Frank Chimero

Yes, more JOJO. What would make a good rock video?...

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:11:00 -0500

Yes, more JOJO.

What would make a good rock video? Feeling.

They would like to ask how I write songs… So, that’s why it’s easy for me to write songs. I just make up stuff that already happened.

I’m the kind of entertainer, I hear the word naive and innocent written… Well there’s nothing really that naive about me… I don’t pretend to be naive … But, you wouldn’t call me naive, you wouldn’t call my songs, I mean, I read things like “attempts to be very simple.” Well, simple enough so that they can be remembered easily. But, no, I’m not that well understood by the press, I think, because they try to complicate it too much. All you’ve gotta do with this stuff, folks, is like it or not like it.

Robert Krulwich on Wondering

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:06:00 -0500

Robert Krulwich on Wondering:

Robert Krulwich, of Radiolab fame, is starting a new blog at NPR. So, first, NEW ROBERT KRULWICH BLOG! My enthusiasm is palpable. I just tossed up a handful of confetti.

Second, there’s some really juicy bits in the first entry about the focus of the blog and its content. I’ll just let Krulwich speak. Imagine there are glitchy sound effects through this whole bit:

I like the word “wonder.” … it seems to me that near the heart of wonder is the simple act of noticing. I plan to pause, look, and notice the little wonders that catch my eye. Because there are a lot of people who do this very well, I’m going to follow the better noticers, the great field scientists, the best artists, photographers, journalists and peer over their shoulders to notice what they have noticed.

Biologist (and writer) Bernd Heinrich in his book “A Year In The Maine Woods” points out that because we humans are biggish creatures and so much around us is small and delicate (or shy), because we are busy and very into our lives, our minds, our problems, “most of us are like sleepwalkers here.” We walk through our yards, our streets, our parks, through our days and “we notice so little… We see only bits and pieces, and then only if we look very, very close, or for very, very long.”

Did you notice that? Yep, I just tossed up another handful of confetti.

So, wondering and noticing are tightly woven together. This reminds me of an interview the AIGA ran a couple years ago with Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg about the benefits of noticing:

It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important! Or that they’re already doing it. It’s kind of like breathing—we’re not usually that aware of it. It’s much easier to recognize more “outbound” activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important—it’s really where everything begins. There’s a funny Zen saying about that: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” It’s a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.

Inputting is hard. Reading Krulwich’s observations and reading the conversation between Portigal and Soltzberg infers that a couple things might be necessary: quiet (or a slower pace), and a willingness to intently focus on the things outside of yourself. Good noticing is selfless.

So how do we build up our noticing skills and spidey senses? Portigal has an idea for that too:

…circulate through an environment and note everything you observe, but using only one sense. First, observe from a distance—say, from on high—so you can’t hear what people are saying. Then sit in the middle of an active zone, but close your eyes. Students have told me how rapidly one sense fills in for the other.

Noticing is tough, yet rewarding work, and it begs to be documented. We’ve more tools than ever to do so. I’ve done some documenting of my own. (And a Flickr set full of things I’ve noticed, and my favorite of all time.) I walk everywhere with a phone camera in my pocket, and I suspect you do too, so documenting visuals is easy. I can type on my phone, so I can capture text or overheard conversations. I can record video if necessary. And then? I can dump it to a Twitter account or a Tumblr blog to catalog everything. And then, if it is good? Maybe if the noticing started to arrange into larger patterns or there got to be a lot of documentation, I could maybe even print up a book of all the things I had noticed. And wouldn’t that be a nice thing to have on the bookshelf? My Year of Noticing and Wondering — 2010.

As a person constantly in a position to produce words or designs or ideas, or whatever it may be, it feels good to give myself permission to kick back and inquisitively absorb things as they come. Part of noticing isn’t seeking, it’s highly reliant on serendipity and unexpected relevancy.

People are always surprised when they realize how many things they are actually experiencing but not really noticing. It’s such a simple activity, but people have told me later on that they felt much more awake after doing it.

Good morning!

Crafting

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:35:00 -0500

I just finished a little questionnaire. I don’t know if...

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:30:21 -0500

I just finished a little questionnaire. I don’t know if this is the answer they’re looking for, but, damn, I think this is the answer I was looking for.

Fishing with Strawberries

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:42:00 -0500

Back in 1995, Tim O’Reilly was looking for strategic partners for his business. While he was looking, he was told this by Bob Broadwater, an investment banker:

You don’t fish with strawberries. Even if that’s what you like, fish like worms, so that’s what you use.

It’s great to use a very specific bait tailored to your audience and their needs when you’re selling or speaking to a very specific group of people. While Tim agreed, he still had doubts.

At the same time, a small voice within me said with a mixture of dismay, wonder and dawning delight: “But that’s just what we’ve always done: gone fishing with strawberries. We’ve made a business by offering our customers what we ourselves want. And it’s worked!”

On one level, the difference between the two points of view is simply the difference between selling one on one to a very targetted prospect and selling to a mass market, where you are casting a wide net, and some set of potential customers will match your own “strawberry” profile.

This was 1995, before everyone was obsessed with niches, and almost a full decade before Chris Anderson and WIRED popularized the term “the long tail.” Incredible.

O’Reilly frames this under the guise of selling, but it can be applied to more than that. The idea is this: in the cases where it makes sense, you use the bait you like in hopes it will attract people who care about the same things you do. You project yourself outward and aspire towards some sort of resonance. You define who you are and what you want and try to present it as accurately as possible, and maybe, if you are skilled or lucky (or both), it will result in a bit of creative kinship.

I sincerely believe good things and good people have found me, or I them, because of those strawberries.

But there’s perhaps a deeper level on which this difference is one on which a great deal that is special about this company hinges. We seek to find what is true in ourselves, and use it to resonate with whatever subject we explore, trusting that resonance to lead us to kindred spirits out in the world, and them to us.

But, I’d suggest you’d better use really, really great strawberries. See #2.

via Rob Greco

In the last couple months your site has gone from inspiring, to tolerable, to what the deuce. You never talk about it, you just tinker. I can tell you're on a journey. Share with us where you're at.

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:23:00 -0500

TL;DR: It’s the words, stupid.

Gosh. I mean, the first time I read this I was livid and wrote up a snarky response filled to the very brim with spite and acid that slayed to bits the presumptuousness and entitled quality of your question. It miffed me that you assumed that just because you liked something less after it changed it was therefore definitively worse than it was before. I mean, seriously, what the hell?

But you know, I reread what I wrote and I thought about it and I realized I hate snark. So damn much. I think about the creative people I respect the most, the good guys and girls who sweat every detail and make it all sing, the mensch’s mensches, the people I want to be like when I’m older, and I looked at what I wrote and deleted every damn word because I knew I’d regret it. Because I thought, “You know, what if he’s just a nice kid wondering why things are changing around here?” So, I’m going to think that way and make the assumption that I am projecting a magnitude of dickishness onto your question that is ill-founded because it is Monday and my lunch sucked and I didn’t sleep very well last night and got woken up early by the construction next door.

So, to your question. Yep, the site is changing quite a bit. It’s been through a bunch of revisions the past few months, and I think that’s okay. You’re not the first person to notice or mention it. A few weeks ago I had a bunch of incoming visitors from a thread in a forum where someone was trying to remember one of my pages, but couldn’t find it because the look of the page had changed in the few months since they had last seen it. Once they realized that it had changed, they cursed me and poked fun, and said how I didn’t have enough client work to do, and that’s why the site kept on changing. And that, actually, was the furthest thing from the truth. I think I’m busier than most, but it was painfully telling to see people explicitly state out loud their assumption that things only change when there is nothing better to do. Which is wrong. And dangerous. And, well, stupid.

Sometimes you just have to move the furniture around a little bit to make you look at where you live a little differently.

Then, there was the angry email from the guy who scolded me for modifying the page layout after he featured my site in his CSS gallery. I mean, I had no idea how to respond to that, so I just deleted that email and tried my hardest to pretend like that hatebomb never landed in my inbox and hoped that he’d make enough ad revenue to renew his prescriptions or buy himself a nice pair of shoes.

And now, this.

But, for some reason, your question has a hint of sincerity to it, so, I’ll tell you the secret. I’ve said this elsewhere, but I think people doubt it. Are you ready? The site changes so frequently because I have no idea what I want, and I am just making things up as I go along. Does that satiate you? Are you satisfied?

There’s a bit of a double-standard here, because people ask for change and seek technologies that allow change to be easy, but, when it actually happens? Ouch. That’s the price of an audience, I suppose, and I’d hate to give anyone whiplash, and sure, change can happen too often, but I think I have a right to change my mind about things as I get more information about what works and what does not, what people like about what I’m doing and what they do not. And, more importantly, what FEELS right to me in my gut, because that’s largely been the decision making process thus far that has seemed to work best. You can’t mumble on about iteration like so many are wont to do now and curse it when it happens. And to not change your mind? To be so staunchly rigid even as you learn new things and the world around you changes? No thanks.

Why do you not like the new design? I feel like I’m doing everything right, am I not? I mean, look at this stuff: I’ve got Helvetica and there is a white background and I’m using a webfont from Typekit and my site is nearly monochromatic save for one tastefully selected color of the bluish-greenish persuasion. I know there is no Photoshop noise filter or gradients or anything of that nature, but I still like it. It is quiet, and, as I get older, I yearn for quiet. I mean, look at the site: it fulfills the obligation of a “minimal” website in 2010, you could almost call it “zen” if that’s your cup of tea (although, no pictures of smooth rocks in the header), and I’ve still kept my logo that is in a black circle that I have had for years now. This is 2010 web design trends manifest!

Sure, this iteration probably isn’t going to make it into any online galleries or be the thing-of-the-day anywhere or find itself on a list on a blog with a number in the title, but that’s okay. Why? Because I’d rather have one person print out a little thing that I wrote and put it away in the drawer of their desk to read again later than be listed on a million blogs for the design of my site. Last week, I got an email from a really nice girl going to school in Ohio for design who said she did just that. And nothing else really mattered that day besides that one email.

But, you know, the thing with the version of my site that you seemed to have preferred? I’ll let you in on a savory little bit about that version. I was having to INVENT content to fill up space. And, gosh, doesn’t that just seem like a freaking awful design? I mean, saying things where there is nothing necessary to say. Scaling complexity up needlessly. I run in to this in my life with the grippy things on my toothbrush, or how the vacuum looks like it has fins like an old Cadillac, and man, it’s so annoying because it is presuming that how it looks is more important than how it works or what it says. And geez, here it was, a big giant thorn in my side, something going against everything I believe right here on my very own website. It had to go. I needed two columns and some type. No 12-column grid structures or Photoshop tomfoolery or anything of that notion. I needed a place for words and the occasional picture, and that’s what it is now. Web 0.5. Not social, not embedded, not streaming, not live, just ideas and words and things to say.

And if you look at it, really look at it, through your squinted eyes, the site is mostly words. Which, granted, I accept is different for a person who is said to make their living as an illustrator. Don’t worry, I get it. Word-fear. Some designers are just terrified of words, especially if there is a swath of a few uninterrupted paragraphs. I’m not even sure if you’ve made it down this far into what I’ve written. But, the words! They make some “visual people” feel dirty, like there is a picture somewhere else on the internet that they are missing. A lovingly cross-processed photo of a nymphish girl with a baby deer and other fauna framed dutifully by a digitally-added dusty, flecked veneer. Or maybe some new song about rainbows. Life gets rough if the pictures used to be in a place that someone liked and when they go back, poof, there are no more pictures. “What the hell?” I understand that.

But it had to go. You know why? Because I was drawing and reading these articles that accompany the little pictures I make for the inside of magazines, and you know what? I started having ideas. Tiny, dangerous, little ideas that happen when there is no music playing, when I’d be laying down on the sofa with my eyes in the crook of my elbow to block out the light, listening to the ceiling fan spinning, waiting for an idea to spring up for an editorial illustration. You cuss and sweat and toss and turn and swear to God. Why did this all come so easily last week and nothing is happening today when all you want to do is to go out with your friends but instead you’re thinking about emerging markets and their relationship to 50-somethings stock portfolios?

And, damn, just like that, this little dangerous worm crawls in your head and you think of something that you can not draw a picture of. “What if limitations are the fuel for creativity?” Or “Have we gotten too acclimated to fake representations of real things?” Or “If there’s no money involved, does everything run on enthusiasm?” Or “Why can’t I have dinner without seeing a cell phone?” Or, God forbid, the most dangerous thought that man has ever thought, the one that has tortured us since Aristotle, “What is the good life?”

And so I started writing because the pictures I was drawing weren’t good enough for these ideas of my own. I couldn’t do them justice. They were not brief ideas. They were complex and needed to be framed properly and they needed to use the right language (if you believe that drawing and visuals and graphics and English are all languages like I believe they are). And that’s where it started, that’s when things started changing, that’s when the site started morphing. And slowly, and surely, I started speaking at different places and sharing these dangerous little ideas that I had and people seemed to like them or at least think they were interesting or novel. I don’t necessarily think that they enjoyed them more than the pictures that I made, but, they did add a new, important depth to what I was doing and new, different people that didn’t really know very much about the world of pictures started to enjoy what I was talking about as well. Scientists. Tech people. Programmers. One classical composer. And that felt good. It felt right. It was substance, and more than just a picture to accompany a little puff piece on grill-outs for the summer issue of some lifestyle rag. (Not that there’s anything wrong grilling, lifestyle rags, or summer.)

The site is different now. It used to have to hold pictures. Now, it has to hold ideas, and that, decidedly, must look different. I’m still trying to grok what that means, but with each change I feel like I’m getting a little closer. You know how clothes start to feel better as you grow into them? That.

So, this “journey” that you speak of… I don’t feel obliged to share the specific details of that with everyone because I would like to keep a small insular speck of privacy for myself, but, I will tell you about some of the high notes. I have been doing this “design thing” on and off for 10 years now. And it is just now, just in this moment, just in this past little bit that I took a step back and said “Wait, what?”

I looked around at what I made and what other people were making and I got sick to my stomach because it was all so damn slick and I felt like I could trust so little of it. I was suspicious of the things that I was not suspicious of before, and believed that things were fake before I believed that they were real, and that made me feel something awful in the pit of my gut. I wondered if a little, important, bright part of me had left or had gotten buried under something I didn’t want.

I’m not out of it yet. I am having fun working on things, but I am much more particular about what I agree to do because, fortunately, I am lucky enough to be in a situation where I have the liberties to say no to things. And you know what? The things that I have agreed to do have been so much more rewarding now. But, I still struggle with the absolute usefulness of what I’m doing in the larger context of things, and I’m not sure if there is logical ending point to that. It’s like asking someone “When are you finished being skeptical?” and I don’t know if that ever ends unless you can control every single little bit of everything you produce, which, fortunately and unfortunately, is not the reality when you are working with or for someone else.

But things are changing. I’m afforded the liberty to choose, and because I have that opportunity, I feel obligated to be very thoughtful about which opportunities I take. I’m not sure how long you’ve been doing this, but as careers go, things very rarely have clear edges and hard cuts between the stages of them. We perceive this, because often we stop one job and then start another and then, wham, all of a sudden everything is different. But, it is usually not that way. There is a gray area between the stages. It is a cross-fade that takes time. It is a situation where your malcontent grows in one place and then, finally, after months you decide to go do something else. Or, your interest in this other place grows and it takes months to muster up the courage to go ahead and leap into fully embracing that new thing.

I think I am of the latter case. It takes a bit of courage to spend 5 years building something, then just turn it all on its head. I’m slowly prepping to do something different, but I’m far enough away that it is still a bit hazy. But, that’s okay. This is new and exciting and invigorating, but things are incubating because good things do not usually happen all at once.

So, I will leave it at that. Thanks for your question, and I’ll go ahead and assume that you’re a nice guy who had a good question that was worded poorly, because really, writing this helped me a little bit, and I hope that it can help you maybe understand just a little bit why the background color of my website is now gray. Maybe it’s a metaphor. Or I could just like gray.

Note: This question was originally submitted by someone under their own username. That’s the reason I decided to respond. That being said, I’ve removed the user’s handle, so this doesn’t seem like me scolding them as an individual. Thanks for reading.

Cooking, Magic, Jamming Your Own Stuff Through the Machine & Changing Everything

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:51:00 -0500

If you dig, you will find. Your thing to read today is What Grant Achatz Saw at El Bulli. (Found via the insatiable Robert Greco’s delicious, who so frequently finds the best savory bits on the internet, you would think he has a super sensitive sense of smell. He bakes chocolate chip cookies out of the raw ingredients of the internet. Go, follow. It’s great curation.)

Anyway, El Bulli. Maybe you know something about the restaurant or Ferran Adrià or have heard about molecular gastronomy or have heard whisperings about how there’s an astonishing amount of agreement about how Adrià might just be the best chef in the world. Or that the wait to get into El Bulli is about a year, but that doesn’t really matter because the restaurant is actually closed and on a two-year hiatus. Or maybe you heard how the restaurant, if it reopens, won’t be anything like its current form, or maybe that it’s turning into a school?

All that aside, the New York Times’ Diner’s Journal blog posted a short little retrospective by Grant Achatz, a most impressive chef in his own right, about his stint staging at El Bulli. Here, have a golden nugget:

When the dishes started to come I was disoriented, surprised, amazed…blown away and to my dismay, blind to what was happening. Trout roe arrived, encased in a thin- perfect tempura batter. I shot Wylie a skeptical glance and he immediately returned it. We bit into the gumball-size taste….there was no apparent binder holding the eggs together, and the eggs were still cold, uncooked! How did they hold the eggs together and then dip them in a batter without dispersing them into hundreds of pieces? And how are the eggs not totally cooked? This is cool…

A small bowl arrived: Ah, polenta with olive oil, I thought. See, this food isn’t that out there. But as soon as the spoon entered my mouth an explosion of yellow corn flavor burst, and then all the texture associated with polenta vanished. I calmly laid my spoon down on the edge of the bowl after one bite–astonished.

What the hell is going on back there, I thought. I know cooking, but this is the stuff of magic.

I’m not sure I know specifically what magic is, but maybe it is encountering a good impossibility. We don’t run into many Willy Wonkas or Walt Disneys in our lives: someone who has a completely different viewpoint than our own, and somehow, through sheer talent or brute force, builds a temple to that point of view. One who isn’t shy to embrace the seemingly impossible, then be able to pull it off. To defy gravity, to make things appear or disappear, to create unimaginable experiences because to make them requires the ability to mix things together that we wouldn’t even fathom possible. Magic!

And on it went…..pea soup that changed temperature as I ate it; ravioli made from cuttlefish instead of pasta that burst with a liquid coconut filling when you closed your mouth; tea that came in the form of a mound bubbles, immediately dissolving on the palate; braised rabbit with hot apple gelatin… Wait, how is this possible—gelatin can’t be hot!

Magic is subverting expectations. It is contrarian by nature.

If you dig, you will find. And laid bare here is a small little trinket of a thought of what it means to change, how craft and art grows, how energy gets harnessed, and how a catalyst can change one thing into something magically different.

People often ask me if the style of cooking he pioneered is a trend, fad or flash in the pan. My belief is that every 15 to 20 years, with an obvious bell curve of energy, most professions change. Technology, fine arts, design and yes, cooking, follow the same predictable pattern. A visionary creates the framework for a new genre, others follow and execute, and the residual effects remain, embedded in the cloth of the craft…

Normally the evolution is gradual and seamless, and subtlety rules. Very rarely, a shift turns a profession upside down…

It requires a great thinker to inspire more great thinking. Whatever he decides to do with El Bulli, the most powerful thing that Ferran Adrià has done is not what he himself has accomplished, but what he has inspired.

If I look at our profession (yes, design, which Achatz name-checks in his own writing), I see patterns emerging. I think the future belongs to designers who can create their own content; to designers who have a point of view about the world. To folks who can make people respond to what they make and build an audience and then let them support that point of view. I want designers who can use the process and products of design to inspire, inform, and delight. I want a Bob Dylan to show up and make everyone wish they were a singer-songwriter and then try it. Then, I want them to be tempestuous and go electric and piss everybody off only to have them realize, maybe only years later, that, God, wasn’t that ballsy and necessary? All of this is more than selling. It’s about world-building and community-building around a honed point of view and a refined way to see the world.

This is different than what has previously been celebrated. A lot of headspace has been given to the idea of designers working on self-initiated projects and trying to profit off of those, but, still, I think in our heart of hearts, we still mostly make the presumption that design equals client work. This is largely the reality because of economics, and thus you could say that it is true, but it is an incomplete truth and not the whole of it. Saying design is not client work sounds very obvious after you say it, but until you do, it is almost unthinkable for most.

At this point in my life, I believe the future of design is the polymath. It is to embrace design not only as a craft, but also as a liberal art and to realize that design is a cultural vessel. While bowls are nice, what makes them useful is that they can hold something. They must be filled with something good. The future is knowing something about programming or knife-throwing or molecular biology or psychology or even cooking, and realizing that these things are assets and not dead weight. It is about using design to project your point of view on these things, and to let the content influence the design and to let the design influence the content, to let each push and pull on one another to make the friction that smooths it all out into something you want to hold and have, to be so round you wish to wrap your mind around it. It is digging, it is finding, it is learning, it is knowing. It is connecting. Life is research.

We have a design machine. For years we have been feeding other people’s content into one end, it’d churn and chug-a-lug and it would design (verb), and then after a bit of smoke and pyrotechnics to warrant a higher price for the job, the machine would pop out a design (noun) from the other end. Things progressed as usual. Useful things were made. Business was good, and we were so busy we couldn’t think about what we were doing and we all just did it.

And then things slowed. There was a quiet moment that hovered and remained for much more than a moment, and, as usually happens in quiet moments, someone had a little, dangerous thought. “What if we make our own stuff and feed it through the machine?”

Someone plugged in. Someone went electric. Magic.

I became familiar with your work via gigposters.com, so I have to ask: Do you have a favorite gig poster? You don't have to limit it to one fave, if you have several.

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:08:17 -0500

This! The color, the flow, the blobs, that scanned phone book, that orange blob, that gut feeling that some sort of acidic sound is being made. Sonnenzimmer = pure gold.

Do you have any tips for finding inspiration for those certain projects that you don't really feel a strong connection to? I'm doing an internship right now at a large corporation's communications department and many times I find it hard to focus on/come up with new ideas for the more boring projects.

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:20:00 -0500

No tips. I am awful at working on things where I don’t feel a strong connection. I try to avoid it, but that’s not always possible. My friends will testify: I complain and whine and moan for days at a time until the project ends. I’m a miserable cuss of a person to be around.

Sorry. No magic spells. Pretend you’re making an ice cream sundae? That’s as close to magic as I know…

What typefaces can't you stand seeing?

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 17:48:00 -0500

It seems silly to get worked up over typeface choices that you have no control over. I’d rather celebrate the times a great choice is made than rue the times a poor choice is made. I don’t want to grumble about things for the rest of my life and I don’t want to annoy my friends and family to death. It’s foolish to think that getting worked up about Papyrus will make you a zealot.

I saw this great flyer the other day for piano lessons that looked like it was made in Word. It was all typeset in 72pt Bodoni Poster Compressed and it was just perfect. It was classy and dignified and it looked like Chopin. An amateur did that, and it was wonderful. Made my day more than any professionally designed piece I saw.

Swish.

You put together the remarkable Text Playlist along with the listing of 10 Blogs, might you have some a list of books (or even just a couple) that you would recommend that are not about design, though maybe they are related in some way to design

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 13:51:00 -0500

This is long. I apologize. In that big advice post, I said keep one fiction and one nonfiction book on your nightstand. Nonfiction can give us the truth about what is happening in the world. Fiction can give us the truth that won’t fit in nonfiction and the truth that is happening inside of us.

I’m not as well read as some, but here are a few titles that I quite enjoy. This is a half-baked reading list, and I am sure I am omitting many wonderful things on my own shelf which I can not see right now. For this, I apologize too.

Design Student Short Reading List of Corollaryish Reading That is Kind of Related to Design But is Kind of Not And That Isn’t A Bad Thing But is Actually A Very Good Thing

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

If you come to this book correctly, it will teach you more about process than any design book could. It’s written by a choreographer, and it is very tempting to consider design a choreographic art of content and concept. Anyway, if there are ideas and areas that seem to overlap between her experience and yours, there’s a high probability of truth, because, you know, unrelated fields and such, right?
Ways of Seeing by John Berger

This book is pretty much the cornerstone of any collegiate class on aesthetics. It’s great (albiet written in the 70s and dated in some aspects), but it’s easy to find applications of the ideas presented within to our current visual climate. This is the book that was ported from the original television series by the BBC. The television series is available to watch online as well, and I would suggest that over the book, if only for Berger’s vigor and intensity. But, buy the book too. Why not, for $5 used on Amazon? If only to fulfill your liberal arts student obligations…
The Elements of Style by Strunk & White

You should already have this. What, you don’t have this? Get with the program, kid. Learn the rules, then selectively break them.
Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

Oh, lordy! An economics book! Oh, the terror! But, this is good. If only to get a grasp of how folks respond to incentives and to develop a latticework of how people make decisions to hang your design choices upon… If you go to a state school instead of an art school, make friends with an economics student. You’ll get into all sorts of fun arguments when your two hyper-idealistic outlooks clash with one another, and that friction is a wonderful thing. (But, buy each other a beer so you don’t hate one another at the end of the day.)
Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan

It’s easy to take things for granted, especially when you view them out of context of the time they were made. I wasn’t a big Woody Guthrie fan until I realized, “Oh my god! This guy was painting ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ on his guitar and singing right wing/left wing/chicken wing when folks were singing gospel tunes and picking dirt out of their toes in the Dust Bowl.”

That’s kind of like McLuhan. It’s easy to think of the idea of a global village as ho-hum, or you might think the influence of electronics and mass communication have on our lives is an easy concept to wrap your mind around. But geez, to forecast so much of this in the technology’s infancy? I mean, sometimes it’s just uncanny, almost like the dude invented a time machine in the future, jumped back to the past, wrote a couple books, and then vaporized in some sort of space/time rip. Maybe.

Anyway, this particular book is a gem because it takes dense ideas and makes them presentable through juxtaposing image and type, and fully leverages the power of design. (It was designed by Quentin Fiore.) Working on an updated version of this is one of my dream jobs. (But, the other part of me says it should be left untouched.) Pick one up, and get an old copy. (Read as: don’t get a new one because you’ll get it with that crappity crap David Carson cover that makes it look like some sort of stupid Nine Inch Nails album.)
The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda

Maeda outlines 10 principles (I wouldn’t call them laws) of simplicity. It’s a quick and breezy read, with tons of insight per word. You should read it online, because, one, it’s free, and two, the book, while a beautiful design specimen, can sometimes feel a bit inflated to generate enough pages to warrant a book.

This is simplicity at its best: as a call towards making things more human and humane.
Design As Art by Bruno Munari

Ok, ok. You got me. This has everything to do with design. But, BUT! Riddle me this: why haven’t you read it? Why don’t more people read it? There aren’t many pictures, but screw designers with picture addictions. For truth, this is better than most design books that you can buy, each chapter is an individual essay, so it’s easy to pick up and read and put back down, and the sucker fits in your back pocket. This is like the original design-writing blog, and it is the best design blog ever. Just go buy it. Why isn’t this required reading for every design seminar ever, ever, ever?
Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

So, a neuroscience book? Okay, one, the brain is awesome, and two, if your thesis statement is that creative people in the humanities usually make meaningful insights about how the brain operates through art and then the scientific community later produces studies that verify… holy-cow-gee-whiz, I am going to snatch that book up and devour it like some sort of seagull shoving a fish down its gullet.

I demolished this book the first time through. Also, everything good in WIRED is usually by Lehrer. Also also, the dude’s what? 26? 27? Let’s all hang our heads in shame while we eat a ham-and-swiss Hot Pocket while sitting in a bean bag chair in our parent’s basement.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

If you have read The Little Prince, you are shaking your head in agreement. If you have not, just trust us on this one, okay?
Read a Book that Changed the World

It doesn’t matter. Take your pick. They’re cheap. And usually available for free online. Pick up your shiny iPad or Kindle and search the store and see if you can nab it for free-ninety-nine. I’m talking Silent Spring, or Common Sense, or The Origin of Species, or Paradise Lost, or The Republic, or The Iliad, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or Shakespeare, or Divine Comedy, or Moby Dick, or 1984, or Don Quixote, or Walden. These are the books that define who we are as humanity. And we should cherish them and consume them, if only to be in the presence of something bigger than all of us for a little bit.
Read a Book that Changed You

By this, I mean the books that everyone reads at some point when they are in high school and it changes a little bit of who they are or how they look at the world. Frequently, they are things like Slaughterhouse Five, or Catcher in the Rye, or Franny and Zooey, or Of Mice and Men, or Animal Farm, or The Giver, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Pride and Prejudice.

These are the books that have sentimental power over us (or at least myself) because they feel like the first documentation of how it feels to be yourself. Someone is speaking to you that knows you better than yourself. These books are the first things you choose to like and believe in, they are works that you can own yourself, and you chose it, and it is not given to you from any one else. “This is mine,” you say, and that is true, like this book helped to unbury something hidden inside of yourself that had always been there.

If you have read one of these before, read it again and see if it has the same effect, and think about how you are more angry now than you were back then, or how your angst has subsided, or think about how you feel less lonely now or more lonely, or think about how time has changed you. Maybe see the times where you pull out something new from the pages that you were not able to grasp before.

By revisiting something that has not changed you can see how you have changed. Think about how reading a book like this is like putting another notch in the door frame where you measured your growth when you were growing up. Look at how far you have come.

These books are litmus tests for friends. For me, if Franny and Zooey changes a little piece of you, I will probably be friends with you. These books never stop having an affecting power over us.

“Let’s just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible. Especially me. I love you.”

“And so it goes.”

mrgan: By now, everyone knows that marble sculptures of ancient...

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 20:39:03 -0500

mrgan:

By now, everyone knows that marble sculptures of ancient Greece weren’t actually bone-white, right? They were painted because guess what, everyone loves color. So I hope you don’t freak out if I say that I’m kind of getting into the look of these re-colored pieces. I still appreciate the ascetic white look, but, y’know… color!

If you pull something from archaeology.org, I will smoosh the “like” button with the fury of a million burning day stars. Plus, that archer is dressed up in an M.I.A. album cover!

What's your favourite book cover? Does it differ from what you'd consider the best book cover?

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:43:00 -0500

This is my favorite book cover. It is for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin. The cover is designed by David Pearson and I think it is a masterpiece. It describes the content and references the format, and wraps it all up into a concept that any one can understand. There’s a pleasing restraint, and a forthright confidence that is attractive. It communicates well too: between the title and the cover, you know what this book is about.

I don’t know what I’d consider the best book cover. I’m not qualified to speak to that.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:45:28 -0500

Gosh, I was going to write something all misty and tender about yellow, wooden pencils and what they are and what they do and what they can represent.

But, I’m going to have to go with grilled cheese sandwich on this one, TumblrBOT.

You've mentioned 'Learn to write' several times now. I would just like to hear your thoughts on good writing and how one learns to write well. It's hard to grasp sometimes as we all 'know how to write'. What makes it good? Thanks Frank.

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:25:21 -0500

I value: clarity, emotion, and brevity. In that order. These rules do not apply to things like novels, where sometimes length is an asset and clarity can stifle a reader’s imagination.

One gets better at writing by writing and reading good writing. I’d recommend Stephen King’s On Writing for further guidance, because I’m a mediocre writer at best. I’m just playing dress-up here.

Favorite Pavement song?

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:53:45 -0500

My brain says Gold Soundz. My heart says Stereo. (And you’re my fact checkin’ cuz.)

What advice would you give to a graphic design student?

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:37:00 -0500

Design does not equal client work.

It’s hard to make purple work in a design. The things your teachers tell you in class are not gospel. You will get conflicting information. It means that both are wrong. Or both are true. This never stops. Most decisions are gray, and everything lives on a spectrum of correctness and suitability.

Look people in the eyes when you are talking or listening to them. The best teachers are the ones who treat their classrooms like a workplace, and the worst ones are the ones who treat their classroom like a classroom as we’ve come to expect it. Eat breakfast. Realize that you are learning a trade, so craft matters more than most say. Realize that design is also a liberal art. Quiet is always an option, even if everyone is yelling. Libraries are a good place. The books are free there, and it smells great.

If you can’t draw as well as someone, or use the software as well, or if you do not have as much money to buy supplies, or if you do not have access to the tools they have, beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.

The best communicators are gift-givers.

Don’t become dependent on having other people pull it out of you while you’re in school. If you do, you’re hosed once you graduate. Keep two books on your nightstand at all times: one fiction, one non-fiction.

Buy lightly used. Patina is a pretty word, and a beautiful concept.

Develop a point of view. Think about what experiences you have that many others do not. Then, think of what experiences you have that almost everyone else has. Then, mix those two things and try to make someone cry or laugh or feel understood.

Design doesn’t have to sell. Although, that’s usually its job.

Think of every project as an opportunity to learn, but also an opportunity to teach. Univers is a great typeface and white usually works and grids are nice and usually necessary, but they’re not a style. Helvetica is nice too, but it won’t turn water to wine.

Take things away until you cry. Accept most things, and reject most of your initial ideas. Print it out, chop it up, put it back together. When you’re aimlessly pushing things around on a computer screen, print it out and push it around in real space. Change contexts when you’re stuck. Draw wrong-handed and upside down and backwards. Find a good seat outside.

Design is just a language, it’s not a message. If you say “retro” too much you will get hives and maybe die. Learn your design history. Know that design changes when technology changes, and its been that way since the 1400s. Adobe software never stops being frustrating. Learn to write, and not school-style writing. A text editor is a perfectly viable design tool. Graphic design has just as much to do with words as it does with pictures, and a lot of my favorite designers come to design from the world of words instead of the world of pictures.

If you meet a person who cares about the same obscure things you do, hold on to them for dear life. Sympathy is medicine.

Scissors are good, music is better, and mixed drinks with friends are best. Start brave and brash: you can always make things more conservative, but it’s hard to make things more radical. Edit yourself, but let someone else censor you. When you ride the bus, imagine that you are looking at everything from the point of view of someone else on the ride. If you walk, look up on the way there and down on the way back. Aesthetics are fleeting, the only things with longevity are ideas. Read Bringhurst and one of those novels they made you read in high school cover to cover every few years. (Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby.)

Stop trying to be cool: it is stifling.

Most important things happen at a table. Food, friends, discussion, ideas, work, peace talks, and war plans. It is okay to romanticize things a little bit every now and then: it gives you hope.

Everything is interesting to someone. That thing that you think is bad is probably just not for you. Be wary of minimalism as an aesthetic decision without cause. Simple is almost a dirty word now. Almost. Tools don’t matter very much, all you need is a sharp knife, but everyone has their own mise en place. If you need an analogy, use an animal. If you see a ladder in a piece of design or illustration, it means the deadline was short. Red, white, black, and gray always go together. Negative space. Size contrast. Directional contrast. Compositional foundations.

Success is generating an emotion. Failure is a million different things. Second-person writing is usually heavy-handed, like all of this.

Seeking advice is addicting and can become a proxy for action. Giving it can also be addicting in a potentially pretentious, soul-rotting sort of way, and can replace experimenting because you think you know how things work. Be suspicious of lists, advice, and lists of advice.

Everyone is just making it up as they go along.

This about sums up everything I know.

"I am constantly torn between the heroes of the east — who are heroes for their ability to see things..."

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:13:21 -0500

“I am constantly torn between the heroes of the east — who are heroes for their ability to see things as they really are — and the heroes of the west — who are heroes for their ability to see things that are not but that should be, and then to build them. One is mainly about accepting, the other is mainly about rejecting and creating. Being from the U.S., it is natural for me to have the second kind of heroes, even as I see the wisdom of the first. But whenever I try to behave like an eastern hero, it always feels like posing, wasting time, or giving up.”

- Jonathan Harris . Clouds and coins

Jonathan is keeping one of my favorite blogs these days. It reminds me how rare it is to find thoughtful, emotional contemplation (especially online), and how valuable those things really are to our lives.

"Hum."

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:39:00 -0500

So, a small thing I’d like to highlight about The Back Side of Your Gullet series:

Part 1 — 1300 words — 62 notes (likes/reblogs) in 4 days
Part 2 — 1500 words and 6 diagrams — 40 notes in 3 days
Part 3 — 3600 words and 4 diagrams — 48 notes in 1 day
Announcement saying Part 4 would be delayed — 27 words and 1 illustration — 150+ notes in about 2 hours

This confirms what I’ve been writing about so much it confounds me. Take away: The Internet HATES words. (Just kidding. Sort of. Maybe?)

From the movie The Jerk:

[a sniper keeps missing Navin and hitting cans of motor oil]
Navin R. Johnson: He hates these cans! Stay away from the cans!

Part 4 of the Gullet series won’t be out today, I’ll...

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:23:00 -0500

Part 4 of the Gullet series won’t be out today, I’ll need a few more days to edit, refine, and polish.

For now, a thought to consider.