This past weekend, The New York Times Week in Review argues in a story headlined Design Loves a Depression that the recent economic slowdown will force designers to eschew novelty and the impractical, and focus more on the “intelligent reworking of current conditions”:
Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood, and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of World War II.
Will today’s designers rise to the occasion? “What designers do really well is work within constraints, work with what they have,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. “This might be the time when designers can really do their job, and do it in a humanistic spirit.”
Related: Designing Through the Recession, by designer Michael Bierut
Image courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Things have been quiet around here over the holidays. I turned 31 years old on December 22, and then Lisa and I spent some time in Buffalo with our folks, where I got to see my newest baby cousin Aline.
The MASS MoCA campus was once the Sampson Shoe Company.
Then, after a few days back in Brooklyn, we headed up to the Berkshires for New Year’s Eve in North Adams – it’s not the most exciting town to ring in the new year, but we visited MASS MoCA, stayed in a wonderful hotel called The Porches, and had the best meal North Adams has to offer at the Gramercy Bistro.
I didn’t do a lot of reflecting and resolution-making, but I am thankful for my family and friends, and for how great 2008 was for Lisa and I. Lisa is fond of saying that each year has been better than the last, which is more than one can hope for in this world.
More photos below the jump.
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This design link is near and dear to my heart – The Boston Red Sox recently updated their team identity and uniforms. Overall, I think it’s a positive evolution, though seems a bit nostolgic. I love the gray primary road jerseys.
Armin Vit mostly likes what he sees:
Replacing the old seal as the team’s official logo is the lone pair of red, hanging sox. Unless I’m wrong, there is no typography associated with it. None. No “Boston.” No “Red Sox.” If that’s the case, this is one of the best cases of visual identity and brand equity becoming so strong the icon doesn’t need explanation. They are sox. They are red. They can not be anything other than the Boston Red Sox.
Illustration courtesy of Boston.com
Shepard Fairey’s cover for TIME.
Time.com has a nice video interview with Shepard Fairey, designer of the HOPE and PROGRESS posters of Barack Obama that were nearly ubiquitous during the ’08 presidential campaign. Time Magazine named the President-Elect Person of the Year 2008, so it seemed only natural to hire Fairey to do the cover.
In the video, he shows the process used to create the piece – techniques learned from his days as a screen printer.
[via Sean]
Blur to Re-Form for Massive Hyde Park Gig »
It ended in acrimony, with the guitarist branding the singer an “egomaniac”. But after months of speculation, Blur have confirmed that they will be reuniting for a massive gig in London’s Hyde Park next summer.
My favorite band of the 90s, together again for the first time since guitarist Graham Coxon quit the band in 2002.
More: Blur In Video » | Review of Graham Coxon Solo Show in 2005 »
Love Is All performing at the Bowery Ballroom, in Manhattan.
It was not as legendary as their first show at the Knitting Factory, or the sweat-dripped set at Market Hotel in Bushwick this past summer, but Love Is All still knows how to bring it. They played a mix of songs from the new album A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night as well as from their debut, and even mixed in their Flock of Seagulls cover.
UPDATE: My Photos on Flickr » | NYCTaper’s Audio From the Show
I TiVo most of the late-night talk shows each night, in the hopes that some band or author that I love is featured – somehow, that’s easier than preemptively scanning TV Guide. But, I was genuinely surprised and thrilled to see the illustrator and writer Bruce McCall as a guest on David Letterman’s show, the other night.
I’m far too young to know his work from the National Lampoon, but McCall’s New Yorker covers are ingrained in my memory:
Some of Bruce McCall’s New Yorker covers, from 1995–2008.
Letterman’s show might not have the cultural relevance that it once did, but you get the sense by watching the segment that he’d rather be sitting there talking to McCall, than Mary-Kate or that chick from Twilight. It’s just one of the many things that make Dave tick, and why I have a TiVo season pass for the Late Show.
In the clip below, Letterman and McCall look at and discuss some of the work in McCall’s new children’s book, Marveltown.
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The Mostly True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway:
There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit’s popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true—or rather, it is only somewhat true. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when it created a new signage system at the end of the 1960s.
R-train icon, set in Helvetica and Standard.
I noticed this discrepancy earlier this year – I had to recreate some MTA subway icons for use on a project, and noticed that the R train map icon looked nothing like the Helvetica “R”. The MTA’s own website seems to be confused about the type used in the system icons, let alone its station signage.
Enter typographer Paul Shaw, and his 10,000+ word piece on AIGA’s site. Did you now that Boston’s subway signage system was the first to use Helvetica, without modifications? Ever curious as to the process by which enamel signs are made? Want to just look at pretty pictures of subway signs over the years?
It’s a great history, for fans of typography and the MTA.
Photo Credit: Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesA photo of downtown Buffalo.
The Times had a great piece yesterday on Buffalo’s architectural legacy, and recent attempts to save historic buildings:
Buffalo is home to some of the greatest American architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with major architects like Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright building marvels here. Together they shaped one of the grandest early visions of the democratic American city.
Yet Buffalo is more commonly identified with the crumbling infrastructure, abandoned homes and dwindling jobs that have defined the Rust Belt for the past 50 years. And for decades its architecture has seemed strangely frozen in time.
There is also an accompanying slide show, from which the photo above was taken.
Full disclosure: I’m originally from Buffalo.
Well, that didnt’t take long – given the success of Barack Obama’s digital and design strategy in our recent presidential election, someone was bound to, ahem… completely rip him off, sooner or later.
Surprisingly, the most recent example is the campaign of Benjamin Netanyahu, the conservative Likud leader running for prime minister of Israel. The Times reports:
The colors, the fonts, the icons for donating and volunteering, the use of embedded video, and the social networking Facebook-type options — including Twitter, which hardly exists in Israel — all reflect a conscious effort by the Netanyahu campaign to learn from the Obama success.
I wonder if that type is the Hebrew Gotham?
Wp-Hyphenate is a very promising plugin for Wordpress, because it enables some typographical control not previously available for the web:
With it your left aligned text will be less ragged, and your justified text will avoid the ghastly word spacing that has prevented serious web designers from using it.
It’s still in its early stages, but I’m experimenting with it here – using justified paragraphs and blockquotes. Let me know what you think.
Out of the box, the plugin broke my linked flickr image codes, so I had to put <a> tags on the whitelist, so the plugin ignores any linked text. Hopefully that issue will be addressed in the future.
UPDATE: Nov 16, 2008 – Jeff King has updated his plugin to address the issue described above.
My colleague at NYTimes.com, Alex Wright, happened to be in Chicago last night, so he made his way to the Grant Park celebration. I’m sure that will be a moment to remember for some time.
Newsweek.com has some interesting tidbits about the recently completed presidential election between Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin:
- Palin’s “rogue” shopping spree was greater than the earlier reported $150,000.
- Obama didn’t choose Hillary Clinton for the VP slot mostly because of her husband.
- Palin appeared with nothing on save for a towel, when McCain aides and strategists came to her hotel room to brief her at the Republican Convention.
- Obama thinks some debate questions are stupid.
More will be released on Newsweek.com in the coming days.
Today’s edition of the New York Times.
I count myself lucky today, for scoring a copy of the paper before they ran out. Apparently, the situation is the same throughout the city, (though I’ve heard rumors of another 50,000 copy run).
In fact, there are a hundred or so people standing on line outside the Times headquarters, waiting for a fresh delivery of news, printed on dead trees.
A hundred or so people, waiting on line for today’s paper, in front of the Times headquarters in midtown.
From Gawker:
Everybody wants a souvenir of Obama’s victory, and you know what makes a great souvenir? That’s right, a newspaper. This is a photo of a line outside the NYT building on 40th Street of people waiting—for a newspaper!
I hope that people still come to the Times for more than just a souvenir.
Equipment and officials from some government agency that I’ve never heard of, in the lobby of the New York Times Building in midtown.
The lobby of The New York Times Building, where I work, was closed this past Wednesday, after an employee on the 13th floor opened an envelope that contained a powdery substance. (The 13th floor is where the editorial board and some columnists have offices.)
It turned out to be a hoax, but for several hours the building was in near lock-down mode. Unfortunately, I decided to disregard warnings and went out to meet Lisa for lunch. When I returned, I was locked out for almost an hour, as the police had roped off the building’s entrances. Peering through the windows on the 8th Avenue side of the building, I saw a huge curtain stretched across one of the elevator banks. Some firemen went in with a stretcher, and the broadcast news media started converging on the street. (Apologies to the very friendly NY1 camerawoman, for refusing to talk to her on camera.)
All I could do was to take some photos, and wait to be let in. After about an hour, I received word from a colleague inside that they were letting employees back in through the freight elevators in the loading dock down 40th st. That was about all the fun I could handle for one day… back to work.
More Photos below the jump.
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