i’d like to take this opportunity to point out my outstanding invoice to gawker media.

never mind, then. apparently durst apologized for gawker’s inclusion in the lawsuit.

i, for one, am wondering how many times gm can step in something and keep on smelling pretty. i mean, really. this is like the third or fourth time, right? eesh.

dear webloggers and your geekish brethren,

please stop fawning over this tagging thing like it’s the next coming of christ. it won’t help you. you’re slobs and you misspell everything. you mis-file everything. if you have tags rather than categories, it simply means that you’ll never find anything accurately ever again.

love,

your designer.

other remaindered links i’ve run across while keeping to myself to deal with doug’s sudden death:

saft is an invaluable utility for safari. enables sidebar functionality, bookmarking functions, and a kiosk mode. very nice.

su found a rather large list of menu extras for Mac OS X for me, knowing i’m one of those people who hates to open a window to really do anything. sweet stuff. i use synergy in particular on a daily basis. it’s special in that it allows you to control itunes from any application with no additional interface clutter—so you can put some of those unused F keys to work.

jesse sent me a link to some fantastic pens that work great with standard issue dick blick sketchbook paper. (i have no real idea what sort of paper that is, but i do know it’s archival). moleskine freaks: i already know about it, and i don’t like the paper. but thanks.

and lastly, i picked up a copy of alias sketchbook pro. its drawing functions beat photoshop senseless. the line quality is much more expressive, drawing is more responsive, pressure feels more natural, and the ink flow and quality os very close to the real thing. the only thing i miss, since it’s so close to actually having a digital sketchbook, is a paging function and built-in file-naming conventions. my sketchbook pages often build off one another in a narrative fashion; it would be great to be able to manage this with as little effort as turning a physical page.

i have an advance copy of moby’s new album hotel, and i was expecting to hate it. completely hate it, actually. but you know what? skinny little bitch has pretty much managed to make the great urban album (again).

only thing i find regrettable about the package is the same thing that’s bothered me about all of his albums back to his first full length: he has strange taste in guest vocalists. the women he chooses sound great when they boom over the dancefloor, but moby makes intimate songs. the girls sound completely out of place—but ultimately, i can’t fault him for that it; it’s where he comes from.

his lyrics are weird: when anyone besides him sings them, they’re awful. they sound fake, they sound completely hollow and lifeless. like lies. but when he uses his own imperfect, common voice, his words sound like hymns for common people. gorgeous, plain little songs sung by a person who’s making a stand by simply believing in something, as if belief is all there really is.

chicago news: there’s an enormous drug trafficking story right under your noses. please wake up.

let’s put a few recent stories together.

1: mike jackson, whom su and i met at a party, was charged with the murder of a cabbie. i was told been told by a friend of his that he’s “had serious problems with drugs in the past.” mike was involved with chicago’s AIDS awareness and education programs.

he disappeared for about 14 hours after the murder, then calmy turned himself in with his lawyers. who besides me thinks that he was detoxing his system after an obvious crystal meth rage?

2: mike anderson—also gay—arrested for dealing crystal meth. he worked for the howard brown foundation, a highly regarded gay chicago charity foundation.

3. the hearts foundation, a highly regarded—yet highly questionable—gay chicago charity was founded by mike jackson. check out what’s been said about their financials.

4. the fireball, hearts foundations’ yearly event, happened a month ago.

given all of the above coincidences, what does everyone think was happening at the fireball? better still, why didn’t anyone send a reporter with a yen for investigative reporting? you’d think someone would want to see what the gay fundraising set is up to when left to themselves.

and on top of that, why doesn’t anyone look to see where thousands and thousands of dollars which should be going to AIDS research and medical charity is actually going?

god, people, open your eyes.

the center of the nightclubbing universe, motherboards, turns four. here’s my celebrations from the past few months.

the tribune’s john kass aims for poingancy and fails miserably—especially tacky for a professional response to a private tragedy made public.

preferential treatment wraps a smooth gui around plutil so you can diagnose screwups in your prefs files. invaluable for longtime mac users (like me—fourteen years!) who are still learning how to work from the command line.

last week, amid much hate mail and more drama than i’ve ever witnessed for a simple redesign, su and i launched a redesigned gizmodo for gawker media. this is gizmodo’s third design, the second one i’ve created, and i believe the most useful and beautiful. this redesign is the cumination of several performance upgrades su and i have been making to all of the gawker media sites over the past few months.

here’s a list of changes and improvements.

1) there’s a robot head. love it or hate it, my artists’ work came out magnificently. the image is a mixture of a character design from chicago’s dirk tiede and mixed media illustration (watercolor and pencil) from ohio’s jesse ewing. dirk is an amazing cartoonist, and jesse is one of my favorite illustrators anywhere in the country. he has an unbelievable range and a solemn sadness to his work that is subtle, but unmistakable. i was thrilled to finally start mixing illustators in a way that made their work more surprising.

2) su basically nuked all of the existing CSS and rewrote gizmodo from the ground up. there should be a fairly significant increase in the quality and consistency of page rendering across multiple browsers. the css should also come as close as su could muster to a reasonable validation (given the crazy shit he has to put up with for ad servers).

3) post typography is now larger, more clearly organized, and much easier to perceive quickly.

4) headlines are now set in typography native to systems. su and i are beginning to move away from web-standard typography as a primary typesetting strategy. there’s no real reason anymore since operating systems are now shipping with a wider range of typefaces installed. if you’re on windows xp, you should be seeing arial black, and if you’re on a mac, you should see futura. all the rest of you bitches get arial, verdana, or sans-serif. sorry. all i can do.

5) date headers are now easy-to-spot visual separators between days.

6) posts are easier to spot by themselves, and easier to mail along to friends.

7) the sidebar has a huge list of improvements which i won’t really go into since they affect every gawker site, but the most notable new feature is that gizmodo (and all other sites from here out) integrates a guide to the web powered by kinja.

next up: we’re launching a new defamer and gawker in the next few days. keep your eyes peeled. if you’re in the new york gossip market, i would guess this might be HUGE! FUCKING! NEWS! but probably nobody else will care. hope you like.

su and i relaunched a redesigned gawker and defamer for mr. d this morning.

defamer’s outward design doesn’t change much; everyone’s thought that one was right on the money from day one. under the hood, it’s a complete rebuild from the ground up.

gawker is a different story: both code and design needed to be gutted and rethought, so we cheerfully burned it to the ground and rebuilt it. the only thing left from the original is jason’s logotype, which i took care to preserve (it needed to be rebuilt to fit other media). everything else is brand new: typography, css, the works. much more pleasant to read now. the last version of gawker was, as was said as i was growing up in tennessee, “‘bout damned ugliest thang since homemade sin.” sounds less than delicious, right?

oh, and both sites now have shiny new guides… just like gizmodo’s. enjoy.

and it sucked. terrible storytelling. pretty, though. catch a matinee if you’re curious.

it’s late and i’m weary from being so completely overworked. but i gotta tell you, i’m happy. there are interesting things going on in mine and su’s camp that will impact not only us in an immediate way, but the way a lot of us look at entertainment and publishing.

big media publishing and personal weblogging are going to coalesce soon in a project su and i are completing. on the surface, it’s not going to be different from other things many of us have already seen, but the inner workings—including the people—are going to shake a few things up in the publishing biz. and frankly, i can’t wait. watch this space.

over at design observer, jessica helfand dutifully analyzes (and kind-of deconstructs) scrapbooking in that weird, incredulous, alientated tone that professional designers are great at: “who are you to attempt a craft, with your little ribbons, and your little star-shaped stickers?” (it’s not that bad, but you know how sniffy designers can get. it’s like we’re genetically hardwired to walk through life with a just-smelled-something look on our faces.) her article’s a little judgemental in places, but clearly as a method to bait the comments. her tone is, for the most part, impartial.

but then check out the comments. designers: how bitchy must you be? scrapbooking makes a lot of sense. images are high currency in our culture, and cheap images are suddenly prevalent. why wouldn’t this happen now, and why would it represent any sort of threat to you and your taste levels?

my mother is a basketer and my father is a wood and metalworker—so i’ve always been surrounded by a craftsperson’s lifestyle. it’s not design per se, not in the way professional designers like to portray themselves. a craftsperson is, i believe, a true designer, but with a very narrow focus. they need to create an object that serves an immediate emotional and functional need. formally trained designers, on the other hand, choose to serve the emtional needs of a larger group of people, and for a longer amount of time (if they’re worth a crap, that is).

professional designers prefer to align themselves with the scientist or researcher—not the artist or craftsperson. but they also wring ther hands a lot about their own craft. it’s interesting that they do so, and then attack a true craft with a true, homegrown vernacular attached.

this story reminds me a lot of a video piece i saw at the chicago MCA a few years ago.

the piece was a black box—a black room—with opposing video projections, about 15 feet high each. on one wall, a muslim man sang prayer from a stage to an audience of men. lovely and moving.

after that was finished, a woman without a headscarf on the opposing projection, photographed and timed as if whe was staring at the man across from her, opened her mouth. instead of singing prayer, she screamed in pain. simultaneously gorgeous and pathetic. it was a complex form of protest, falling somewhere between screaming invective over a sacred text and self-flagellation.

the most powerful part of the moment was my role, as a viewer, trapped between enormous twin eruptions of emotion.

our copy of the incredibles got here the other day. i’ve watched it twice for fun, another couple of times to dissect it: stopping, rewinding, slow-motioning, zooming in, and fast forwarding. it’s a great movie for details. the scenes i found myself watching most closely were edna mode’s.

edna’s a big problem for almost every designer i’ve talked to. they swoon with admiration or they furrow their brows with outright hatred. sometimes they do both. edna’s an enormous problem for designey types.

edna causes a lot of conflict. on the one hand, she’s an embodiment of everything designers are embarrassed to admit to being: fickle, rude, judgmental, kind of homely, and with an unhealthy predeliction for black. on the other, she’s what every designer i know wants to be. edna has more of a sense of a self than any designer i’ve ever met. she’s completely aware of her aesthetic opinion, absolutely sure of its correctness. she’s quick to state her opinion or correct one that’s wrong.

what’s interesting about her character is that she is all of these things—the best and worst of a designer—but she’s also positioned in the plot as the catalyst for almost all the main characters. the characters must work with edna before they can face any real danger. edna is the preparatory step to conflict. she is their armor.

bob can’t fight without visiting her to have his suit repaired, and helen can’t find bob without edna’s assistance. she literally outfits the entire family with their outward expressions of self and togetherness. edna seems to be something of a portal of self-discovery, a way for the characters to arm themselves (literally and emotionally) to fight. that’s kind of a great way for a designer to be portrayed.

i really wish the country would leave the schiavos to deal with their pain privately. there’s obviously a lot of yelling coming from folks who’ve never had to make a decision this painful. a lot of tasteless, uninformed politicizing, too.

update, 10:46 pm never mind. finish your screaming and be quick about it, please.

inside this issue: italian hairdresser of madonna loves talking about hair. homosexual writer of books loves cock and cooking.

gorgeous faux-amateur retro-trash photography, crap paper, guys with great dicks, and smart writing on silly things. yes please, another. on sale in chicago at quimbys, which is kind of the one thing that keeps me from burning their dave eggers section to the ground.

(chicago’s a bookish town and i get that they need bookish heroes, but this eggers fanboy thing has gone too far. i kinda wanna sic dale peck on his clean-cut ass, just to see who exits the thunderdome.)

blame clothing makes a fetching t-shirt. they also make trucker caps which makes me go, “what the fuck, man, is this 2003?” but you know, the rest of their line is really nice. so i’ll turn a blind eye. i actually bought the gem pictured here.

this is sort of a genre of design i’ve always liked. it doesn’t really have to mean anything or have any underlying function, so i’m not sure if i should be calling it design. it’s more like to dada-influenced scrap collage, mixed up with graffitti culture. interestingly, this sort of street-influenced art rarely comes from the major cities—always smaller communities: minneapolis, grand rapids, columbus, kansas city. it makes me wonder if the culture which used to spring from major cities has sort of floated out to smaller areas via the internet. it’ make sense in real estate terms; artists head towards less developed areas.

fun stuff, and a pretty decent price for a fetchin’ little piece of wearable art. go do.