October 2012 Articles

This summer, as I set out to visit six museums, I dreaded it, but then I’d have a sudden surge of happiness when I remembered that I would be able to bash them in this article. I like making fun of things because I like laughing. When you go to museums, you don’t get to laugh, unless it’s at the stupid paintings and how much they cost. The artist will put some blotches of paint on a canvas, give it some stupid name, and the painting will end up costing around $1 million. I don’t get it. Why do they do stuff like that?

This link has been posted in retrospect from a collection of articles I compiled in 2012 using the iOS app, Instapaper.

I might seem like a jack of all trades, but I’m really a specialist. I specialize in lettering, type design, and illustration–this is what I’m best at and is probably why you found my website in the first place. I find it strange that I get so many requests for web design–I went to school for graphic design, yes, but each sub-field of graphic design has its own set of problems, limitations, and guidelines.

Just as you wouldn’t expect any random person that owns Adobe illustrator to be able to draw a decorative letter from scratch, you can’t expect any print designer to be able to really and truly design for web. Web design is not print design, it’s a whole different and very complex animal. When a person encounters a book or brochure, they know how to use it. They look at the cover, they open the cover, and page by page they work their way to the end. Web design is, for the most part, not linear, and the way that people use and peruse the web changes constantly. To be a good web designer you must live and breathe the web. You have to pay attention to trends, read articles about best practices, essentially do whatever you can to stay relevant and current. If you don’t throw yourself head-first into the field, you end up making websites that feel “two years ago” or believing that Flash is still “The Next Big Thing”.

This link has been posted in retrospect from a collection of articles I compiled in 2012 using the iOS app, Instapaper.

It is The Future. You wake up at dawn and fumble on the bedstand for your (Google) Glass. Peering out at the world through transparent screens, what do you see?

If you pick up a book, do you see a biography of its author, an analysis of the chemical composition of its paper, or the share price for its publisher? Do you see a list of your friends who’ve read it or a selection of its best passages or a map of its locations or its resale price or nothing? The problem for Google’s brains, as it is for all brains, is choosing where to focus attention and computational power. As a Google-structured augmented reality comes closer to becoming a product-service combination you can buy, the particulars of how it will actually merge the of ine and online are starting to matter.