Jason Santa Maria

Hillman

2012-04-26T20:41:21+00:00

Hillman Curtis, artist, designer, filmmaker, Brooklynite, bicyclist, friend, and explorer passed away last week at the young age of 51. I put off writing about him because I couldn’t find the words. Everything I would try to write felt so insignificant for such a significant man. Thankfully, as is usually the case, I found my words among friends. The folks over at Happy Cog have collected some thoughts on Hillman and invited a few of us staff alumni to share too. Below is my contribution:

I followed Hillman’s work when I was first getting started in design. He stood out as a voice and style all his own; you could plainly see that this guy was in a whole different class. And after I had read his stunning book, MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer, I wanted to be just like him. If not for Hillman’s work, I wouldn’t be the designer I am today.

Later when I moved to NY I ended up living in the same neighborhood as Hillman. I’m honored to have counted myself among his friends, and further to have had the opportunity to collaborate on a few of his projects. I always looked forward to running into him on the street and talking at length about bikes and cameras and what we were each obsessed with at that moment. He was generous with his time and endlessly curious about bringing beauty to the world.

His influence will be felt for many years to come. I didn’t get to know him half as much as I wish, but even now I look up to him as a creative force, an inspiration, and as kind-hearted a guy as they come. He will be missed.

More on Hillman

The New York Times has a great piece on Hillman, and many individuals shared stories online too. If you’ve never seen it, or if you haven’t seen it in some time, please do have a look at Hillman’s work. This film is a great place to start.

Design Is a Job, by Mike Monteiro

2012-04-10T14:25:13+00:00

I’m very excited for our latest release from A Book Apart available today, Mike Monteiro’s Design Is a Job. I’ve been working in design a while now and good handbooks on how to do it right are few and far between.

Years ago, I read Norman Potter’s What Is a Designer, a thin yet surprisingly dense book that attempts to quantify this dear profession. There’s truth to be found there, but the language is terse. Perhaps it’s an effort to dissuade all but the most brave; if you get to the end and you still want to be a designer, you may have earned it. This industry can beat you down and offer little reprieve, and Potter asks that you take it on the chin and ask for more. If I’d read it when I was still in design school, I might have changed my major.

Thankfully, Mike’s book takes a different path. Rather than trying to scare you off, it nudges you forward and says “I’ve got your back.” From the book’s introduction:

So I wrote you a book. It has a spine and by the time you’re done reading so will you.

Our reviewers who’ve read it remarked they wish they’d had this book before starting out. I gladly count myself among them, but its impact is bigger than that. Mike provides solid advice without attempting to chart a mythical single course that works every time. He speaks from experience, but doesn’t preach. He lays out what’s worked and what hasn’t for him and what he’s learned along the way.

If you’re smart, you can see how these lessons apply to doing business on your own or with others, but also how damn easily these things extend themselves to dealing with other humans in general. And it really doesn’t matter whether you’re a designer or not, what’s laid out here is universal.

Books like this are rare, people don’t typically talk about how they do business. When they do, it’s usually a snoozefest or some sort of smarmy business book. This is practical, honest, earnest, and from the gut.

You can preview a chapter from the book over at A List Apart, or see the talk that started it all, Mike Monteiro’s “Fuck You, Pay Me.”

I do wish I had this book when I started out, but hell, I’ve got it now and I’ve got the spine to show for it. Get your spine today.

Comic Books on the iPad

2012-04-03T16:36:20+00:00

A page from Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener’s awesome Atomic Robo.

I’ve been reading comic books since I was a kid, and now the new iPad has quickly become my primary means for reading them. Comics are one of the few printed formats whose interaction may have actually improved (or at the least didn’t diminish) when they moved to the iPad.

The de facto standard for digital comics is the app Comixology — whose technology is also licensed by standalone apps from the big publishers. It’s available for the iPhone and iPad (plus Andoid and Kindle Fire, but I haven’t tried those). Panelfly is another app that’s been around for a while, but the newly teased interface on the site is only available on the Galaxy Tab (the one in the iOS App Store is still the old interface), and they’ve been largely silent about when the release might happen.

Regardless, Comixology seems to have the lionshare of content from all the big publishers, with many titles being released the same day as print (like The Walking Dead).

With the new iPad’s crazy screen, reading a fully zoomed-out page is now comfortable because all of the text is crisp and readable. The interface also provides a smart panel-by-panel zoom that can be great for some books. This view can be fun because you actually get surprised when the story unfolds (rather than seeing something you haven’t read yet out of the corner of your eye).

Moar Better

Comixology may be the best comics app out there, but there’s always room for improvement. Some of the typical interactions I’m used to in other services leave me wanting with Comixology. It has the potential to be even more awesome than it is now, and these are a few of my humble desires from it in the future:

Better relevance: Surfacing relevant titles based on my tastes or purchases would be really helpful for discovery. The current system is highly focused on what’s new, but there are loads of great titles from the past waiting to be discovered.
Better alerts: The current system uses the iOS notifications to alert you (if you opted into alerts for a particular title), but these are easily missed or dismissed by mistake. I’d love to be able to have a location to keep track of these in the app so that I can act on them at my leisure. Also, the ability to opt into alerts for not just titles, but anything new from writers, artists, characters, and more.
Wishlists: Sometimes you see stuff you don’t want to buy right now.
Friends and what they’re reading: Comics have always been a very social thing for me. I read some, talk about them with others, and we share mutual recommendations for other comics.
User lists: I’d love to curate my favorite comics and storylines, or even stories based around themes into lists. And I’d really love to see other users’ lists of the same. Just think, “Best origin stories”, “Best one-shots”, and more.
Lending library: It’s probably really difficult, for both technical and legal reasons, but like I said above, comics can be really social. We started a comics club in the studio for just this purpose where we could lend each other stuff we liked. I’d even pay a monthly subscription fee to offset things.

Most of these things are straightforward patterns we’ve seen in services for years now. I don’t mean to belittle the effort it would take to make them, I just mean we may not need to reinvent the wheel either.

Wither Comic Book Stores?

I hate the idea of taking money away from the local comic shop. But then again, my local comic shop already closed a year ago, while I was still a frequent patron.

If a particular book is important to me, or leaves a lasting impression, I will still buy it in print. If for no other reason than to keep it closer to me for years to come.

But the advent of reading more comics on the iPad is saving my already overloaded bookshelves. I’m buying more than I did when I only bought in print (which isn’t bad for the industry), but now I’m less concerned with figuring out where to keep them.

Paper by FiftyThree

2012-03-29T18:49:30+00:00

Paper is a new drawing app for the iPad from FiftyThree. Immediately after watching the video, I downloaded it (free download with paid add-ons) and ordered Cosmonaut and Jot styluses to try out.

As a habitual sketcher, I’ve tried lots of drawing apps before, but this is the most promising one yet. The simplicity and lack of chrome for navigation (not unlike what we’ve seen in Clear for the iPhone) really speaks to me. In the short time I’ve played with it, sans stylus, I already love it.

Stamen Maps

2012-03-21T15:10:13+00:00

Stamen has released some beautiful alternative takes on map tiles. They’re all free to use wherever you display OpenStreetMap data. All three are great, but the watercolor one is particularly pleasing to the eye, feeling a bit reminiscent of an old pirate treasure map. Maybe we just need to throw some all-caps italic Caslon on top of it.

Kickstarter keeps getting better

2012-02-28T16:26:33+00:00

Kickstarter has quickly become one of my favorite sites around, and not just now, but for as long as I’ve been on the internet. Their goal is so empowering, so noble. Every time I visit the site, there is a very good chance I’ll be parting ways with some cash. Whenever I see someone talking so deeply about something they want to make a reality, and how low the bar is to help them do it, it gets me every time. It’s such a simple concept, but the effect is gargantuan.

Today I read this, Kickstarter Expects To Provide More Funding To The Arts Than NEA:

One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribute over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million.

Yowza. That’s all at once heartwarming and troubling. It’s troubling how regularly the US stunts arts funding, but it’s also amazing that grassroots efforts like Kickstarter have effectively doubled the money available to artists. Yes, I know, they aren’t the same thing, but it’s a promising development.

Our Favorite Typefaces of 2011 at Typographica

2012-01-26T01:13:23+00:00

One of the best annual wrap-ups returns after a hiatus in 2009-10, Our Favorite Typefaces, from Typographica. Welcome back!

The idea is simple: I invite a group of writers, educators, type makers and type users to look back at 2011 and pick the release that excited them most.
…

This is not a juried contest. The result isn’t necessarily the “best fonts of the year”, or even those most used or ballyhooed. But these 50 selections do capture a pretty accurate snapshot of where type design is now, and where it’s headed.

And the results are spot on. 50 reviews is a lot to digest, and I’m still picking my way through them, but there is a lot to love here. Not only is this a great wrap up of the year, but contributes to a valuable collection of commentary on the state of type.

Some favorite reviews so far are Indra Kupferschmid on Cyrus Highsmith’s Salvo, Aegir Hallmundur on Travis Kochel’s amazing Chartwell, Tim Brown on José Scaglione and Veronika Burian’s Abril, and Caren Litherland on Ludwig Übele’s FF Tundra. It’s great to have a chance to give some typefaces a second look, or discover some that you missed over the course of the year.

I’m also honored to contribute a review to the mix. I chose Nicole Dotin’s beautiful new text face, Elena. It reads like a dream.

A List Apart: Issue 342

2012-01-19T19:32:32+00:00

The latest issue of A List Apart is one of my favorites in recent memory, and has three articles you can’t miss.

In “An Important Time for Design”, Cameron Koczon challenges designers to be all that they can be:

The web is going to increasingly shape our world and consequently our daily lives. We can either sit on the sidelines and submissively assist those who are doing the shaping or we can take a more active role in creating the future we want. This year, thanks to a spike in demand, designers have a chance to actively nudge the world in any direction they like. It’s a huge opportunity with a tiny window. Let’s not let it pass by.

Next, Mark Otto walks us through “Building Twitter Bootstrap”, a fantastically useful bit of web design documentation:

Ultimately this boiled down to one core concept: pairing designers with developers. Constant interaction with developers is what sparked Bootstrap and continues to drive its development over a year later. From whiteboarding ideas to coding rough prototypes, collaborating across disciplines is what made Bootstrap successful for internal use at Twitter. This process informed the development of nearly every feature in Bootstrap and has worked remarkably well over time.

And Scott Kellum closes us out with “A Pixel Identity Crisis” where we learn how our little pixel is growing up and getting all awkward:

When using a phone that you held close, a reference pixel will be smaller on the screen than a projection you view from a distance. If the viewer holds their phone up so it is side-by-side with the projection, the pixel sizes should look identical no matter the resolution or pixel density the devices have. When implemented properly, this new standard will provide unprecedented stability across all designs on all platforms no matter the pixel density or viewing distance.

10 New Year’s resolutions for designers

2012-01-04T16:10:04+00:00

I generally avoid lists and New Year’s resolutions, but Mike Monteiro issues a rallying cry so poignant we all need to listen:

I spent the first 10 years of my career saying things like, “If I could just do this work the way I know it should be done…” and convincing myself that someone else was keeping me from making better choices. I’ll often be reviewing work with another designer and they’ll say, “Well, if I were doing this…” I stare back at them in astonishment until they realise what they’ve said. What is this strange gene that makes designers handicap themselves?

Mike sums things up as only he can and it’s a damn fine way to start off a fresh new year. Do yourself a favor and read this one. It’s a wake up call we could all use.

This year? This year’s gonna be a goddamned golden age. Last year we trained. This year we fight.

Tattly in Motion

2011-12-14T17:25:46+00:00

The fine folks at Made by Hand made a cheery promo video for those lovely designy temporary tattoo people at Tattly. I love it when smart people get together and make great things. And you can’t help but smile while watching this.

I make a cameo appearance about seven seconds into the video. And my Tattly design called Aperture is still available.

Shelve Your Opinions

2011-12-06T16:37:38+00:00

Does our definition of what a book is need to change? Barbara deWilde has been seeking to answer just that as part of her project “What the Book” in my SVA IxD class that also doubles as an installation at the AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers exhibition going up later this week at the AIGA headquarters in NYC. This on the heels of the near cancellation of the competition last year which drew the ire of many designers.

Part of the project is a short survey online that asks you to agree or disagree with such statements as “I would never give an ebook as a gift” and “Decorating with books is perverse”. Those same questions are asked at the exhibit too as an installation that allows viewers to physically shelve books as votes (as seen in the photo above). Very cool.

At the end of the survey, you’re also asked to give your definition of a book. And:

Each day, for the duration of the exhibition, a new definition of the book will be written on the gallery wall at the AIGA National Design Center in New York.

Spend a couple of minutes with the survey, and if you’re in NY between now and the end of February, swing by the exhibit at AIGA.

Little Printer from BERG

2011-11-29T17:10:16+00:00

Wow, Little Printer from BERG is such a stellar little example of making something simple and fun.

Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.

You configure Little Printer from your phone, and there’s some great content to choose from — it’s what Little Printer delivers that makes it really special. We have an incredible group of launch partners, and in the run-up to shipping we’re working with them all on custom publications.

It makes mini personal newspapers! Count me in. Just watch the video and tell me you couldn’t see using one of these things.

Kafkaesque

2011-11-28T20:22:35+00:00

These ~~upcoming~~ (Whoops! They’re already out!) Kafka covers by Peter Mendelsund are really lovely. These beautiful stark shapes and colors make them unexpected, but also totally on the mark. Also, they make use of FF Mister K, a typeface based on Kafka’s handwriting. That’s one of the few appropriate uses for a handwriting font, and it really works here.

via Jacket Mechanical

The Knife Maker

2011-11-04T15:44:33+00:00

The second film in the Made by Hand series, The Knife Maker, focuses on Joel Bukiewicz of Cut Brooklyn. Joel painstakingly makes beautiful knives by hand while breaking down the true meaning of craftsmanship: the people. Just two films in and this is one of the most inspirational series I’ve seen in a long time. Wonderfully shot and edited too. Next up in the series, The Beekeeper.

Chevrolet Speedometer Design

2011-11-04T15:37:32+00:00

Another great gallery from Christian Annyas:

Speedometers are those kind of items you look at thousands of times during your live, without ever really noticing. You notice the speed, not the meter. And if you do notice the meter chances are you don’t realize someone actually designed it. The company probably even did some research beforehand. Research regarding the readability of typefaces, the right size of the numbers and the space between them.

I can still remember the speedometer in my grandfather’s old Chevy. Maybe it’s something I hang on to to remember a bit more of him, or maybe it’s just because it was also the car I learned to drive in.

via Christian Annyas

Tegels

2011-11-01T16:08:41+00:00

Tiles is an animation made of a large photographic collection of street tiles. By viewing this collection of photographs as a sequence, different movements and processes become visible within the frame of the tiles. Both music and animation are trying to find a balance between a thought-out arrangement and an arrangement of ‘chance’ deriving directly from the tiles.

Mesmerizing.

Chocolate is for Girls

2011-10-28T15:03:49+00:00

by Jessica Hische

My love affair with candy has been lifelong, and while each year I seem to have a new favorite, there’s one variable that unites them all—they are not chocolate. I’m almost cartoonish in my ladydom in so many ways, but a lover of chocolate I am not. That’s not to say that I don’t occasionally crave a Mast Brothers’ masterpiece, but if I had to choose a desert island treat, it would likely be fruity, tart, or even flowery. Essentially any candy that you can clearly envision rotting your teeth to the core, that is what I want. As a kid, I loved Squeeze-Pop (“the liquid lollipop”), basting my tongue in sour-apple lava whenever I had the chance. The public pool was an epicenter of sugary awesomeness. In between games of Marco Polo, I’d shock my system with sour watermelons, Swedish Fish, Spree, and—my favorite by far—Fun Dip.

If there was a chewy component to this treat, I think I could solidly declare it The Best Culinary Invention of All Time. Fun Dip, for those not familiar, combined what was essentially pixie-stick sugar dust, with a white stick of sugar that you used as a device to consume the pixie-dust. Eating sugar with a tool made of sugar. How Wonka-esque! The best thing about Fun Dip was the bang for your buck. You got two treats for the price of one, plus it was impossible to eat quickly. Adult swim would go by in the blink of an eye while I slowly made my way through the small paper packet of deliciousness. By the end, I’d have a bit of stick remaining, which, with its neutral sugar flavor, would act as a palette cleanser to the fruity dust. I’d lick my wrinkly fingers, and with the taste of chlorine and sugar in my mouth think “I wish I never had to go back to school.”

Candygrams are odes to candy by guest authors during the month of October. You can see all of the past Candygrams here and here.

Jessica Hische is a crazy cat lady known for her lettering, silly projects, and occasional foul mouth.

Kern and Shape Type

2011-10-26T17:30:41+00:00

Just in case you were under the impression that type design or typography are easy, I suggest you try out Kern Type and Shape Type, two fun game from Mark MacKay for Method of Action. Each game tasks you with correcting default and malformed spacing, and then ranks you against the correct solution. It’s instructive and humbling! Hug your designer today.

Monkey Nuts, Barmbrack and Apples

2011-10-21T16:40:42+00:00

by Jeremy Keith

I grew up in Ireland, the home of Halloween.

I know that it seems like a quintessentially American holiday, but Halloween has its roots in the Celtic feast of Samhain. The Americans embraced and extended Halloween, adding the tradition of trick-or-treating, which in turn made its way back to Ireland.

I spent many of my childhood Halloweens trick-or-treating in the town of Tralee in County Kerry with my cousins. It’s funny, but when I think back to those times, I can’t think of any specific sweets (or “candy”, as the Americans would say). Instead I think of three other foodstuffs: monkey nuts, barmbrack, and apples.

“Monkey nuts?” you ask. Before you get too excited, thinking that perhaps you are about to hear of some previously unknown species of nut, I have to break it to you that monkey nuts are simply peanuts in the shell. I don’t know if it was an Irish phrase or a Kerry thing or just something my cousins said but I remember them always being called monkey nuts. And for some reason, they were always in plentiful supply at Halloween.

And what of this barmbrack of which I speak? That was a cakey bread that my aunt would bake. It was filled with raisins and much more besides. An inventory of the ingredients would reveal such incongruous items as a pea, a coin, a stick, a rag, and a ring. If you found one of those items in your slice of barmbrack, it prophesied your future. The rag meant that you would be poor, but the coin promised a life of riches. If you got the ring, you would be getting married soon, but if you got the pea, then your marriage prospects were bleak. Oh, and the stick: that meant you were going to beat your wife.

Apples were omnipresent at Halloween, which is unsurprising given that it was apple season. Of course we indulged in the game of bobbing for apples, but there was another game we played in Kerry called Snap Apple. In this game, an apple was suspended from a string. Holding your hands behind your back, you had to try to take a bite of the apple. It’s harder than it sounds.

I remember one of my cousins hammering a nail into the frame above the kitchen door so that we could attach the string for the apple. Even my uncle, normally a fairly dour man, didn’t seem to mind the boisterous disruption of the children playing these Halloween games.

My uncle passed away a few years ago, but my aunt tells me that she sometimes looks at the nail that’s still there above the door and smiles at the memory of those happy times.

Candygrams are odes to candy by guest authors during the month of October. You can see all of the past Candygrams here and here.

Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer living in Brighton, England where he works with Clearleft. You should unfollow him on Twitter.

New Browsing UI at Typekit

2011-10-20T16:46:02+00:00

We just launched something over at Typekit that we’ve been working on for some time: a brand new interface for browsing our type library.

This release had lots of moving parts, including devising a new classification system that worked with our offerings, and retagging every last one of our fonts. We had built up some crufty tags in the last couple of years, so I’m happy to say that things are nice and tidy now (and vastly simplified).

But my favorite part of all is the new visual interface for browsing fonts. Type can be difficult for newcomers to understand, there are lots of strange terms that don’t always sound like what they mean. Type is a visual entity, so what better way to browse and sort typefaces than through a visual interface. This has the benefit of quicker recognizability, and the interface itself serves as a key to the terminology. We can show you what the terms means, so you learn as your browse.

This is actually just the groundwork for some big things we’ve been busy with. Now that this is out there, we can start rolling out even more wonderful things. Hold on tight!

You can read more about what went into the new browsing UI on the Typekit blog, and you can check it out for yourself here.