i’ll be on a panel at the how conference with armin from speak up and william from design observer. something about blogging and whether or not it’s “good for us.” i have no idea what that means. if you’d like to come heckle my work for gawker personally, please do.
in light of that, here’s me being a complete dick by calling ronald reagan a jackass at speak up—the day after he died. but i’ll be kind enough to not point out the silly shit my co-panelists have done in public. it’s all about the couth, people. all about the couth.
so, speaking of couth. toby of vivdblurry has decided to get all sniffy over an ex-blogger’s decision to persue a career in porn—which is a hilarious use of selective memory and morality. i mean, this is coming from a kid who occasionally does graphic dildo testing.
i was wondering about the nature of the person driven to design. it seems—based upon watching folks around me—that we’re a creepy breed. obsessive-compulsive and control-driven to one degree or another, every single one of us. i think there’s a real spectrum of minds at work there. my guess is that those of us who are more compulsive tend towards emotional translation of information: pattern, color, style. the decorative, emotional end of things. those of us who are more obsessive tend towards the “library” end of design—the designer who considers themselves to be a rational communicator rather than an emotional expresser of information. a cataloguer.
i kind of remember laurie and scott makela’s partnership being a good example of that sort of spectrum. laurie’s work seemed very formal, and scott’s was just everywhere. the two together made a ton of sense.
wonder if there’s any ground to that line of thought. i’m not interested in defining design as either communication or emotion—that argument gets shitty every time, and all it really does is polarize people. i believe that both are valid trains of thought, and that both can be utilized by the same person without any real soul-sacrificing action going on. i am, however, interested in the emotionally-charged rift that continually crops up (and always has) around the two notions.
i’m also totally talking out of my ass. i haven’t done any real research on it yet—i want to see if i can find any psychologists who’ve been into the subject. just jotting down some things that keep occurring to me.
i know that it would be the easiest thing in the world to roll your eyes heavenward the moment i start bubbling happily over the virtues of teenagers. i understand that reaction—everyone knows a gay man is nothing if not a giant, hairy teenybopper.
teenagers are brilliant creatures. they are not quite children, not quite adults—they create intricate, lacelike social networks that inform the way they will interact with the rest of us as they go through their lives. they also communicate in more complex ways that an adult can. they adapt easier, they are fiercely tribal, and they therefore create prototypes of easily-identifiable social groups for future generations.
i love teenaged girls most of all because they are freaky communication powerhouses. if you think your design works well, stop thinking it. ask a group of four sixteen-year-old best friends to play with your work. they will improve it a thousandfold–and they’ll do it in a way that is at least a gazillion times cuter and more fun to deal with than you ever would.
and that is why i love ruth kikin-gil’s thesis. and i bet i would totally like her hair, too.
everyday art is a new project from automatic art and design which creates a new celebrity artist every hour. it’s as simple as uploading your work.
does this sort of thing have precedent, outside of your mom’s refrigerator? absolutely. the abolition/expansion of celebrity is soemthing several artists are working with. for instance, house of diehl did exactly this at fashion week 2005 in bryant park with their instant couture project.
this abolishes traditional notions of celebrity by removing the press corps and media from the celebrity’s construction. it is an expansion of celebrity by allowing virtually anyone to become one, and therefore more accurately showing the star’s position within the context of the rest of us.
everydayart’s proprietor, my friend chaz, says he is interested in expanding this project beyond the web and into a desktop gallery powered by the site.
so ten bucks says you can’t guess, based on the above image and this link, which website su and i are designing and building right now.
okay, you know what? craigslist MC’s are just not cool anymore. i mean it. the place used to be kind of sleazy, kind of desperate, and now it’s like this crappy myspace b-list hangout, which makes me go “ew” because everyone knows how grade z myspace gets. what gives?
also: everyone’s given up on hyping the shit out of tags, woo hoo. huge weight off my fucking back, seriously. oh wait, never mind.
as reported earlier, i’m going to be embarrassing myself on a panel at the how conference. i have no idea what we’re talking about, but if you’d like to come see me blinking like a quasar as i try to figure out what’s up, we’ll be somewhere in the hyatt on june 12th at noon, ostensibly talking about blogging. i’m kinda curious to see what happens here, considering i have no real idea what the general public thinks of online publishing.
and hey, you have no fucking idea how stressful it is when one of your primary clients hates the fuck out of the other one. in public, even.
so, sploid reaction roundup: 37 signals seems to sorta like it, which means i did an okay job. metafilter fucking hates it, which means i did a good job. and newsdesigner loved it—which means i nailed it. yay me.
i don’t know who this is, but i think he’s fancy. (via milan.)
so i’m such a reprehensible twat that i can’t even be bothered to point out when a close friend relaunches his own site, and therefore announces a major career shift. man, what a jerk, right?
le sigh.
jesse ewing owns and operates inkleaf studio from creston, ohio. his work is some of my favorite—i’ve commissioned him for two projects now. the first, an image of wonkette’s ana marie cox for her own site, is beautiful. here’s a sneak peek of su’s development. the second, an illustration of a character design for gizmodo, was nothing short of spectacular.
jesse’s voice is quintissentially american. his work is gracious and hardworking, a little sad, and casts a loving eye onto the common, the everyday, and the pastoral.
if you have the opportunity to commission him, i highly recommend his work. he works for the joy of his craft and will bring your work to life in ways you never expected.
i’ve posted this before, but it’s worth a re-tread. i wish all album art collections would give as much care as does the mystery parade’s collection of 4AD’s first twenty years. granted, 23 envelope’s magnificent body of work gives 4AD special currency other labels don’t have. but there are many classic album covers which will, very soon, be washed away as digital music replaces analogue.
ishkur is apparently a DJ, and a knowledgeable one at that. he’s put together a fairly comprehensive (and, oh god, so over-opinionated) roadmap to electronic music. everything in this guide is something that’s happened in contemporary nightclub culture. it’s a culture we’re all familiar with: a black box with bright lights and loud music inside. a few of us call that culture home.
ishkur’s knowlegdge of genres is amazing. i hope he keeps growing this catalog as styles evolve; it’s an important roadmap for a culture that rarely sees its origins.
i personally think electronic music’s growing beryond the bounds of this roadmap (as witnessed by the dance-punk aesthetic that seems to have sprung up over the last five years—best exemplified in out hud’s brilliant let us never speak of it again.). it’ll be interesting to see where dance culture ends up when 1990’s-flavored techno and electro die off a little more. i think the culture’s growing away from presets and self-conscious repetitiveness as artists become better able to gracefully handle technology.
