The fine folks at Urban Omnibus and WNYC are hosting a meet up at Bryant Park this Saturday to explore New York’s unbuilt future from the past with the project I worked on: Museum of the Phantom City.

Details below…

Urban Omnibus and WNYC Meet-up
Museum of the Phantom City
Saturday, October 31
2:00-4:00 p.m.
Meet at the Bryant Park Fountain (6th Avenue side)
Drinks and conversation to follow
RSVP to culture@wnyc.org

The Museum of the Phantom City launched, which invites people to interact with unbuilt architectural proposals through an iPhone app and website. The project plays with some interesting ideas about location (obviously) but also of how designers in the past envisioned the future.  We started with New York, and try to show that an invisible history that never was, resides to a physical/ actual space we inhabit.

We had a great team working on the project, and thanks go to Brett and Irene for getting me involved in building the website portion of the project. I hadn’t done any serious programming in a while, and I re-learned everything I love and hate about coding. (Also note, the site and iPhone are beta versions.)

Joel alerted me to Vanity Fair’s share tool. I deal with two social networking sites, Facebook and Linkedin, and I am already facing social networking fatigue.

But the intriguing question is, do all these options mean VF gets or doesn’t get social media?

I recently got a nice package in the mail, my eagerly awaited issue 2 of Manzine. What looks like a large format zine is actually a clever take on mens magazines. Created by a group of writers and designers based out of the UK, who write for places like The Guardian, British GQ, and Arena (RIP,) Manzine riffs upon the world they helped created.

On a previous trip to London, I had the pleasure of meeting up with one of the writers Kevin Braddock, who I was first ran into after scouring the internet for a copy of issue 1.

I’m an avid fan of magazine publishing. Manzine has been added to my collection of Chap, Butt, and Fantastic Man. Going to sort of great lengths to find semi-obscure and certainly obscenely expensive international titles. (London, by the way, has some truly, awesome magazine shops, like RD Franks 5 Winsley Street, London W1 8HG T: +011 44 20 7 636 1244. Of course the exchange is a killer.)

But back to the issue at hand, no pun intended. Manzine is a different take on magazines, that moves in the opposite direction of creating magazines as art object. Here, Braddock and his conspirators, have gone indie, dyi, and underground. In he face of the ongoing implosion of the magazine industry, the writers, while still keeping their day jobs, are producing articles and columns that feel much more personal than you get in men’s mags, like writing about learning out to play pop songs (specifically by Phil Collins.) The article destructing the sexuality of a mermaid is more, dare we say intellectual, than what you get in Details or GQ.

The magazine, itself, feels disposable. Its low-fi design and barely better than newsprint paper quality, and of course, cheeky design give it a cheap look and feel to go with its a couple of pounds pricing, (Free (Two Quid where sold.)) As we learned in grade school, looks are deceiving, and judging books by their covers leads to misinterpretation. At first opening, I just liked looking at it, with its over use of typefaces and seeming new style guides for each two page layout. However, when you actually starting reading, personal articles about the art of fixing up a bicycle, an honest voice comes through the guy-ish surface.

What better way to spend one’s spare time than trying to reinvent and resuscitate magazine?

Shot from the top floor of 14 Wall St. J P Morgan (the person, not the bank) used the entire floor as a piet de terre.

Wonderfully surprised by the renovation of Alice Tully by Diller Scofdio + Renfro and FXFowle. Is it a shark or a ocean liner? Interiors and sound quality were great too. I heard Alarm Will Sound, Bang on a Can All-Stars, and Steve Reich & Musicians.

This sign was found in the bathroom of the 31st floor of One Chase Manhattan Plaza. The typography is mesmerizing.

Wojciech recently asked me to suggest some good books on design, which were more practical than theoretical. Here are a few suggestions that immediately came to mind. If you think something is missing, please let me know. I may also add a few more if they come to me. (Ed note: I’m recalling some of the examples from memory, so there may be an error or two in the examples I site.)

Edward Tufte, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”

While Tufte has written other good subsequent books on visualizing information, this one was the first. To my knowledge, the book was also the first to organize ideas on how to display quantitative data in a formal way. The book contain now classic examples, such as mapping Cholera in 19th century London and Napoleon’s army during an campaign in 1812 which relates time, temperature, and number of soldiers.

Donald Norman, “The Design of Everyday Things”

Another classic book outlines how design often fails the user (not the other way around,) by not taking her into account though the entire design process. Although the book’s examples mostly reference industrial design, the concepts can be applied to other design disciplines like graphic design, interaction design, and architecture. By the book’s end, the readers will forever recognize how often everything things, such as light switches, water faucets, and doors are poorly designed and labeled.

Gary Hustwit, “Helvetica”

While not a book, this surprisingly entertaining documentary film on the ubiquitous font tracks the font’s rise in a particular point in history and how designers still revere or reject it. Designers and non-designers come away from the film with an understanding about the subtle and overt power typography can have in skilled hands. Designer Paula Scher gives a hilarious quote connecting Helvetica to the Iraq War.

William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler, “Universal Principles of Design”

A book that I discovered by accident runs through and defines a wide collection of principles from many disciples of design (industrial, graphic, and architecture, etc.) Each principle only gets a brief two page overview, as the book thrives for breath. However, the budding designer can quickly get a sense of what practitioners have discovered over time.

Erik Spiekermann and E.M. Ginger, “Stop Stealing Sheep”

Although written in 1993, this book is still a fun and relevant read on the basics of typography. With an abundance of visuals, readers get exposed to many different examples of the same word in different contexts and typefaces to help show the nuances of type. Spiekermann of the firm Meta Design is also featured in film Helvetica. I’ve only read the first edition, but a second edition was published in 2002.

Scott McCloud, “Understanding Comics”

I love reading this book every couple of years or so, and not just because it justifies countless hours and dollars in my youth reading comics. Scott McCloud, creator of the also amazing comic book Zot!, formalizes sequential art, in a way that legitimizes the art form as a medium within itself. It was a book both comic book lovers and makers where waiting a long to be written.

I must say that I’m impressed that Amazon.com continues to innovate on the e-commerce services, which is perhaps why they are still the market leader. I’m don’t think sliders are the answer to everything or can be applied everywhere. When it comes to shopping for diamonds, there are several factors which control the cost of them, such as size, color, and flawlessness. the slider interface give the user control over what your needs are makes shopping much easier. (Thanks for the tip Jen.)

Image source: Amazon Windowshop

Am I the only person who missed this? This month Amazon launch Windowshop Beta, a CoverFlow-ish interface for shopping. This flash based interface allows you to search new selections, which are added each Tuesday. Browsing is controlled with the space bar to zoom in and the arrow keys to navigate, giving it the user experience of an 80s PC video game (that’s not a bad thing.) However, the categories of “Best selling,” or “New releases” have limited appeal to me.

I’m not a user of CoverFlow, mostly because most of songs don’t have images attached to them, so the UX is pretty lame for me.  But I think that some of the Silverlight interfaces and visual search engines like SearchMe and Riya are showing promise. Clearly, Amazon is trying to emulate the browsing experience of the brick and mortar store.  However, just like I only browse certain sections of a book store, it would be great to have that kind of granular control in Windowshop.  If you could combine some search, and narrow the selections down to topics or areas of interest, and then browse through 100 or so titles, we would *really* have something to write up in here.

On November 6, I didn’t run out to buy a paper. I thought about it for a second. I decided that I have more than enough stuff and because newspapers aren’t archival. Because they are designed to be disposable, newsprint disintegrates over time. I asked myself, “why bother?” When the paper eventual would turned brown and brittle, would I ever want or try to read it? Or would I just log on to nytimes.com and look it up? Of course, then I thought, what nytimes.com look like in 20 years.

Not that it matters, because the newspapers sold out all across the country during all this thinking. And I more concerned about getting a train to Philadelphia.

In retrospect, it’s interesting to observe in a time when newspapers are shutting down and laying people off, on the day after a historic election for many reasons, people still wanted to sought out the newspaper as a physical token of the event.  A copy of the New York Times apparently sold for $400, not a bad return for a one dollar investment in less than a week.

Did anyone bother saving a screen shot of the New York Times website for November 6th?

I wonder if the selling out of print newspaper was a generational phenomenon. Did Millennials, the so-called redubbed, Generation O, view this edition as someone to save?

On Wednesday, November 12, I was lucky enough to pick up a copy of the New York Times Special Edition. The parody issue of the Times dated July 4, 2009, with articles full of a hopeful future. (I wonder, however, what the Yes Men and others had planned if Obama had lost.)

This elaborate campaign took months of planning and reportedly hundreds of volunteers.  It seems that they will someday be collector’s items, according to Alex S. Jones, who wrote a book on this paper titled, “The Times.” Score one for ironic outcomes.

We, as a culture, still value scarcity. My newsprint copy is worth than my screen from nytimes-se.com. The vessel is worth paying for, but the content is not. Now the two have been irreparably divorced. And we want and expect the content to be free.  However, there are times like the 6th and 12th of November 2008, that we found ourselves returning to treasuring the vessel.

For those two days, we were back to the 20th century, where people sought out the print newspaper.

What this its last hurrah?

My friend Alex sent me this link to this recent JC de Castelbajac video, which reconsiders his recent runway show as LEGOs.  JCDC is known for incorporating popular culture imagary into his couture, but this is taking the concept into new levels. The Anna Wintour as a plastic toy is just too good. Below are screen grabs, a still from the animated show, the actual Spring/Summer 2009 show, as well as, Ms. Wintour. I’ve let you go to the site watch the entire video (which I highly encourage) and find Kanye West in the first row. In the confusing time of economic uncertainty and post-election optimism. The show itself leans toward the hopeful, with rainbow colors and plastic hats. Obama’s portrait even makes a showing.  Amidst the gloom of two wars, the shrinking global economy, and pummelled stock market, is this the perfect time for play and reinvention?