blech,

i felt like this today.













I spent the day working on my new portfolio site. it's slow-go, especially since i tried to decrease the cheating factor this time by "coding" in dreamweaver, rather than just mapping buttons onto a big photoshopped layout... but it kept acting up so i gave up. or gave in, however you might want to look at it. it would be nice if i could figure out the best way to preserve flexibility and efficacy in all of this. my perfectionism is coming out everytime i have to move something around or resize an image and that's why this has been taking so long.

but the basic site looks like this so far:
















I kinda stole the concept from a logo i saw. I'm wondering now whether it's too colorful.... whether it will just make all my projects look alternately drab or gaudy. hmm. yeah, and changing the colors now, without css, will result in me needing to do every single page over again. boo.

i miss the subway

nyc subway - 1964

nyc subway - 1972


designed by Massimo Vignelli

ny subway cover - 1972

from design observer:

"In 1968, Unimark International was commissioned to design a sign system for the subways, and out of this chaos came order. Two Unimark designers, Bob Noorda and Massimo Vignelli, developed a signage plan based on a simple principle: deliver the necessary information at the point of decision, never before, never after. [...] Out with the complicated tangle of geographically accurate train routes. No more messy angles. Instead, train lines would run at 45 and 90 angles only. Each line was represented by a color. Each stop represented by a dot. What could be simpler?"

nyc subway - 2005

nyc subway -- 2007

nyc subway - blank template!


this makes me happy. and terrified.

this is for laura

mugs.

pantone-mug

memo mugs

here's a poster by sagmeister, where the image is made with coffee cups (kinda related to mugs, right?) in different "cream gradients"

paper art

brian dettmer - log

brian dettmer - eye's ornament

brian dettmer - the physiological basis of medical practice

peter callesen - little erected ruin

peter callesen - the short distance between time and shadow

jen stark - coriolis effect

jen stark - cylinder

jen stark - circle

jen stark - triangle

cara_barer

jack wang thesis poster

jack wang thesis poster detail

hey andreas, i did these with quickrpickr and it works well. another benefit: it makes me much more attentive to my flickr stuff.

stories from the field

andreas entered a competition to create a logo for the UN film festival. the festival was themed "stories from the field."

















here are other entries i thought were nice:

a quickr pickr post

catching up. archives. worries.

i'm always too optimistic about my productivity. i had big plans for this, my last winter vacation. my visions encompassed a new online portfolio, scores of job applications, screenprinting, reading through seven or so books on rhizomes, complexity theory, and geophilosophy, and catching up on blogging.

but everything is getting bogged down because i forgot how much time i waste everyday just being around all my possessions. it feels so...pleasant and borderline nostalgic to be in the room that led me through high school and to have the wonderful chore of going through all the things that have fallen into disorganization while i've been gone the past few years.

magazines. i've been reading all the magazines that had continued to come in my absence. and rereading the ones that deserve it, several years after their publications. i have been disastrously trying to sort through my closet, which-- via my mother's good intentions-- has become bloated through the store-closing sales of a local department store and is now uncomfortably swollen with clothes and accessories. and i spend about fifteen minutes each morning repositioning the tom clancy hardcovers that are holding up my broken bed. i detangle necklaces for an hour and don't notice that time has passed.

in short, my vacation has been distracted with my own brand of domesticity. i am about fed up with it, but as soon as i feel productivity coming on again, a carful of family members roll up from new jersey. i'm happy to see them and to be in a household that feels like it has something to do every day, but all the same, this bodes poorly for my portfolio etc.

part of my hesitancy, though, is rooted in a bizarre ideological paralysis i'm having about how to organize myself and my thoughts. before leaving stanford for birmingham, i arrived in andreas's loft space, flustered, near-militant, and demanded that he sit down and figure out how i was going to archive my life.

with blogging, flickr, facebook, all the various files and formats on my computer, on my external hard drive, the logbooks that keep multiplying, the files of clippings that have yet to make it into the logbooks.... we have all these methods of making, keeping, and storing things, but i feel like i'm engaging all these archives without an idea of what kind of work i want them to do for me in the future.

the way i see it, the archive has been based on "retrieval," or being able to go back and find something later. but how often do we go back and look for something specific? sites like flickr or digg are really good at sharing things between lots of people in a given slice of time, but will the site with the most diggs on a monday even matter the next friday? when will anyone ever go looking back for that stuff? ...it comes down to "relevance" and what that means in a cultural semantic. right now, time and keywords determine relevance, but should we be searching by "relevance" at all?

clearly, we don't yet have criteria for what is "good," "useful," and "important" in the storing and organizing of information. i t would be nice if data could be informative in real-time, all the time. because no matter how good or thorough your tagging is, tagging only contextualizes things with that capcity that you, the user, are capable of tagging it in a given moment in time. i guess i want my archive to be better than i am at organizing and figuring out the potential in things. i want it to be able to draw connections that i might not be able to see.

so... all this to say: i'm not doing so well with blogging. i don't post often enough and certainly don't always post the things that i really should be archiving/sharing. sometimes it feels like too much of a hassle to scan something, so i won't blog it at all. and sometimes i feel a weird guilt about writing too much or else putting up too many images. and i am definitely deterred from posting about something if it seems "achronological." which is stupid, especially, since i think that chronology can be the most retarded organization-crutch to fall back on.

anyways. i shall be blogging haphazardly since i don't have any better ways of doing things. quickrpickr will help, i think. its a flickr app that will help me put images up better. and i'm going to try to keep up my flickr stuff better. captions? tags? who knows. all that stuff annoys me but it's probably a good idea. archiving seems to be a hard business.

any suggestions?

rain

have you ever felt that rain is just one big negative feedback loop?

when it's raining, people are generally upset at the absence of sun. but they have to go out regardless, so they exit their residence and quickly discover (if they are a stanford student, anyway,) that they cannot bike due to the rain. ultimately, rain causes people to be later than they would otherwise be-- and so lateness, in this case, can be viewed as a negative feedback signal that tells you "it's raining."

but then, since you can't bike, you're walking to class. your reduced speed means you're spending even more time out in the rain, despite the fact that you dislike rain more than you dislike sun and thus, would rather spend less time outdoors when it's raining.

as you're walking, your shoes kick up water and your pants drag a little on the ground. you get wet, and because of water cohesion, your pants get wetter and wetter as the water absorbs upwards. more time spent outdoors (which you don't want to be spending anyway), means wetter pants.

and then, since your pants are soaking up more and more water, they're increasingly heavy. which means that they drag more and pick up water at a much faster rate.

by the time you finally get inside, your pants legs are so wet, that it's almost more irritating to be indoors than to be outdoors. which means that rain has spoiled even the initial positive option: that one would prefer indoors to outdoors.

and of course, you and everyone else have tracked the outdoors into the indoors, which means that all this negative feedback has actually changed the system and deteriorated it. things are slippery, dangerous, and dirtier. wet umbrellas are annoying and everywhere. i can't think of a single thing that is positively introduced to the indoors on rainy days...



the point of all this is to say that there are a lot of systems out there that are modeled like this. computer/tech interfaces come to mind (i.e. error messages that just interrupt you to tell you, alarmingly, that things are wrong but not how to fix it). i think we all get to a point where we just accept it.

but wouldn't it be great if we were able to deal with systems like that and actually do something different and insightful? or at least avoid creating rainy day systems in the first place?

when did staples become so iconic?

saw this on nytimes book design review: a promo video for a novel, the gum thief, by douglas coupland.



question one: when did book releases start warranting youtube videos?
question two: since when did staples have such an iconic brand language?

just seeing the taupe-painted rafters of the ceiling in this video gave me that incredible sense of productive calm that i get every time i walk into a staples... (if anyone didn't know, i have a total office supply fetish.) plus, this video really illuminates the whole signage-as-brand thing that you see in these kind of large stores. those black signs with white type (helvetica, of course, but narrow? bold?)-- could this video be anywhere else?

bookshelves pt. 3

Fwis has published their second annual review of bookshelves on their covers blog.















a lectern attachment for the ikea billy shelf.



and here are some interesting "concept shelves," i guess














































































I like these as modular furniture that doesn't feel obligated to snap together or fasten in a modular way.
here's a detail of the colors on the insides:













































house-as-giant-bookshelf



















could be interpreted as either heavy-duty bookends or "books-to-go"

















i actually think that this would be great in action. say you were organizing your library by fiction vs. nonfiction, every time you picked up something or added something, you would have immediate feedback on the balance of your literary diet...














this is just cute.

my light.

(closed)
















(and opened)




















... and here's a video.



I started with the challenge of building a better desk lamp, with my main intuition being that I wanted something wall mounted and discrete to be more economical about space on a work surface. However, that quickly evolved into the question of what was important when it came to task lighting.

Why can't "task" be gratifying? Why can't it be stimulating? My lamp design evolved into a design challenge of bringing gratification to a useful, pragmatic object.


I took a lot of inspiration from things i'd seen recently:

1. the gratification from the changing colors of Michael Hayden's light installation at chicago o'hare airport.


























































2. the olafur eliasson exhibit at sfmoma:

the changing gradients of color...














and the transformation is built into the bridge entering the exhibit...



























(it's the same bridge... just uses polarized material that is silvery from one angle, i.e. entering, and brilliantly colored from the other, i.e. exiting.)






Some personal reflection (i need to get this down somewhere...):

Part of the assignment was to develop in an object a personal statement, i.e. a personal point of view on design and functionality. i was surprised to find that this did crystallize something for me... i was able to articulate four things, four words really, that were essential for me in designing this lamp. Gratification and stimulation were both part of that; contextual was another-- i'm obsessed with context and all the complex baggage that comes with it-- and the last word is still a bit unresolved... "dimensional" maybe? "enabling"? as words, none of those mean too much, i guess, but it's all part of... something more important. priorities. something that doesn't change about me-- not over time, space, or whatever else.

i felt-- amongst other presenters in my class-- that my design was ultimately about a sort of intellectualism. that it was a considered object. it was important to me that the lamp have a context. that it have use in a particular situation, but that the design itself was able to expand and empower that context-- to make it better, more compelling, or else to enable one to progress in some way. i think the other side to this is that it is all meant to be a part of someone's life, which is inherently complicated, emotional, variable, etc.

i like bridging the exercise of rationality with the tapping into something more human. and i think gratification is the right word for that, because unlike "pleasure," there is some sort of efficacy to gratification. something mental occurs in the user in order for an object to gratify, rather than just please. and yet gratification, like pleasure, inspires some degree of positive feedback, which is empowering and transformative if employed correctly. maybe it is all coming back to "transformative" and what a designer can transform. objects? experiences? expectations? societies?

well... today i'm a bit tired. but tomorrow, or soon thereafter, i will remember to post about rainy days/negative feedback systems, and i will put up my vision statement. which may help all of this make more sense.