"He's chimping during the national anthem"
Dean Allen found the name for it – Chimping. I got a kick out of this video describing chimping.
Chimping is a term used in digital photography (especially when using a digital single-lens reflex camera) to describe the habit of checking every photo on the on-camera display (LCD) immediately after capture.
From Wikipedia
Failed experiments in wayfinding
I saw this book on the shelf at Housing Works yesterday. It’s a good title, but poetry totally makes for poor wayfinding systems.
What awesome type
Marlene came over the other day and brought a beautiful Mexican architecture book along with her. It was published in the 60s. She bought it in a second-hand book store in Mexico City if I recall correctly. The type throughout has this archetypal 60s Mexico feel.
Thanksgiving in Glamis, CA
The day before this past Thanksgiving (2007), I spent the morning in Glamis, CA.
Thanksgiving weekend in Glamis is crazy – what with hundreds of thousands of people descending on the dunes, setting up impromptu camps (dry camps – ie. no water, sewer hookups, or electrical outlets. The only things the government supplies are pit toilets and a few porta-potties.) and riding around on off-road vehicles.
Effort and the new bold typography
Super heavy, geometric and counterless (or nearly counterless) type is everywhere these days. I was reading this interview yesterday with Wim Crouwel in which he spoke about the type in his poster Hiroshima from 1957.
Q: If you didn’t know that, you might think that it was conceived on the basis of a woodcut. Real printmakers, such as M C Escher, also did this.
A: Yes, of course, woodcut artists did the same thing, a black pane with fine lines. But I did not start out with black, adding white lines. I went about it the other way around. It was absolutely the construction of the letter itself that caused it to be spaced so tightly. It became a closed block, as it were. I wanted a word image that was itself very heavy and threatening. I had a sort of monolith in my head, in which the white had as humble a role as possible, which is why I chose this form, which would work from a distance as a black, total form, with those scorched chimneys rising up out of it.
Crouwel makes some interesting points (tho he loses me at “scorched chimneys”), but I actually found the question by Kees Broos a bit more interesting. I have dabbled a bit in woodcut recently. The thing I am quickly realizing is that carving into a block of wood takes significant effort; the fact of that exertion (a time as well as physical commitment) pushes you towards a sort of minimal expression – trying to get at what you are trying to get at with the least amount of work (actually not unlike programming).
It’s a bit different in Crouwel’s case, obviously (he says so himself), but the type forms produced by woodcut printmakers back in the day must have been at least partially influenced by this desire to minimize effort while working in the medium – something which is a bit lost in newer incarnations of bold, geometric type, I reckon.
The bird can stand again
I received this wooden sculpture as a gift while in France two summers back.
It had obviously been exposed to the elements for some time before coming into my possession. When I got it, the base was splitting and the sculpture couldn’t stand upright on its own (I am assuming that it could at one point stand since the paint on the surfaces that would theoretically face the sun is faded whereas the other surfaces’ paint is still crisp—I may at some point repaint it).
So I didn’t figure I could un-warp the wood, but I could adjust the alignment of the sculpture’s axis by sawing through the base.
Uh. And that’s what I did yesterday evening.
How to fix Marcel Breuer's Wassily Chair
If you ever find a torn apart, but otherwise dignified Wassily Chair on the street, don’t call Knoll or the leather worker you know in Greenpoint.
Instead, take another chair – in this case a steel seat from the same period, but fabricated initially for a decidedly less rarefied setting (a French motorcycle factory) – and place it inside the Wassily.
Farmland in Brawley
I recently spent some time driving through the Imperial Valley here in California. I took a lot of photos during the trip and visited some strange and interesting places including the sand dunes in Glamis, Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain, and Bombay Beach on the shores of the Salton Sea.
Here are some of the first shots I had processed. These are just a few takes from a farm tour I had in Brawley with Larry, a farmer and family friend.
The scans came out exceedingly poorly so I will post more when I rescan them.
Lovetastic on Command Shift 3
Ok, at best, I am ambivalent about the premise from which CommandShift3 is built (Hot or Not for websites, with no attention paid to content), but I’d reserve the same gripes for the whole Hot or Not idea if not for the fact that nobody really makes the mistake to think that Hot or Not actually provides any kind of new or useful perspective on much of anything (it’s a pageview generating machine).
That being said, Lovetastic, a gay personals site I worked on this year for Norbauer Partners, has been getting really positive marks at CommandShift3. Right now, it is rated second overall among sites tagged dating and third among sites tagged networking (it’s likely that “social networking” was split into two tags for some reason; but Lovetastic is in 12th for “social” sites). It has “won” 76% of its “battles” (screenshots of two sites are compared and voted on).
So what does this all tell us. Pretty much nothing. I am glad folks are responding well to the design at first glance, but a site’s real success (particularly for social web apps) depends on how people come to inhabit that site’s functional space—aesthetics obviously inform this, but information architecture, usability, content, the quality of the community and myriad other elements play just as important a role. The design should facilitate all these other (sometimes nuanced) attributes and I doubt that that comes across on CommandShift3; reducing complex judgements to binary choices based on incomplete information seems to work in American politics but these kind of results shouldn’t be taken as remotely authoritative in a field as important as web design.
Anyhow. It’s worth noting that Lovetastic’s mission relates to this fairly directly.
The tallest flagpole in Calipatria
The ‘World’s tallest flagpole’ stands in Calipatria, CA, or so the sign at the flagpole’s base says [image of the sign after the jump]. At 184 feet tall, though, the flagpole is dwarfed by poles in Aqaba, Jordan (400 feet) and even in Sheboygan, Wisconsin by the Acuity Insurance Flag (338 feet; tallest in the US).
The crazy thing is that the Calipatria flagpole stands 184 feet tall and its top is at sea level. Calipatria is in fact the lowest city in the Western Hemisphere and likely better known as home to the Calipatria State Prison.
@the Rose Bowl
I caught a UCLA football game at the Rose Bowl the Saturday after Thanksgiving with my dad. My cousin, Justin, plays for the Bruins and his folks were nice enough to get us great seats.
Here are some photos from that afternoon, my first at the Rose Bowl.
What an awesome chair
My mom found this chair in a flea market in Santa Monica a while back. Leather straps, iron and wood in good proportion with one another. The chair may not look it immediately, but the chair is exceedingly comfortable. I haven’t ever seen another like it.
Ey Ar Tee
While visiting with friends at their house, you excuse yourself to the restroom. You rest. You go to wash your hands afterwards and, while looking in the mirror, you see the artwork on the wall above the john (previously illegible) reflected. Pretty awesome.
Actually reminds me of the time I (inadvertently) cut off a motorist while driving in Los Angeles and looked back at him in my rear-view mirror (he had extended his middle finger) and noticed his license plate:
TIHZTA3
