wi-Fi-only model today, one of two devices that we bought at the office. In my limited use so far it feels terrific, though until I’m actually in possession of an iPad I can call my very own, it’ll be still too early to decide how much I like or dislike it. Without really being able to customize a machine like this for my needs — installing my preferred apps and loading my personal data onto it — it feels a little bit like a model home; attractive enough, but not really cozy just yet.

In playing with iPad-optimized apps, I’m watching with particular interest to see how content publishers are approaching the platform. One that has gotten a fair amount of exposure is the Popular Science app, a digital version of the longstanding print magazine that has put forward an ambitious, visually rich attempt at embracing the things that only a tablet device can do.

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Adding Up Basic Maths

Since last November’s release of Basic Maths — the commercially-available, Subtraction.com-based theme for WordPress that I designed and developed with Allan Cole — I’ve been asked from time to time by friends and acquaintances how well it’s fared. My answer is usually that sales have been healthy but not spectacular, that I’m satisfied with the revenue that the theme has brought in, but also that it’s hardly enough for me to quit my day job.

As soon as I started having these conversations I began to realize that very few people really have a sense of what makes for a successful commercial theme, at least not numbers-wise. This included me, too, especially at the outset of my foray into the market, when my most specific ambition was basically ‘to sell a lot.’ Now with a little bit of experience under my belt, I certainly have a better idea of how to define success, but it’s based exclusively on my own personal experiences selling Basic Maths, with the benefit of very little if any intelligence from other commercial theme developers.

With that in mind, I decided early on that, when I had a sufficient amount of sales data logged, I’d try and share it so that others might benefit from it. Basic Maths was released on 14 Nov of last year, so there’s just over four months of records available to me; not a tremendous amount, but certainly enough to draw some early lessons regarding how theme sales work.

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Weeks without Tweets

Have you ever had that feeling of nagging guilt, the kind that slowly simmers inside of you when you know you haven’t been keeping up with something you really should be keeping up with? Like bills piling up on your desk, or your office email left unchecked for days, or medicines not taken daily or as prescribed by your doctor? That’s sort of the feeling I have right now.

I took most of this month off from posting to this blog, but it’s been at least four or five weeks since I’ve logged into my Twitter account. At first I welcomed the respite, the break from posting updates regularly or coming up with interesting things to say. Then I began to miss it a little as I started accumulating a little backlog of ideas and links I wanted to tweet. Somewhere in the middle of the month though, it turned to a kind of dread of the unanswered queries and unrequited mentions, and now I have outright anxiety over wading through whatever awaits me there on the other side of that login. Urgh. Social media is too much work.

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Out of the Office

What’s happening on this blog? Let me explain: for the past several weeks, I have been deeply engaged in an experiment I call “not blogging.” It’s a weird, wild alternative style of living in which I refrain from posting long, rambling diatribes on poorly-researched design topics close to my heart. Additionally, I have even abstained from the indulgence of publishing those shorter, no less inconsequential regurgitations of links you can already easily find elsewhere on the designy Interweb. In short, nothing’s going on here.

Instead, I’ve used most of this month to turn my attention instead to three other projects that have preoccupied my time. Two of them I can’t really speak about at this point, except to say one involves a new Web site and another involves ink printed on paper, the way they used to do it way back in the early years of the twenty-first century. You’ll be hearing more about both within a few months.

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A Metallic Taste

AnvilGenerally I’ve no truck with heavy metal music and like it that way, as there’s almost nothing about the genre that appeals to me. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of Sacha Gervasi’s 2008 documentary “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” which I watched a few nights ago. The movie tells the sometimes hilarious, somewhat sad and shockingly heartwarming story of an indefatigable Canadian metal band that, some three decades after their initial, minor brush with success, continues to plug away in search of rock stardom. It’s surprisingly well made, being gorgeously photographed and incisively edited, and is also universally appealing, even if like myself you prefer a lot fewer serifs in your music, if you’ll permit me to contort a metaphor for novel purposes (you know what I mean!).

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Layer by Layer

Truth be told, I was pretty nervous before facing off against Nicholas Felton in our Layer Tennis exhibition match last Friday afternoon. I’d never played the game before, and its structure, in which two visual artists volley a collage-like series of images back and forth under the scrutiny of a stopwatch, seemed very high pressure. Plus, my opponent was none other than Feltron himself (as Nicholas is sometimes better known), a designer famous for autobiographical annual reports in which he creates gorgeous visual narratives from nothing more than the statistical mundanity of everyday life.

Layer Tennis

All that trepidation wasn’t without good reason, as it turned out. You could hardly count layer tennis as physically demanding, but its breakneck speed and creative intensity do require dexterity and stamina — the fifteen minutes allotted to each volley is surprisingly intensive and vanishingly brief. Still, what I didn’t expect was how much fun the live atmosphere of layer tennis was. In the past, I’d always come to layer tennis matches after they were over and done with, perusing each match’s archive of volleys after the fact. Layer tennis in real time, though, is where the fun is.

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Slow to Judge

ExtractBy the time I thought to go see Mike Judge’s third live action feature “Extract” at my local cineplex it was already gone, having disappeared almost as quickly as it debuted back in September. I then promptly forgot about it — until I remembered it again, and realized a few weeks ago that it had been out on DVD for over a month already.

Most people, I suspect, regard Mike Judge’s movies with similar levels of mild interest, even those who are devotees of his unexpectedly great classic of the cubicle age, “Office Space.” At first glance, Judge’s movies are deceptively unremarkable, even generic. But upon closer inspection, they turn out to be surprisingly memorable — very nearly indelible — and his thus far brief oeuvre has already made for a directorial record that many other auteurs would envy. The satirically dystopian future he imagined in “Idiocracy,” for instance, is probably more accurate and certainly more entertaining than most of what science fiction has ever offered us. It also happens to be more hilarious than most movies of any genre.

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