Very excited to announce the new website Perry Garvin Studio designed and built for Baryshnikov Arts Center, one of New York City’s leading arts presenters.

The site features big graphics and a minimal interface optimized for tablet and mobile interfaces to encourage exploration of their varied programs.

Take a look at it now!

Zach McNair

A monthly roundup of excellent articles from ’round the web for your amusement/delight:

Tumblr Art Blogs to Follow – Art pics on the daily

What Can Neuroscience Tell Us About Morality?

How Publishing and Reading Are Changing – from WNYC’s On the Media

Is Procreation Immoral? - Answer: (as always) it depends.

On Hyperaddictive “Stupid Games” - The enduring appeal of crappy games like Angry Birds, Farmville, Tiny Tower, and others from that cursed lot.

Point Differentials in NBA Games Are Better Indicators of Team Performance than Win-Loss Ratios - Boom.

On Kierkegaard and Anxiety - “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”

Have a great May!

from Geometry Daily

Hello gentle reader. Here’s a round-up of long form writing I enjoyed in March 2012. Hope some of them strike your fancy as well.

How Many People can Manhattan Hold - Self explanatory

Some Reflections on the Relationship between Supply and Demand in the Formalized Arts Sector  by Adrian Ellis - God, what a bad title. Essentially the writer details how the supply of arts organizations exceeds the public’s demand for them and provides recommendations for resolving the dilemma (hint: less arts organizations).

On the Market by Alice Gregory – On one young woman’s experience working for Sotheby’s in its art department.

Sad as Hell by Alice Gregory – A young woman’s meditation on technologically-mediated post-college life situated within the framework of a book review.

Stop Calling It Curation by Matt Langer – A delightful rant against the use of the word “curation” when “sharing” would suffice. (Note: while “curation” is a word, it isn’t related to curating).

The Personal Analytics of My Life by Stephen Wolfram – One man’s analysis of scads of data he’s collected about himself.

The White Savior Industrial Complex by Teju Cole – On the fraught First World impulse to save the world.

UPDATE 3/3/13: I wrote this post over a year ago and it’s now outdated. Instead of following the instructions in this post, I recommend buying this book instead: The eBook Design and Development Guide by Paul Salvette. It goes into great detail and covers so much more than I could in one blog post. I’ll keep my instructions up for posterity but really encourage you to buy Paul’s book instead.

I’m going to show you how to make a Kindle ebook using HTML 5 and CSS 3. This tutorial cuts through a lot of the confusion out there by providing a step-by-step recipe and the boilerplate Kindle files you’ll need so you can start making your own Kindle books within less than 10 minutes. Amazon’s KF8 (Kindle Format 8) opens up new opportunities for designers by supporting all the wonders of CSS 3 and HTML 5 on Kindle devices. It’s an exciting (and, yes, still nascent) time for electronic book designers and I hope this tutorial gets you up and running.

I run Perry Garvin Studio, a design firm in Brooklyn, New York and we specialize in Kindle book design, publishing, and conversion, web design, user interface design, branding, and development. Learn more about us at http://perrygarvin.com and email studio@perrygarvin.com if you need help with your project.

Also, note that this article has translated into Serbo-Croatian by Vera Djuraskovic.

Onward!

Step 1: What You Need to Know

This tutorial is written for people using Macs. If you’re on a PC, keep reading, but you’re going to have to be on a Mac to make this recipe work. It will also be helpful if you know HTML 5 and CSS 3 and are familiar with XML. And we’re going to do a little stuff in Terminal. Some people get nervous when the command line is involved, but don’t worry. Stick with me and you’ll be fine.

Step 2: The Big Picture

To make a Kindle book, you assemble a bunch of files and run them through Amazon’s processing engine called KindleGen. The file that pops out is a .mobi file. That’s the file that gets dropped onto your Kindle for reading.

Step 3: The Files

First, you need to make the files that comprise the book.

1) Download this ZIP of sample files that I’ve made for you

2) Unzip it and put the resulting folder called “My Kindle Book” on your Desktop

3) Trash the ZIP file

4) Open that folder and let’s go through these files one-by-one.

mycover.jpg

This is the cover of your book.

mykindlebook.html

This is the content of your book – what your readers will read. Keep the HTML simple and refer to Amazon’s documentation for details on how they want you to write your markup.

toc.html

This is the table of contents. You’ll see that each link points to a part of the Kindle book using anchor points.

style.css

This is your stylesheet and it’s how you’ll design your book using CSS 3. I’ve styled my book so text is green (cripes) and images float to the right. Amazon’s support for CSS 3 is new as of January 2012 and pretty darn exciting because of the new design options it brings. You can learn more about the CSS 3 tags Amazon supports on its various devices here.

mykindlebook.opf

This is an XML file that tells the Kindle how your book is structured. Go ahead and open it up (you can use TextEdit if you don’t have a code editor).

The stuff between the <metadata> tags defines the metadata for the book using standard Dublin Core elements: title, creator, date, etc.

The stuff between the <manifest> tags tells Kindle where things are. For example, you’ll see that it has references to all the files we’re currently reviewing: the cover image, the book HTML file, the table of contents HTML file, the stylesheet, and the NCX file (I’ll explain that in a moment).

The stuff between the <spine> tags tells Kindle the order of how those HTML files should be read. Using this file, for example, when you open your book on a Kindle you’ll first hit the table of contents. Then you’ll hit the book contents. See how the “idref” in the <spine> elements match the “id” in the <manifest> elements? That’s how the spine knows what HTML files to present. That matching is required, of course, otherwise Kindle won’t know what to load. You can create multiple HTML files and define the order they will be accessed in the <spine>. Be sure to also make reference to those HTML files in your <manifest> so that Kindle knows where they are located!

 toc.ncx

You know that bar along the bottom of a Kindle that has points that allow you to skip to various parts? The NCX file tells Kindle where those points are. The <navPoint> elements within the <navMap> tags define those points. For more details, check out this post: http://www.cjs-easy-as-pie.com/p/create-ncx-file-by-araby-greene.html.

I also put a folder called “img” in the download and I threw in a nice de Kooning picture that you’ll see embedded in mykindlebook.html file.

And that’s it. These are the minimum files you need to build a Kindle book. So what’s next?

Step 4: Putting it all together

Go through this with me step by step:

1) Download and install this shareware ZIP creation app: http://www.yellowmug.com/yemuzip/ Unfortunately you cannot use Mac OS’s built-in ZIP creation tool otherwise you’ll get errors. Annoying but true. Other ZIP creation tools like Rucksack might also work but Mac OS’s definitely will not (as of this writing, Mac OS version 10.7.2).

2) Zip the “My Kindle Book” folder through YemuZip or your other third-party ZIP creation app and be sure it’s saved to the Desktop.

3) Find that ZIP file and change its name to “book.epub” (without the quotes). You’ll probably get a warning asking you if you want to use that extension. Yes, you do. So your file should now be called “book.epub”. It was a ZIP, now it’s an ePub. If only switching identity in real life was so easy.

4) We need to convert that ePub file to a .mobi file – the format the Kindle uses. Luckily for us, Amazon made a program called KindleGen that does this for us. Time to download and install KindleGen.

What follows is what’s correct as of this blog post in January 2012. If you’re reading this in the future, the process may have changed a bit. Always value Amazon’s KindleGen documentation over mine. This recipe works as of this typing, but I can’t promise it will in the future.

5) Download KindleGen at http://amzn.to/wYEogJ . This is a tutorial for Mac users so download the one for Mac.

6) Unzip it and change the folder name to “KindleGen” (without the quotes)

7) Move it to your Home directory – the place where your “Documents”, “Movies”, and “Pictures” folders live.

8) Open Terminal

9) At the command prompt, type “~/KindleGen/kindlegen” (without the quotes) and press enter

10) Now you need to navigate to your ePub file using the command line. This is the trickiest part of the tutorial because it requires a tiny bit of UNIX knowledge. Let me try to help. Type (always without quotes): “cd ~” and press enter. That gets you to your home directory. Now type (again, without quotes), “cd Desktop” and press enter. Now you are in your Desktop! See? You’re a UNIX pro already. Type “ls” (without quotes) and press enter. You’ll see a list of whatever is on your desktop and in that list will be “book.epub”. Great. Now type (without quotes), “~/KindleGen/kindlegen book.epub” and press enter. A whole bunch of code should appear (hopefully without any warnings or errors). Now go to your Desktop and look: you’ll see a file called book.mobi.

You just made your Kindle book!

Let’s look at it.

The easiest way is to download Amazon’s Previewer application which is a software version of a Kindle. You can get it here: http://amzn.to/w3jJLP

Once you’ve downloaded Previewer, open it up and go to File > Open and select your .mobi file from your Desktop. And there you have it: your Kindle book. You can also drag and drop the .mobi file onto your Kindle and read it there.

Something doesn’t look right? Typo perhaps? Well, you’ll have to trash your .mobi file and your .epub file and repeat Step 2.

Step 5: Final Thoughts

Here are a few helpful links:

Amazon’s Kindle Publishing Guidelines : The official Amazon guidelines on how they’d like you to produce your Kindle books. It’s full of all sorts of geeky details which will help you craft the perfect files.

About Kindle Format 8 : Amazon’s new file format for its Kindle devices

About KindleGen : Amazon’s application for producing .mobi files

About Amazon Previewer – Amazon’s application software for previewing how Kindle books look

Good luck!

Perry Garvin Studio
studio@perrygarvin.com

Just launched a brand-spanking-new website for International Contemporary Ensemble.

Since its founding in 2001, ICE has premiered over 500 compositions — the bulk of them by emerging composers — in venues ranging from New York’s Lincoln Center to galleries and clubs around the world.

Perry Garvin Studio designed and built International Contemporary Ensemble a website that represents their contemporary identity and showcases their concerts, recordings, and educational initiatives. The visitor experience is grounded in clean geometries of cyan, black, and white. Large graphics, high definition video, and embedded audio bring ICE’s exploratory work to life. A blog and Twitter stream keep people connected to the work they do advancing new music.

Take a look for yourself!

via dataisnature.com » The Phase Transitioning Seed Drawings of Clement Valla.

I’m very excited to announce the launch of Perry Garvin Studio’s latest website: the Habana Works website.

Habana Works approached us to build a website that showcases the great work they do educating Brooklyn residents about urban environmentalism.

We crafted a custom design that looks handmade and communicates their environmental message. Visitors can easily orient themselves and navigate through Habana Works’ programs no matter how they enter the site: through the homepage or an interior page. Habana Works staff can update all parts of the site through an intuitive back-end interface.

Take a look!

Irina Werning‘s Back to the Future series presents old photographs retaken years later.

I’m a strong believer in the last position and especially disdain the way criticism of youth gets conflated with the criticism of technology. You know: the times you go to a dinner party and you hear someone prattling on that kids have no attention span these days and that all they do is text message and don’t know how to relate to people any more and that the Internet’s nature of instant-gratification is going to cripple our culture and likely ruin our civilization.

That’s about when I excuse myself.

Consider this:

“At any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.”

Again and again, it appears, adults find the behavior of younger people and their relationship to technology and the entertainment it fuels to be a threat. And again and again, like a broken record, this tired narrative gets pulled out and played by the very people who were condemned just a few short years before by their elders who have now passed away.

This must stem from a social need to distinguish between youth and adulthood but I’d prefer that to be expressed in ritual (marriage, drinking alcohol, etc.) rather than in condemnation of youth as a category.

Read Adam’s essay here.

ArtCat – Midtown – chashama 217 Art Space – chashama presents: The Blithedale Romance.

via BLDGBLOG: On the Grid.

via MoMA | Instruction Lab.

We designed a brand and website for Raddish Catering that reflected their organic, home-made services. We grounded all text and images on a watercolor paper texture and used subtle graphic effects to create a hand-built, textured look.

Take a look!

Special thanks to Raddish Catering owner Juliette Shimkin for her support and marvelous meals.

See more of Perry Garvin Studio’s work

Photo by 16 Miles of String

Bruce Nauman has made a work that speaks to people.  Actually, he made a work that speaks through people.

Enter a minimally-installed gallery and on either side of the room you’ll see a series of white square boards suspended on cables facing one another.  There’s a cacophony of sound and as you approach the squares you note that they’re actually speakers. Through some audio engineering wizardry, a device has been adhered to the back of each square which sends a signal across the board, effectively turning it into an amplifier. You go to the middle of the room and stand between one of the sets of speakers.  You hear a looped logorrheic stream: an endless recitation of days of the week: “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday…” But then the speaker starts skipping words and gaps in the week begin to emerge in a pattern of Nauman’s devising. The speaker is male, serious. You walk to the next pair and the voice is now a child, plucky.  The next pair, a woman, robotic.  The pattern of words spoken is the same from speaker to speaker.  Only the intonation and timbre change.

You step back and you think: I need to conduct a fake interview with Bruce Nauman about this work, Days.

Perry Garvin: So let’s jump right into this.  Why use board and not a speaker?

Bruce Nauman: It looked cooler. [Laughs]  Well that’s just part of it. I wanted to create as little visual distraction as possible and thanks to some amazing audio engineering technology that was possible.

PG: There are a lot of art historical references going on in Days. Can you talk about a few?

BN: I’d rather not get into that.

PG: Why not?

BN: I didn’t make the work about “art historical references.” Any that are present are either coincidental or part of the visual culture. I’d rather people focus on the work itself.

PG: Okay, fair enough. But let me casually ignore that and ask you about one I couldn’t ignore and actually shaped the way I saw the piece: On Kawara.  From his date paintings that reference the passage of time to his recent work, “One Million Years” presented at David Zwirner where speakers count from one to a million.  Days seemed like – how can I put this – maybe a twist on what On has been doing for years.

BN: I think it’s fair to say that there are some similarities.  On has always been interested in the mutability of time and the systems we create to help order it.  He’s also a consummate performer, even if his performance is “in absentia.”  I guess in Days I wanted to leverage the predictability of reciting the days of the week but then disrupt it by leaving holes. I mean, the piece is quite simple: it’s a meditation on “where does the time go.”

PG: You know, I always think about that when I look at your Mapping the Studio at Dia:Beacon. I sit there in a darkened room watching rodents scurrying by, waiting for something to happen, and I myself start to lose track of time and start wondering where my time is going while watching the piece.

[Laughter]

Then there’s the whole Sol LeWitt reference at the entrance to the piece where you lay out the schematic of the recitation.  And I picked up some Janet Cardiff Forty Piece Motet allusions and of course Robert Irwin and that minimal “cool” look.  I guess the space just seemed to drip with a lot of very hip visual clichés of contemporary art: minimalism, systems-based works…  Would you agree this is a very fashionable piece?

BN: No, I wouldn’t. Or I don’t really care. I designed the work to communicate as efficiently and elegantly as possible.  If that means it has a certain “look” or adopts certain references to other artists or styles then that is pure coincidence or at least such a part of my world that it’s incorporated into the work.  Let’s not forget: I’ve been in this game for decades.

PG: That’s true.  On the same day that I saw Days, I saw a number of your pieces scattered in other exhibitions throughout MoMA including the permanent collection and the photography of sculpture exhibition.  You probably have work on display right now in about four museums in New York.  Not to sound like a sycophant, but you are a major artist – probably the most likely among the current crop to be remembered for decades hence.  Aren’t your prices going through the roof?

BN:  You know, I don’t pay attention to that.  I’m comfortable and I’ve been lucky to be able to keep making work over the years.  I don’t for one minute take for granted the reception I’ve received and I just hope to keep making work that speaks to people.

PG: I would say that there’s a bullying quality in your work.  Or, if not bullying, aggressive.  Forcing people to walk between tight walls, pushing your face in extreme directions, designing neon that blasts photons at people, recording videos of clowns doing obsessive compulsive actions, or this piece which just bombards the viewer with words.  People in the installation were genuinely cowed!

BN: [Silence] I don’t know how to respond to this.

PG: Is aggression something you value in your work.

BN: Well, I’ve never gone for art that is limp-wristed and mousy.  I want to make assertive pieces that stand on their own and that stand up to the viewer.  Let’s not forget that viewers of works of art have tremendous power.  For one – they think.  They are sophisticated machines honed over millennia and a work of art – basically a few ideas an artist comes up with and seals in amber – is supposed to compete?  That’s why I think that assertive works of art are important.  That’s the word I’d prefer to use to describe some of the work I make: assertive.

PG: And Days is assertive?

BN: Sure.

PG: Can you tell me a funny anecdote about Days?

BN: I don’t know how funny this is but that kid, Justin, that recorded one of the loops.  He sounds very peppy in the recording because, I swear, that was the most hyperactive kid I met.  We found him through a friend and he came to the studio and basically couldn’t sit still.  We gave him the script and he kept fumbling over words and saying words twice and messing it up.  I think it took three hours until he finally got it all out without any mistakes and we were so grateful.  Was that a good anecdote?

PG: Terrific.  OK – let me ask one other question.  The “wow” factor.  It’s pretty cool that there are square boards that are speaking.  That alone is pretty exciting since it seems like a new technology (or at least something I’ve not often seen).  I went into the room and saw that and was amazed and then that amazement was transferred to the piece itself.  Do you think that this work is getting an illegitimate boost in acclaim because of its technological sophistication?

BN:  No. We live in a world saturated in high tech stuff.  A talking board?  Are you kidding me?  This is a “wow” factor?  Hardly – it’s a talking board.  You get over it and then you get on to experiencing the work and listening to the speakers and the words and decoding patterns and, if I’m successful, taking a bit of your day to think about time and daily, lived experience.

The Ecology Center is an environmental education center in San Juan Capistrano, California. They hired us to redesign their website to present an intuitive interface for accessing the Center’s array of programs. We simplified the navigation options, introduced bold illustrated graphics, and built a content management system that enabled staff to update all parts of the site.

Thanks to illustrator David Rager and The Ecology Center founder Evan Marks.

See more of Perry Garvin Studio’s work

- The navigation bars (necessary when navigating but not when reading)

- Advertisements (necessary revenue generators for site owners but visual annoyances)

- Links to other articles in the form of images or text boxes (helpful when looking where to go next but inapplicable when you’re planning on staying put)

These competing page elements take up space which shrinks the amount of room available for the article you’d like to read.  They also introduce distracting visual clutter, making reading long form text on the web unpleasant.

Here’s how to cut out those distracting elements and focus completely on the article you want to read:

1) Click a button called “Readability” in your browser bookmark bar
2) Enable Full screen mode in Firefox or Chrome

Readability is a button that you add to your bookmark bar that automatically detects the text you want to read in a webpage and isolates it in a new window, removing all competing visual clutter.

To improve the experience, hide the browser frame by going to the “View” menu in Firefox or Chrome and selecting “Full Screen.”

What you’re left with is pure text and images associate only with that article you want to read.

See the image to see a sample “before” and “after.”

Get Readability

Download Firefox or Chrome

Kodak Camera, 1888. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of American History

The iPad is to computing in 2010 as the Kodak camera was to photography back in 1888.

In that year George Eastman registered Kodak as a trademark and coined the phrase “You Press the Button and We Do the Rest” thus introducing the concept of a “snapshot” and expanding access to photography beyond a niche, technical audience.

Prior to Kodak, photography was a pain.  You had to tinker with recipes, manipulate complicated instruments, and go through a time-consuming and error-prone processing period.  With the magical Kodak, however, you took a picture with the camera’s one button. You extracted the roll of film when it was used up and mailed the whole thing to Kodak for processing.  They’d return you a complete set of tidy-looking prints.

Amateur photography exploded and access to image making blew up.  Competitors came in on the scene and here we are in 2010 with a vast ecology of cameras from basic point-and-shoots to full-featured digital SLRs.

Some are complaining that iPad kills creativity by controlling access to computing.  Its “black box” concept of computer interaction waters down programming and restricts innovation because Apple controls both the programming environment and the user experience so tightly.  This, they argue, is a harbinger of a dark future where corporate behemoths restrict how we use computers.

But did this happen with photography when the Kodak was introduced?  Absolutely not.  Photography expanded and became even more instrumental in people’s lives.  The iPad will have a similar cultural effect by liberating computing from a technical crowd.  There will still be computers with power user features, knobs, and cogs and all sorts of customizations for tinkerers and professionals.  But there will also be a huge swath of very basic computers that get basic things done.  And offer a gateway experience for those who might otherwise be turned off from computing in its current form.

This is a promising time for computing.  Let’s think back to 1888.

Photos For Tino – artnet Magazine