Archives

Putting the High in Highrise

I’ve never worked in an architecturally significant building, never really stood inside of a structure designed by one of the world’s architectural greats and been able to see a future for myself within its spaces. But that changed today when I showed up for work at the new Times building at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan’s midtown. It was designed by Renzo Piano, and whether it fits your taste or not, it’s hard to deny that it’s the most notable new skyscraper to rise on the island this decade.

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I’m into Their Early Stuff

Giampietro+SmithI’m flying out to California to see my sister today, but if I weren’t, I’d definitely be going to the Apple Store in SoHo at 6:30p, where Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith of the design studio Giampietro+Smith will be speaking and taking a few questions.

This is the first installment of Design Remixed, a series of talks developed by AIGA New York in collaboration with Apple (a parallel series exists in San Francisco, produced by that chapter), and there will be an introduction by the inimitable Liz Danzico. Plus, admission is absolutely free with the purchase of any 8-core MacPro! Just kidding, it’s free for everyone, even if you’re not a Mac fan whatsoever.

Rob and Kevin will show a small selection of their many, many beautifully designed projects, going in depth on the motivations, challenges and inspirations that brought about the end results. It’s going to be terrific. This is a young studio with a big future; they’re doing some of the most intelligent work in the field today and they’re barely getting started. If you want to see what the early part of a long career looks like, this is your chance. As you can probably tell, I’m extremely disappointed in my own inability to plan my trips sensibly enough so that I could be there tonight, but alas, I didn’t. Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made in life, is all I can say.

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Least Useful Site Ever

MisterPresident.orgHere and there for the past few months, I’ve been finding spare time to work up a new design for my dog’s Web site at MisterPresident.org. Now it’s done. The fact that I have this site at all is worrisome enough, I’m sure, but the newly added Twitter feed “written” by an anthropomorphized Mister President is sure to be the straw that broke the back on the camel of my dignity… or something. What can I say? Dog peoples is crazy.

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Through a Lens Expensively

Sigma 28mm Macro LensIn the wake of that photography class with Joseph O. Holmes that I took last year, I’ve only been able to make halting further progress in developing my camera skills. There just hasn’t been a lot of time to continue to take pictures as often and as intensively as a class environment allows, is one excuse. The other is that I’ve been dissatisfied with the lenses I’ve had for a long while now.

Aside from the absolutely middle-of-the-road 18-70mm lens that shipped with my Nikon D70, I’ve been using two others for about eighteen months now. First is a 50mm f/1.8 that produces beautiful results but works satisfactorily under relatively few conditions. It functions well with little light and its depth of field is evocatively abstract, but it’s visual range is fairly narrow and it’s not really the kind of lens that matches my aesthetic.

I’ve also got a highly imperfect but otherwise likable 70-300mm f/4-5.6 Nikkor telephoto zoom. As it turns out, I’m really a telephoto zoom kind of guy; I feel very comfortable with the reach of these lenses, the way they allow me to traverse great distances to capture small details and, let’s face it, to gently invade people’s privacy from afar. (A friend worries that if I upgrade to a longer lens, I’ll become a full-fledged pervert.) What’s more, I’m crazy for the spatial flattening effect that these lenses produce. Composing photographs through a telephoto lens feels very much like designing to me; the lens compresses space dramatically, reducing depth to a shallow, almost flat phenomenon, and the result feels akin to shifting nearly geometric shapes around on a plane.

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Popularity Contest

Webby AwardsNominations for this year’s Webby Awards are out, and I’m here to shamelessly plug a couple of favorites. First off, NYTimes.com is up for an award in the somewhat odd category of Best Home/Welcome Page. Suffice it to say, I’d encourage everyone to vote for everything Times-related, including our excellently written The Caucus, up for Best Political Blog; DealBook, our indispensable breaking news outlet covering the world of high finance; NYTimes.com Real Estate, our highly addictive index and marketplace for homes you can and can’t afford; and These Times Demand the Times, the companion site to our marketing campaign that debuted last year, which is up for an award in the category of Best Copy/Writing.

But that first award I mentioned for Best Home/Welcome page is the one I’ve got my eye focused on most keenly. It would be a very satisfying affirmation of the work we all do at NYTimes.com to have our front door, so to speak, recognized for all the hard management, debate and tireless tweaking that goes into it; it would be nice to get it, is all I’m sayin’. So please go cast your vote.

Also, I want to cite Design Observer, up for for best Culture/Personal Blog, as another nominee that I think deserves special attention. (It has no affiliation with The New York Times.) Though not without its flaws — I sometimes take issue with its reserved embrace of the conventions of online publishing — it’s nevertheless a remarkable site. The fact that this kind of critical design thinking is published regularly and for free is still hard to believe even though the site is in its fourth year of publishing. Over that time, it’s come to occupy a unique and indispensable position in the blogosphere as a platform for some of the most engaging, most provocative and, crucially, most accessible serious design discourse around. They have my vote.

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Apple’s Unnecessary Objects

In last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Pamela Paul reviewed “Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole,” a new book by the political theorist Benjamin R. Barber. (It has a very good cover.) In reading it, I was struck by one phrase she wrote:

“Children’s lives are reduced to shopping excursions in which their identities are subsumed by brands — they’re the Nike generation, Abercrombie kids, iPod addicts.”

Hold up, “iPod addicts”? I haven’t read Barber’s book yet, so I don’t know if he in fact includes Apple and its ubiquitous iPod among his list of corrupting, infantalizing and, ahem, swallowing culprits. But the mention of everyone’s favorite fruit company alongside what I consider to be less seemly brands — Nike and Abercrombie are two of my least favorite companies anywhere — was a surprise.

In reading this, I was also reminded of a scene from “Fight Club,” an admittedly much less serious critique of modern capitalism, in which the characters embarked on a casual vandalism spree, targeting various consumer brands. For a very brief moment, an old-style Apple logo is displayed prominently in one of the targeted window displays. It’s not a flattering guest appearance for a logo, as the message is clear: Apple is an enemy.

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Three Things I’m Late On

Round-up time. If only each day was a few hours longer than twenty-four, I wouldn’t be so behind in posting these three items. If only!

First, I was lucky enough to be sitting about fifteen rows back from the third base line at Yankee Stadium on Saturday afternoon when Alex Rodriguez hit that game-winning grand slam against the Baltimore Orioles — in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs and two strikes. I acknowledge that even an event as unique as that is flirting the edge of what readers of this weblog are generally interested in, but I just wanted to say it was one of the coolest, most exhilarating things I’ve ever seen.

As it happened, my Saturday turned out to be a great day for seats at live events. Later that evening my girlfriend and I had front-row seats to see “Jack Goes Boating,” a two-act production from Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz’s LAByrith Theater Company — both actors appeared in it as well. It’s currently in its original run right now at The Public Theater in downtown Manhattan. Even if it’s not a groundbreaking entertainment, John Ortiz’s confident, commanding and highly watchable performance reaffirmed my contention that he’s currently the best kept secret going in the world of acting.

Finally, I’m very, very late to the party on this one: Wow, have you seen “The Shield”? I’d completely missed this FX Network original series until now, but it’s unbelievably good. Oh, and while we’re talking television, one more thing… Sci-Fi Network’s Battlestar Galactica is the most overrated television show ever.

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The Other Times

The Times of LondonOne question I get from time to time is, “What do you think of so-and-so’s redesign?” People ask me this about many sites of all kinds, but most often, the inquiry regards the redesign of a news site of some sort. As it turns out, my position as Design Director at NYTimes.com suggests that I might have a halfway interesting answer.

To be honest, I don’t like to comment on our competition, mostly because I think it’s inappropriate for me to make remarks that could so easily be confused as an official New York Times view on what another news outlet is doing online. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion on what they’re doing, I just think it wouldn’t be productive of me to air my thoughts publicly (catch me in private if you really want to know), even if those opinions are generally positive — and they frequently are, as lots of companies in the online news space are doing exciting work.

I do make an exception, though, for those instances where I think a competitor has really hit it out of the park, and when I like a design enough to be effusively positive about it. One example of this, from last September, is the discussion between Liz Danzico and myself over last fall’s redesign of The New York Post’s site. It’s not without its flaws, but I still stand by my contention that it’s a nearly pitch-perfect expression of that paper’s brand and journalism. Nicely done, I say.

Today I want to talk about another example of a newspaper that, I think, is doing really wonderful work online: The Times of London’s recent redesign beautifully translates (versus simply transferring) its broadsheet aesthetic into something vibrant and native to the Web.

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Illustrate Me for March

March’s Illustrate Me is by Liz Danzico, the multi-talented interaction designer, writer, editor and information architect who is partly responsible for, among other things Boxes and Arrows and AIGA Voice, serves as a senior development editor at Rosenfeld Media, and on the advisory board for The Information Architecture Institute. Whew. To say that she’s prolific is an understatement; there are about a dozen other significant things on her résumé that I don’t have room to mention here, but somehow she made time to produce a really wonderful, whimsical interpretation of three of my posts for last month. Go see it right now on the March 2007 archive page.

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