I love magazines. Although the industry as a whole model is busted, as titles are folding, advertising revenue is plummeting, and wholesalers are in lawsuits, while they are going out of business. Even before the recession hit, unsold copies (which are the majority of them) end up getting destroyed. On the bright side of things, Cunning and teamed up with HSBC to give travelers in Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 1 customized magazines. Passers-by had the ability to select content from 32 commissioned articles, get them bound, and take their personally curated magazine onto their flight with them.  Of course, the next step is to have the printing done by something like Espresso Book Machine.

Via the fine folks at PSFK.

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 finally made it to New York Comicon. The first year they had it, they oversold tickets and I couldn’t even get in main event area. Now, a few years later, I seem to have recovered from the experience and had a jolly ole time. Unfortunately, my partner in crime (that’s you Jesse) had to bail for work reasons. Next time, you’ll see me posing with the cosplay(ers?).  NYCC was the warm up event to my dream of attending the main event in San Diego. The day did make me nostalgic for the time when I used to go to these comic book conventions in Connecticut in the 80s. No costumes, “celebrity” autograph signings, or corportate booths. It was just comic book collectors and sellers.

See the full flickr set here.

Is this story of suburban dystopia what would have happened if Kate and Leo survived in Titanic?

(Ed Note: ignore the problems of chronology)

My friend Eddie Tejeda, has been working on an awesome site called, “LittleSis” which is an “unvoluntary Facebook for powerful Americans.” The relationships of politicians, their donors, CEOs, lobbyists, non-profit directors are made transparent through a combination of crowdsourced labor and accessing public databases. The site is a project of Public Accountability Support from the Sunlight Foundation.

It’s sort of like playing “Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon,” except with American elite, like Madeline Albright who is connect with soon to be former FCC commissioner Kevin J Martin. Their connection? The Aspen Institute.

2008 has been a rocky ride. I could write about a year reflecting on the changes of the guard… industries failing, fortunes made and lost, seismic Presidential shifts, passing of torches at the Olympics. We’re entering 2009 with lots of uncertainty. But instead, I’m just going to quickly post about how this occasional blog, is going to become even more occasional. Instead of the overhanging pressure to “feed the monster” I’d rather use my time work on other stuff without the self-imposed guilt of “I should be blogging.” So, the change is more a mental re-defining for myself than anything else. Anyway… maybe the frequency won’t even change… because I’ll still use this site as a staging area for some of the other things I was meaning to work on in 2008. 2009 will be year of getting the half done project out the door, wish me luck.

Anyway, this photo is from a party a few months… it has nothing to do with the post, just your standard blurry flickr photo.

Enjoy.

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.)

A few years ago, I noticed a bunch of books sitting behind the information desk at the St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village. The books were multiple copies of Don Delillio, Paul Auster, and Raymond Carver. I asked the sale clerk behind the counter what they were doing there.  As it turns out, independent book shops put certain authors behind the counter to keep them from leaving the store before they have been purchased. If you go into the stacks of St. Mark’s, you’ll find signs within the titles, directly customers to the information desks. The other authors also include Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Hubert Selby.  A bit further south in Nolita, McNally Jackson Books uses a similar strategy. Charles Bukowski makes an appearance, with Delillo and Burroughs giving a repeat showing. These choice titles are not the current best sellers, but are works from those aggressive writers who capture college-aged (give or take a few years) minds.  Those books, like White Noise or Junkie, feel dangerous the first time they are read. In a way, it makes sense that that those book are the ones most often stolen.

Somewhere there is this whole small oddity, there resides in compliment making it for behind the counter.

Other people who write about books:
Future of the Book
The Penguin Blog
26th Story
Planned Obsolescence
New York Public Library Blog

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?