General Projects

This blog is over here now. Eventually I’ll have this page redirect appropriately.

Given Milton Glaser’s reputation as a champion of ethics in design, I wonder how he feels about this month’s issue of PRINT. The cover features a massive illustration by the iconic designer, overlayed with the headline “30 Design Superstars — Who has the power and who’s on the way up?” How exciting!

Leaf through its pages, though, and you realize there’s no such article in the magazine. Yes, there are probably 30 designers in the issue if you felt like counting, and yes they’re probably on the way up, but as near as I can tell, that’s the extent of the tie-in.

Did anyone else feel bamboozled by this?

While I understand it’s probably hard to push Designer Tote Bags off the rack, and I’m sure sales are dwindling, as a big fan of PRINT, I hope this isn’t the start of an editorial push which sacrifices common decency for sales.

(I’d also like to note that their new Designer Couples feature is frustratingly similar to The Strange Attractor’s wonderful ongoing Creative Couples series.)

See the rest of them.

For the first 6 months of its development, Lookwork was called Feast. This was one of the initial logos that I eventually let go.

American Trademarks, a new book of historical logos, has just been released. I was asked by the books editors, Eric Baker and Tyler Blik, to contribute as one of a handful of contemporary designers whose work would be intermingled throughout.

The book is a repackaging of a series of books that Baker and Blik put out back in the 80s. I’m not exaggerating when I say that they were as formative to my development as a designer as any other single resource. To be included in this repackaging amongst such an esteemed list of designers is easily the biggest professional compliment of my career thus far.

Pretty proud of this one. Good stuff.

(Big high-five to Draplin, the other young buck in the lineup.)

If you sell coffee as a commodity, it’s worth 2 cents a cup. If you sell it as a good, it’s worth 25 cents a cup. If you sell it as a service it’s worth $1.00 a cup. If you sell it as an experience, it’s $5.00 a cup. A 250:1 difference between commodity and experience.

The rest of this post isn’t terribly relevant unless you’re interested in affiliate marketing, but that first paragraph really hits home.

After just two weeks on the market, the self-published new book from the hardest working couple in the business, has brought in over $20,000 in sales. (They recently mentioned some of their sales quantities, so its just a matter of doing the math.)

Flaunt, which addresses best-practices and inspiration in portfolio design, cuts to the heart of the insecurities of every student designer out there. The focus is brilliant, I would have killed for this book when I graduated. Given that as many as 40,000 design students are pouring into the market annually, I can only imagine that Flaunt will be a best-seller for years to come.

Congratulations to both Armin and Bryony.

I believe that a publisher’s imprint means something, and that if readers paid more attention to the publisher of the books they buy, their chances of being disappointed would be infinitely less.

I believe that good books should be well made, and I try to give every book I publish a format that is distinctive and attractive.

I believe that I have never unknowingly published an unworthy book.

I believe that a publisher has a moral as well as a commercial obligation to his authors to try in every way to promote the sales of their books, to keep them in print, and to enhance his author’s prestige.

I believe that a review by an incompetent critic is a sin against the author, the book, the publisher, and the publication in which the review appears.

I believe that the basic need of the book business is not Madison Avenue ballyhoo, but more booksellers who love and understand books and who can communicate their enthusiasm to a waiting audience.

I believe that magazines, movies, television, and radio will never replace good books.

— Alfred A Knopf, 1957

Wonderfully earnest and relevant.

The volcano is from the Filipino Infantry Regiment.
More details here

The problem with building a portfolio of your own work is that you’re being asked to to show off work that you’re almost entirely embarrassed of.

I recently got hired to design the portfolio of a fairly well known design firm. I’m really looking forward to working on it. All the challenges of building and laying out an attractive, minimal, image-based presentation, with none of the ego involved.

All that to say, I’ve got a new site. It aint’t much but I’ll call it home for at least a little while.

At one point, Hawke recalled how, when he worked with Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2006, he’d stare at Hoffman and wonder, Why you? They’d known each other back when they were in their twenties, and Hoffman was a script-reader at auditions and Hawke was a movie star. Now Hoffman is arguably his generation’s greatest actor. And Hawke wanted to know: Why?

“It’s been harder for Phil than it was for me. That’s what’s made him so great,” Hawke says. “Playing smaller parts. Doing two scenes in a movie. And all those years that Phil’s doing that, I’m off doing White Fang and I’m getting paid and girls are asking me to sign their pictures. And I’m taking it for granted that I’m allotted this slot. Working with Phil, I realized I needed to work harder.”

Read the full article at NY Mag.

Spent the day at Boston’s Museum of Science. They have a permanent installation regarding visual representations of mathematical principals. Highly recommended. I only took one photo for whatever reason, but it’s a good one.

Nebojsa Cvetkovic has a blog of sketches. Most everything in it is stupidly interesting. The subtle cultural commentaries and faux-logos just kill me.

For what it’s worth, that last post about PTMK was both petty and poorly worded. Going to try and make sure that doesn’t happen again.

You Work For Them just announced their new Book Archive, a compendium of all the books they used to sell. Beyond it being a great resource for future indulgences, I am doubly interested by YWFT’s intentions to profit off the site. Each section page has a grid-breaking ad for their stock site, while each item page features not only an Amazon Associate referral link to buy the book, but an AdSense ad at the bottom.

The reason this is of interest to me is that there are direct parallels with my own Book Cover Archive, wherein we feature advertising from Fusion Ads on every page, and each cover has an optional link to Amazon which includes our referral code, (note that we’ve made about $100 off Amazon since the site’s launch a year ago, haha. I’d tell you how much we make off Fusion but I think that would piss them off.)

The big question for me is audience perception. The Book Cover Archive, and to a lesser degree YWFT’s Book Archive, is meant as a charitable resource. It is a collection of other people’s work meant to assist and inform other designers, so I’ve always felt odd about trying to profit off it. Yes I spend a fair amount of time “curating” the site (mostly saying “no”), and yes a good deal of time went into building it in the first place, but it is ultimately a showcase of the work of my betters, through which I am now making a small stipend.

Does the advertising taint the experience?

Is the advertising understandable?

This question has direct connotations for my new, unannounced service, as well. (Between the Cover Archive, Svpply, and this new one, I seem to enjoy working with other people’s stuff.)

So when confronted with the other Archive this morning, it was refreshing to note that while I was a bit put off by the ads, I didn’t blame them. It seemed like a logical decision to me. It is a valuable resource and only in the digital Land of the Free would we expect that to be completely non-funded. Even libraries are supported through our tax dollars.

If the three or four of you who actually read my blog catch this post, what are your thoughts on this? How do you feel about people making money off the display of other people’s work online? We all know hosting and bandwidth are a non-cost (up to a certain point), so does it rub you the wrong way?

PTMK is a new collective (?) design studio out in Austin. Absolutely fantastic work, one of the more interesting studio launches I’ve seen in a while, but I’ve never encountered a more unusable website. I can’t use my scrollwheel without the site diving into detail shots of a single row, and if I use my mouse to manually scroll up and down, I have to keep jumping from the browser scroll to the custom bars on each row. It’s so bad I think I’ve only gotten through about half their work before I inevitably close the window out of sheer annoyance.

Failed direction for a new logo (more on this later).
(Just in case the reference isn’t clear)

Looking at my news feed this morning on Facebook, I noticed that my sister-in-law had joined the “WE’RE AGAINST THE 4.99 A MONTH CHARGE FOR FACEBOOK FROM JUNE 30TH 2010” group. Surprised that I hadn’t heard anything about this new charge, I clicked through to find out what it was all about. The group has no content other than its title and a reference to an external URL (which I won’t be linking to).

The website it links to is the worst kind of hackneyed malware (*edit – see comments below). The background is a repeating image of some nasty porn, and Chrome informed me that the site was trying to upload 25 separate items to my hard drive. It ultimately crashed my browser.

Google yields no results for “Facebook 4.99” or “Facebook June 30th” other than this one instance. The group has 133,000 members. 133,000! Either I’m misunderstanding something, or over a hundred thousand people joined a social group without doing any investigation whatsoever. An amazing example of social hackery.

(Here’s a screenshot, since I’m sure Facebook will take it down soon enough.)