Design Loves a Depression

Vermelha Chair

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.

New Year’s Eve in the Berkshires

Reverse

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, Massachusetts.

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.

North Adams

The MASS MoCA campus was once the Sampson Shoe Company.
Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective »
Anselm Kiefer: Sculpture and Paintings »

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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A New Pair of Sox for the Red Sox

New Red Sox Identities

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

Icon-maker Shepard Fairey - Person of the Year 2008 - TIME

TIME Person of The Year 2008 Cover

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

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 @ The Bowery Ballroom

light

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

Bruce McCall on Letterman

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:

Bruce McCall New Yorker Covers

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

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

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.

Saving Buffalo’s Untold Beauty

Downtown Buffalo

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.

What’s Hebrew for “Yes We Can”?

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 by KINGdesk

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.

Grant Park - Alex Wright

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’s “Hackers and Spending Sprees”

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.

Who Said Print is Dead?

OBAMA

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.

Print Isn’t Dead

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.

New York Times Anthrax Scare

Who?

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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