“The Modern Listener’s Guide brings together the previously disparate worlds of indie-rock and information graphics… The first print in the series is a lyrical and statistical undressing of Destroyer’s 2006 album ‘Destroyer’s Rubies.’ To be honest I’m tiring of info-graphics as a short-cut to credibility for client-less graphic design, but this poster looks attractive enough. What’s more, it doesn’t hurt to call some attention to this really phenomenal album.

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“The world’s US$71 billion battery market, once an old-tech backwater, is becoming a hothouse for innovation. The flow of U.S. venture-capital dollars into battery development has grown from US$4.3 million in 2002 to more than US$200 million this year, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.”

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For folks my age, I bet you get a nostalgic feeling of delight when you see this new shirt from Chris Glass and his cohorts over at Wire & Twine.

Oh, and while you’re over there, take note that my Subtraction.com tee-shirts are still available, including the ever-popular Hel-F’ing-Vetica design. They make for excellent holiday presents.

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In general I’m not a fan of the ongoing public radio series “This I Believe,” finding it too precious. And the transcript for this installment from Brian Eno, which extolls the virtues of singing as a socially valuable activity, reads a little more stuffy than suits my taste. But the spoken version of the essay, not to mention the idea, is disarmingly profound:

“When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue…

“So I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.”

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Mister President sleeping in the living room. Sort of like achieving the optimal sleeping temperature by keeping one leg under the covers and the other leg on top of the covers.

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The noted typographer muses on the deep past and uncertain future of screen typography’s atomic unit. “It’s likely that the pixel’s final and most enduring role will be a shabby one, serving as an out-of-touch visual cliché to connote ‘the digital age.’”

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Portfolio for a French graphic designer and illustrator. Very sharp, very of-the-moment work for culture and luxury clients.

This picture collage in particular really struck my fancy. Via SeptemberIndustry.

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It’s so great when a developer creates a piece of software that matches precisely a feature that I’ve been wanting for years. This is the case with George Brocklehurst’s compactly executed and altogether wonderful utility Choosy, for Mac OS X. Once installed, it effectively intercepts your clicks on Web links from non-browser applications — Mail, Word, iChat, whatever — and displays a menu of available browsers that you can ‘send’ the link to.

Incredibly handy for people who use multiple browsers regularly — people like me and you, too, I’m guessing.

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Starkly quiet architectural imagery. Not recommended for manic depressives. Via AisleOne.

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Two radio dramas that I had no idea existed; one by Joel and Ethan Coen, the other by Charlie Kaufman. Both aired on Sirius Satellite Radio three years ago.

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Cute, simple tagline: “Twitter + history. And that’s really it.” In reality, just slightly more robust than that: this new service grabs your tweets and formats them as a subscribe-able calendar file that plays nice with iCal, Google calendar, etc. It’s clever, but if there’s a business model in there, I can’t see it. Via John Niedermeyer.

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Fearing that the traditional mode of narrative storytelling is increasingly at risk from disruptive new technologies, the Media Lab at M.I.T. is looking at the problem more closely. This article includes quotes from Bob Farrelly (of the Farrelly brothers):

“‘If you go off the beaten path, say, give them something bittersweet, they’re going to tell you they’re disappointed,’ Mr. Farrelly said. He spoke from his home in Massachusetts, where he is working on the script for a Three Stooges picture, and said he missed complex stories like that of ‘The Graduate.’“ Hilarious bit of irony there.

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Fresh out of the gate, a new site dedicated to the review of design-related books.

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Back in 2007, during the initial burst of enthusiasm for the Wii, I bought one, thinking that perhaps there was the soul of a gamer lying dormant inside me. After playing with it for several months, though, I essentially got bored, and haven’t much touched it recently. Today it sits in my living room, hooked up but usually forgotten.

In spite of this inability to muster a sustained interest in video games, I’m savvy enough at least to recognize that very interesting things are happening in that world. As a point of reference for interaction design — for design of every kind — I’m convinced that games represent an important new paradigm that people, like me, pay insufficient attention to at our own peril.

Forget design, even. As a subset of our culture, video games are clearly headed to center of the conversation, where it’s not inconceivable that one day they might shoulder aside old media mainstays like television and newspapers, or even eclipse plain-vanilla Interweb browsing. The inherent power of the concept of play shouldn’t be underestimated.

There’s no shortage of intelligent thinking about this field being written in all corners of the Web. For someone like me though, who remains essentially disconnected from gaming, validation still bubbles up through the mainstream media. And lately, I’ve been noticing increasingly thoughtful writing about video games in some of my favorite publications.

“Gears” Heads

For example, an article by Tom Bissel in The New Yorker about Epic Games’ design director, Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski bowled me over as I read it during a recent morning commute. The New Yorker is less stuffy than its reputation, but it’s still notable that the editorial staff are applying their trademark care and deep insight into something as un-stuffy as “Gears of War.” Aside from being written to the magazine’s usual levels of excellence, what struck me as so fascinating about this piece was how much, in trying to understand the creative equation that makes games work, Bissel engages in language that’s very familiar to designers.

“Anyone who plays modern games such as ‘Gears’ does not so much learn the rules as develop a kind of intuition for how the game operates. Often, there is no single way to accomplish a given task; improvisation is rewarded. Older games, like ‘Super Mario,’ punish improvisation: you live or die according to their algebra alone.”

Bissel is essentially peeling back the layers on how designers guide users through experiences. A lot of these concepts — intuitiveness, task completion, improvisation, and especially rewards — lay at the heart of design of all kinds.

Another passage later in the article discusses the prevailing philosophy of the “Gears of War” designers, and it reads very much like a mantra for designers everywhere:

“The singularity of ‘Gears of War’ resides in what designers describe as its ‘feel’ — the way that the game’s mechanics are orchestrated to create both a compelling experience for the player and the illusion of an internally consistent world.”

If there’s anything that says design to me, it’s that desire to engage an audience while evoking order — order that is occasionally explicit, but more frequently implicit. Which is to say, we are experts in creating a ‘look’ — the part of a design that draws in an audience — but what makes us designers is that we are beholden to rules and logic that sometimes only we are aware of — that’s the part that to users constitutes the ‘feel.’

Right: War games. You can learn a lot from “Gears of War.” Just look. The Gray Lady Is a Gamer

Meanwhile, even closer to home for me, Seth Schiesel’s writing on games in The New York Times has been consistently covering similar ground. Following is a lengthy and typically excellent passage from a review of Electronic Arts’ horror game “Dead Space.”

“But horror games (and films and, to a certain extent, fiction) don’t really rely on story to make them compelling. They do not really rely on production gloss, either (though Dead Space looks and sounds beautifully gross). “What they rely on is pacing. The difference between an excellent horror experience in any medium and a mediocre one is in how it measures out all those little jolts over time. It is balancing the generation and release of episodic tension with a mounting sense of dread that gives the narrative its basic arc. If viewers, players or readers are oversaturated with dramatic and graphic scenes, they can become desensitized. Too much wasted space and the consumer can become bored in a more obvious way. “These pacing decisions are more art than science. One could argue that maintaining an audience’s attention with a drumbeat of minor moments, punctuated at just the right times with major events, makes the big difference in all entertainment. It just becomes especially clear with horror, because horror generally relies on such blunt emotional instruments: revulsion, surprise, panic, confusion and, of course, fear. Such powerful tools must be wielded delicately. “And the one word that kept occurring to me in playing Dead Space was discipline. Not over-cautiousness on the part of the designers, but a discipline to stay focused on providing the basics at a high level: spooky levels of the Ishimura to explore, suitably gruesome foes to shoot, and enough depth in the detailed if predictable back story to give the action a sense of consequence (as in ‘I really should care if I can blow apart this next slimy necromorph, because the fate of humanity may depend on it’).”

Here Schiesel draws a more direct parallel with filmmaking, but there are critical ideas that he touches upon — pacing, fending off user boredom, and artistic discipline — that speak to the decision-making in which designers engage every day.

Right: Sack education. LittleBigPlanet is the same as Web design.

In another review, this one for “LittleBigPlanet,” a quirky game that puts an avatar called Sackboy at the center of the action, Schiesel practically unites game design with the kind of experience design through which I earn my paycheck, under a single umbrella, as if they were very much the same thing:

“This [game] is more a system than a product. Most traditional entertainment is about providing an artifact — a book, a script, a show, a score, a performance — that is then preserved, passed on and reinterpreted. There’s nothing wrong with that. But new entertainment — social networks, games, online communities — is about empowering everyday people to express themselves and interact without a central arbiter. The thing is, interactive entertainment is much harder to design than it is to experience. A great game like chess, poker or Tetris should be easy to play at first and then reveal deeper levels of complexity and skill.”

When I read that, I thought to myself, I need to start playing some video games.

[Design, Web Design ]
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In a tradition of endless repackagings of Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories and novels, it’s probably fair to say that this is the most aesthetically sophisticated. Certainly the fancy-pantsiest:

“Hyland created a cloth-covered hardback with cover imagery restricted to a silver foil-blocked image of Bond’s infamous Walther PPK… A subtle diamond pattern is debossed on to the boards, which combined with deep burgundy endpapers evokes the discerning elegance of Bond’s world. An embossed manila bellyband with typewritten cover information on the label evokes the official documents of the period.”

Appears to be available only in the U.K.; American customers must abide with this plebeian, retro-minded edition.

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“All in all, it is, once again, a pitifully bad installation experience. Adobe’s engineers have not learned any lessons from the experience with previous versions. And I suspect that the experience with incremental updaters for CS4 is going to be just as bad as it was with previous versions… Just what will it take for them to address this?”

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“CRW’s management has a longstanding, international experience in the risk consulting sector.” Um, yeah, whatever. All I know is the design for this site is superb. The unexpectedly bold navigational roll-overs are fantastic, and the hand-drawn underscores balance the modernist coldness aptly. Via Mike Rundle.

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Art exhibition opening tomorrow night at Pierogi 2000 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “Working with laser cut museum board and materials typical to architectural model making, Joel Stoehr has created a sculpture inspired by New York City entitled ‘Tower of Babel.’”

If you find intricately built models strangely satisfying, this show looks worth the trip to the gallery. Via Manhattan Users Guide.

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“We’ve scientifically determined the maximum amount of time that you should need to make a layout work in CSS: it’s 47 minutes. When your time is up, we’ll even give you the table code you need.” Nine months late on this link, but then again it would’ve been funnier a few years ago anyway.

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Graphics occurring in nature. Shot in San Francisco last Friday.

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Hand-crafted, three-dimensional rendering of the famous interface. Pretty charming.

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Video preview of a first-person “painting game” set in an abstract, featureless environment. Players must “splatter” black paint in order to make their way to their destination. No idea if the game play will be any good, but aesthetically it’s gorgeous:

Yes, I’m a sucker for black and white.

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Your chance to weigh in, courtesy of Mr. Essl.

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It’s remarkable how this politician has inspired the world of design: an enterprising freelance graphic designer created these twenty-four illustrations of President-Elect Barack Obama and packaged them as a TrueType font, free for download.

Just one of many forthcoming graphical immortalizations of this man, I’m guessing. Unless he disappoints in a major way.

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“[The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center]’s work with IDEO comes as businesses increasingly tap the design world for fresh ideas on management. Some are struggling with new business models and unexpected rivals; others seek new approaches to old problems.” Heaven knows I hope this is in actuality a legitimate trend, but this article reads more like a press release from the remarkably effective IDEO publicity machine than accurate reporting. Not a single additional design firm is mentioned.

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Though I’m not quite as enthusiastic about the design of the identity as a whole, I think this is probably one of the best new logos of the year.

Hinrichs is one of my design heroes. If you can find it, his regrettably out-of-print book “Typewise” is essentially a full year᾿s worth of an undergraduate typography course encapsulated into 160 pages.

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Several series of airplanes and related imagery. Fans of big toys, you will enjoy these.

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This has probably happened to you, too: the past two days, I’ve been taking election-related pictures, and whenever I’ve gotten shots that I think are really good or unique, I soon discover that plenty of other people have taken very similar shots. Well, the amazing Joe Holmes came up with this terrific shot and no one else has it. A gem.

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Paul Schrynemakers talks to Lori Richmond, Design Director of Online Editorial, and Kristen Dudish, Online Designer for the cross-media wedding brand. It’s a nice interview, but I mostly wanted to point out how impressed I am that The Society of Publication Designers, an organization that could easily succumb to the misguided temptation of turning its nose up at digital media, is making a real effort to understand and engage digital audiences. Hats off, particularly, to Paul, who has been writing about Web sites extensively on the organization’s blog.

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Just a few minutes ago, some of my colleagues noticed a line forming out in front of the Times Building. People are queuing up to buy already scarce copies of today’s newspaper, presumably as mementos of the historic election of Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States.

Before shooting this picture from the street, I ran down to a lower floor where I could get a look from overhead and got this picture. People working on that floor hadn’t noticed yet that the line was forming, and when they realized its purpose, a feeling of delight swept over the newsroom like the friendliest wildfire I’d ever seen. Reporters, editors, photographers, everyone started clapping, hooting and hollering that people still find the newspaper valuable enough to wait dozens of people deep in line for their chance to buy a copy.

Update: The Times printed an additional 75,000 copies for sale in key hubs throughout the city.

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