One fun byproduct of working in both film and design is that whenever I make a film it becomes a big design project, too. I get to design posters and flyers and websites and title cards in the exact ways that, for whatever reason, rarely pass muster with clients. Often those designs are the ones that result in the most positive feedback. A favorite comment of the many I received after posting and texting and emailing this flyer out was from a friend who replied with one word. “Wow.” I’m happy with it, too.

We’ve got a screening tomorrow at Gersh Park, should be a blast.

When people ask me where I’m from I’ve started saying “the Amtrak Northeast Regional.” And if that gets a laugh then I tag it with “Train 154.”

This Fall brought me to Newark, New Jersey, where I walked through Branch Brook Park nearly every day for a couple months during my fellowship at NJIT. Walking is the photographer’s secret weapon and so I moved and saw and snapped many times over.

There are six East Coast cities where I’ve lived for at least a couple months, most of those for a year or more:

Washington, DC – 10+ years
Baltimore, MD – a couple months
Newark, NJ – one semester, going on two
New York, NY – 15 years
Providence, RI – 4 years of college
Boston, MA – 10+ years

That doesn’t count the large number of times I’ve visited Philly, the many nights out carousing in Wilmington, countless beach trips to New Jersey, and at least a few nights in various cities in Connecticut. Demographers have given this entire region, which doubles as the spine of my life, a name worthy of its expanse — the Northeast megalopolis.

Unarmed is starting a big project called We. It’s been fun to use those walks as an excuse to launch it. More than that, it’s been fun to see another great East Coast city in all its colors.

Update — I wanted to try a coding project with AI, so I had Copilot build this interactive map of all the places I’ve lived. Took me three hours. Here’s the first prompt:

I’d like to create an interface that loads in a web browser. The interface has two parts, a frame holding a map on the top part and a bottom part that allows the user to move a slider from left to right. The slider has several hash marks indicating amounts of time, starting with 10 years on the left side and one week on the right. As the user moves the slider right, the map widens out and more dots appear on the map, highlighting places listed in a multidimensional array. Can you build this for me?

From there it was like a conversation and I would ask the AI to code whatever other idea I had. It was fun, if unsettling, to take a skill that’s taken me decades to (sort of) learn and then use a machine do it better and faster than I ever could. And it was fun remembering so much travel. The “U.S. Only” box is checked by default. Unchecking it is a great reminder of all the places I’ve been, and all the others I hope to visit someday. Don’t be shy – give it a whirl!

This year I spent 6 months working on an 8-part docuseries about the NBA Playoffs that just released on ESPN and ESPN+. (Wrote a pretty extensive post about it over on social media). What I’ll say here on the personal dot-com is that it felt great one night a couple weeks ago to sit in my favorite bar and the bartender Jamie had it on the TVs. At one point he dimmed the lights and turned the sound up. People clapped afterwards when my credit popped onscreen. One of those bucket list type things.

Here’s a map of the places I went:

As for the first photo – it was taken back in June. The Cs had just won it all and there I was standing in the locker room as a guy brushed past me carrying the Larry O’B. That and a million other stories we’ll have to share over a beer sometime.

Maybe this kaleidoscope of images can paint in a few more details:

The flight was to Ghana. The trip was to Kokrobité, a town just west of the capital Accra, and the Kokrobitey Institute, which was founded in the 90s and continues to be run by Renée Neblett – Auntie Renée – an irrepressible woman with the charm of a million charmers, and the style to match.

My goal for the three weeks at the Institute – my first artist residency – was to produce an editorial photo shoot for Unarmed. I gave a lecture, mentored young creatives on the staff, and spent the rest of the time dancing with the bustle of a small slice of Ghana.

The Kokrobitey campus is filled with buildings designed by the celebrated architect Alero Olympio, who died in 2005 and whose pioneering use of natural materials pervades even the Institute’s new construction. I learned about laterite bricks, which can be made from local soil, and about their advantages in construction vs. concrete.

The Institute’s campus lets out to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s easy to get lost in thought attempting to grasp the incomprehensible horrors associated with its crossing by Africans on their way to America. And Ghana is its own thriving, obstreperous place right now, demanding thought, comment, engagement. There were too many tastes, smells, and moments to list why they were remarkable – such as when I got a burn and someone stepped out into the courtyard, snapped off a stalk of aloe, cracked it open, and handed it to me for my wound.

The campus is a serene paradise. The challenge is to use the space it provides to produce creative work. In several trips to Accra I gained an appreciation for the rhythm of the place, its hustle. The shoot would need to have spark. It would be better to cast models from the street, to shoot in different locations. And could we find some ballplayers? A motorcycle?

Although I consider myself dangerous with a camera in my hands, it was important for me to hire a Ghanaian photographer. Morris Frimpong and I hit it off right away. And over the course of several meetings we discussed locations for the shoot, casting, lens choices, time of day. One of my first times as the client. Then we went out and did the shoot. Morris delivered and I couldn’t be more proud of the images.

My one regret from the trip was not printing enough of these books.

Nearly a year has passed since I returned. Unarmed has grown. One of the layouts has a heading that is both a command and a cooing voice in one’s ear: Return to the Port of No Return.

—
Unarmed presents: Inna Ghana.   Creative Director: Raafi Rivero.
Photos by Morris Frimpong. Photo Assistant: Abdul-Wasiu Ayariga. Models: Caleb, Rahim, Blinkss, Humble King, Star. All models were paid. Jerseys manufactured by Shirts & Skins. Special Thanks to Renée Neblett & Marita Rivero. Editorial produced with the generous support of the Kokrobitey Institute.

The heartbreaking story of Tyre Nichols had me clenched up all week. I wrote a more fulsome post about his life and what inspired the design elsewhere. Perhaps one day I’ll do some writing about the value skateboarding has had in my life. Tyre was an excellent skater.

The We. logo above is something that’s been gestating for a couple years. I’ve written before about the fundamentally reactive nature of Unarmed. If you’re designing a jersey it means something bad happened. Developing and spreading a visual language that represents the core ingredient in this project – love – is perhaps the way to be proactive.

If you look closely, the shape of the “W” might even look like a person with their hands up. But if it doesn’t, well, wouldn’t that be better anyway?

Technically speaking the We. logo debuted in Boston back in September 2021 when I did a wild posting there with my friend Lalithra. The QR-code (seen in the second pic) takes you to we.unarmed.co. I hardly posted any images at the time. It’s always gratifying to discover that people post the designs on their feeds, have conversations about them.

A few years ago I got into the habit of checking the NBA box scores on my phone right before bed. Mainly on ESPN and nba.com but sometimes right in Google. Then on other sites, lots of sites. And while most places do an OK-enough job acting as portals to other basketball-related stuff, the part I came for – the box scores – tended to be hard to navigate and read.

It’s 30 lines of data, I thought, how tough could it be?

Then I spent about a year working on nbaboxscores.com. Well, before that I snapped awake from a stone sleep at 2 a.m. one night and thought, if the URL is available, I’ll do it myself! Yes, I was quite literally losing sleep over the state of box scores on the internet.

So this is the part where our trusty narrator, Werner Herzog, comes in with his signature baritone and says, “human beings are essentially unknowable. And stupid.”

Although I love designing things, as a coder I’m basically like one of those people who gets booted from The Great British Bake Off in the second week: all heart, and maybe even a couple good ideas. But my moon cake is slumping to one side. And that’s just not gonna fly in a real kitchen.

A functional version of the site was running for most of last season. And a good deal of the look got dialed in during those first few months. Since then I’ve honed a million details on both the front- and back-end that, in the aggregate, I hope make all the difference. The images below plot some of the journey from flat data coming out of an API to a dimensional thing that you can hold in your hand. Each one of these steps cost me blood.

A shortcoming of the current design is that I haven’t figured out a satisfying way to display the data on wide screens – it’s optimized for phones and narrow columns. Just like the first box scores, in agate type on newsprint, darkening the thumbs of eager sports fans everywhere. Perhaps one day I’ll make a “newspaper mode” that pushes this idea further.

For today, there’s a website that’s pretty good. You can read the player’s whole name, for instance, which solves the dreaded “J. Green” and “D. Wade” problems of 2021. The first view focuses on points, rebounds, and assists. And if engaged, the all-stats mode persists throughout the visit for people who prefer to see the whole line. There are team nicknames, funny animations. But not too many, I swear.

Months before starting this project, I struck up a conversation with guy and his girlfriend at a Red Sox game. He had a scorepad and notebook and told me he’d been to almost all 30 MLB ballparks, that he keeps score whenever he’s at a game. He showed me a bit of his notebook. There were sketches of the parks in there, hand-drawn team logos. Not just scores, not just numbers.

Sports are fun. They should be fun to watch, fun to play, and fun to browse on the web.

So about that. The most original feature comes when you tap on a player’s name. The site enters an app-like mode that resembles a player card and allows the visitor to swipe through the roster. The interaction isn’t new – dating apps have popularized the act of swiping through people on your phone. And kids have been swiping through stacks of player cards for generations. But I’m not aware of another sports site that displays data in this way. And there’s nothing quite like performing a Joe Pesci “I got no more use for this guy” flick to get back to the full roster.

Maybe you go back to look at another player. And then.

The big takeaway, I guess, is that working with data is hard. There are 400 human beings who behave in measurable yet unpredictable ways. If one of them happens to be named Antetokounmpo then he’ll break down your layout just like a weak contest on a Tuesday night in Detroit. BANG! The thing is, there are two guys named Antetokounmpo, one named Gilgeuous-Alexander, and there’s even a guy whose first name is Karl-Anthony. The data changes throughout the night. Some games end before others start. And the last games end after midnight.

If I were designing the About page of a website, for instance, I could just throw a couple ems of margin on that Antetokounmpo and call it a day – make it into a whole scene. Celebrate each of the 13 letters with its own birthday party. The fact that the box score gives you no quarter means you have to design within a tighter expressive range. To use a sports metaphor, you’d better be good at playing defense.

There are times when the site counts how many letters are in a name and scales the text down to fit. And there are other times when a line break is just fine. This isn’t a newspaper – digital interfaces give us infinite vertical space. And yet, the layout should strive to remain terse. NBA Box Scores is nothing if not an opinionated view of what should and should not be in a digital box score, over 100 years after we invented the damn things.

None of these choices were obvious when I started working on this project 15 months ago. You just have to feel your way through them, one broken layout at a time.

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’

 

“That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

There are visual moments within the site that I’m proud of, but, mainly, the look is about not getting in the way of the data. The design of NBA Box Scores is all about fetching data at the right time. Which data to save for a little bit and which data to save forever. Which data implies that a guy never got off the bench and which data proves that his jumper is wet. Then, finally, making it look cool, which is the one thing out of all these I actually know how to do.

Working on this project has reminded me how fun it is to learn. In this case I learned a good bit of SvelteKit and modern practices in web design. And I learned to watch the games a little closer, even as the data they produced logged to the terminal.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll do the other sports next.

My father Askia Muhammad died a few months ago and it’s been hard to figure out what to say here about it. We weren’t always close. We were close in our own way. I loved him dearly.

Lord willing and the creek don’t rise – I’ll see you here again next week.

That was my father’s sign-off for over 40 years on the radio. Rest easy, Pops.

These photos were captured a year ago in and around Santa Fe, NM. Seeing the sun (or moon!) so low on the horizon was a rare sight in my previously urban existence. These next pics were taken while hiking with my friends Eric and Emily, who nursed me through a shoulder injury and opened the door to a place I hope to visit again.