On Interformat Cooperation and Interspecies Friendship

I don’t think that I truly appreciated the difference between ‘what images do’ and ‘what text does’ until I had to write my first artist statement in school. With the words “my work explores the juxtaposition…”, any sort of visual logic took a nose-dive, and never found its written expression in text. (I’m not alone here, see exhibit A: there are multiple artist statement generators on the internet.) In fact, among my classmates, there seemed to be an inverse relationship in the economy of expression between mediums: the more elegantly an idea could be made with paint, the more it seemed to resist any sort of dignified translation into the written word.

While learning this lesson entailed some existential anguish, in retrospect, those hours of inadequate translation may have actually been a well disguised gift. It left me with an exaggerated appreciation for ideas that work across multiple formats. Now, when text+visual or form+content logically echo each other in a cohesive whole, it feels incredibly exciting… and yet, against nature. Much like interspecies friendships, this interformat cooperation gives the momentary sense that everything in the universe just might end up being okay after all.

In my current day-to-day work life, projects drop on my desk with one half or the other missing—either form in search of content or content in search of form. My mission is to try to adequately fill-in-the-blanks. Client work is almost always content-lead—an idea needs to find a visual/form analog. Personal projects, on the other hand, almost alway start with a form. I have graveyards of sketchbooks of folding formats, Kaleidocycle schemes, branching choose-your-own-adventure pop-up books, special effects ink chips—all waiting for the correctly-shaped idea to surface.

For me, design work means apportioning a considerable (socially reckless?) amount of one’s time to contemplating like-patterns across content and form—finding those serendipitous overlaps that reconcile two impossibly-different things. There is a dimension of absurdist pointlessness to this pursuit because the gulf between form and content begins so wide and intersects at random. By this logic, it is not surprising that Guillaume Apollinaire is both accredited with the coinage of the term “surreal” and also responsible for some of the most iconic examples of concrete poetry with his Calligrams, which shape the text of a poem according to its subject matter.

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Never Odd or Even / nevEr Odd Or eveN

Taking Apollinaire’s Calligrams as inspiration, I achieved a small victory last year in this area-of-my-interest: I made a holiday card that works as an interactive form of concrete poetry. While playing around with a flipbook, I noticed a transformat analog between it and how a palindrome works.

It turns out that the format of a palindrome (which is a letter sequence whose order can be read the same forwards or backwards, like “Mom” or “Racecar” or, for the experts, “Go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog”) and the format of a flipbook employ the same structure (operationally-speaking)! Both structures are linear, but reversible (so you can drive forward or backward in each one), see here:

And so I made a set of card-sized flipbooks, bearing a holiday-y/space-enthusiasm-y palindromic message. When you flip it forward it says A SANTA LIVED AS A DEVIL AT NASA. And backwards, it also says A SANTA LIVED AS A DEVIL AT NASA, demonstrating the commonality between a well-known booklet format and that strange language form, forever immortalized in song.

I cut the covers myself out of Eames Furniture paper on a Craft Robo Pro cutter. Influence Graphics in Long Island City printed the interior pages and perfect-bound the whole thing together into a monolith-like slab.

Perhaps the most satisfying part of this project was dispatching them out into the world and then getting this unexpected tweet in return, from friend Raul:

Hey @kellianderson, your awesome holiday flip book inspired my son to make a little movie. He posted it here.

Excited (and anxious) to be speaking at Typo San Francisco this afternoon. I used the talk as an excuse to try out something that I’ve long intended to play with: paper lettering! Many of the text-only slides in my presentation needed some additional attention. So for each one, I came up with a different, semi-legible strategy for making a different type of paper lettering.

I wanted to confine myself to using the form of paper to render the image of the type, rather than using paper as a substrate for ink. While I did break that rule once, most of the lettering experiments are white-on-white… working within the parameters of “paper-only”. (The cheater-one that uses ink, relies on the form of a block of paper for the ink to display properly, so its really in the same spirit as the others… promise!)

Here are some of my favorites:

Like many others, I felt a sense of urgency to do something after the Newtown shootings last year, but wasn’t sure what I was qualified to contribute. That’s why I was so excited when Ted Alcorn from Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG)—a non-partisan coalition of 900 mayors who advocate for smarter gun laws—approached me in January to help visualize some complex/tricky policy ideas. (Fortunately, one of design’s super-powers is presenting complex information in a digestible manner.) We’ve since created a series of infographics (or, in this case, perhaps “information illustrations”) that explore “Buying a Gun in America” from three different angles. They are being used as part of MAIG’s “Demand Action” initiative.

The three graphics came out of piles and piles and pages and pages of data and research. MAIG collects data on how policy effects gun violence outcomes and then educates the public and advocates for those policies that have been found to help reduce violence. The idea is that better understanding what the policies are (and how they statistically correlate to different outcomes) is the first step in building consensus around the development of more effective policies.

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Ease of Access

The first infographic explores how astonishingly easy* it is to buy a gun in America. (*It is, indeed, easier to buy a gun than it is to buy Sudafed or a beer.) I thought it would be most effective to but this into everyday perspective—so we took five different everyday items: a beer, a car, Sudafed, and a gun and showed what legal requirements exist for each that filter-out inappropriate purchasers.

For buying a gun, there are two legal options. Option one is to buy a gun from a dealer. In that case the buyer must pass a background check to ensure that they aren’t a prohibited purchaser. However in most states, there is a perfectly legal second option: Buying a gun from a private seller. In this scenario the background check isn’t required, and data shows that this is the “loophole” by which the majority of criminals get their guns. So while you need things like an ID and a license to buy a car, but, incredibly, nothing is needed to legally buy a gun from a private seller.
 
This loophole is a like letting people step around security screening at the airport:

Here is the entire infographic (click for a larger version):
 

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How Many Guns are Sold without a Background Check?

Infographic 2 attempts to show the scale of this problem—that a full 40% of the guns changing hands in America are transferred without a background check.

Here is the entire infographic (click for a larger version):
 

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The Relationship between Policy and Outcome

Infographic 3 contrasts the measurable policy outcomes in states that have universal background check laws (there are a few) and those without. The findings are dramatic:

• In states that don’t require universal background checks, the vast majority of inmates had purchased their guns off-the-record, from a private seller.

• Levels of gun trafficking and violence against women (gun-homicides) are far higher in states that don’t require universal background checks.

• Guns recovered at crime scene across state lines (and across the border) had disproportionately originated in states that did not require a background check.

Here is the entire infographic (click for a larger version):
 

If this inspires you to get involved as well, point yourself to Demand Action’s site here. They do amazing, important, and effective work.

When you think “future-prediction”…

Does a crystal ball or an algorithm flash across your mind? OK… so an algorithm has probably never flashed across anyone’s mind (ever), but the point is that notions of future-prediction seem to have gotten stuck somewhere in 19th-century with motifs of mystics, psychics, tarot cards, tea-leaves, and crystal balls. However, now that future-prediction is something that actually kind-of happens—our collective vision of it may be ready for an update. Computers are now modeling possible outcomes in increasingly powerful and accurate ways. The prediction of voter behavior, enabled by some sort of black-art data-crunching, supposedly helped Obama win reelection. …And, you know: Nate Silver. [Letting commerce-terms to leach into non-commerce life is annoying, but for the sake of simplicity:] The “brand” of future-prediction is in dramatic flux.

I’ve been racking my brain on these topics because I was asked to create the presence of a future-prediction company in an art gallery. (A great project, indeed!!) The assignment was to create environmental brand elements representing the idea of a company that doesn’t actually exist. In the exhibition, As Real as it Gets, fake products and companies are used to test branding’s capability to communicate ideas beyond products. Read curator, Rob Walker’s (NY Times, Design Observer) really great catalog essay.

The show asks: What can branding do when freed from the drudgery of selling? My little back corner installation asks: Can branding be used to show a model of time? Or of future-prediction? To get at these questions, I worked with the journalist/author Rob Walker and a fictional company called FutureWorld from the novel, Odds Against Tomorrow, to create branded-objects about our increasingly strange, increasingly unfixed relationship with time.

The 7 1/2 Floor

When I think “time”, I see office stuff. So the connection between time and corporate offices was immediate—figuring out why this was the case took a bit of work. I began considering my own ideas and associations with time—my mind automatically going to the calendar grid, to a feeling of precision + planning, to a place of an anywhere-generic-office (on a desk near the red stapler.) I suspect most people must see something similar (right?)—equating “time” with the gadgets and mechanisms of time-control as it relates to work: calendars, watches, and alarms.

The everyday calendar is a mind-bogglingly complex piece of user experience design. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar was developed to reconcile the imperfect solar year (consisting of a variable 365.242199 days) with the human need for accuracy-without-decimal-places. This new design improved upon the Julian calendar (45 BC), correcting for time-slippage through complex rules rules governing Leap Year—yielding an evenly-divisible calendar year in apparent harmony with the solar year. However, in spite of its medieval origin, Marx suggested that human-constructed-time didn’t really take hold (in practice) until the Industrial Revolution (see the study of time-discipline.) That the office or the factory (with its planned meetings, deadlines, and schedules) is what effectively shifted human beings’ conception of time from the agricultural day of the solar-time to the human construct of calendar-time —of “9-5″, of “M-F”, of “Sa-S”, of “work-week” vs. “holiday.” (This may explain why time for me is basically Being John Malkovich’s 7 1/2 floor.)

In any event, I wanted to make very traditional office branding elements with a science-fiction dimension. Something that didn’t stray too far from traditional corporate print design, but showed that time—and our relationship to it—is actually pretty surreal.

This plexiglass calendar is my best attempt at creating a physical model of this idea of transparent/Gregorian/office time. It is a “promotional calendar” for FutureWorld which has been stretched out, parts dissected in 3-D space, which hovers above the floor atop a lightbox for visitor investigation.

The model breaks apart the constituent parts of a traditional print calendar—revealing how time is architected within this common format. The grid, when stretched out into sculptural space, becomes an expanse of pits. The current month rises to the foreground, closest to human experience, and the past and future months float beyond in the background. The typography identifying the month is constructed from faux-sculpted type with beveled edges and marks of human intervention—the crossing out and circling of days is perceptible in the topmost, most superficial layers. The whole thing becomes unstuck into chaotic mess of lines and shapes when you look at it from the side. It moves and shifts with the viewer in kinda fun ways:

I created the calendar by stacking layers and layers of laser-cut plexiglass. The thicker sheets of plexiglass offer crisp transparency, but less opportunity to develop to develop the illusion of sculptural space (the very thin sheets enabled the ideal rise:run for bevels to rise up on the lettering.) So I used the thick sheets of plexiglass at the bottom, where less modeling detail is necessary, and very thin sheets of plexiglass near the detailed, beveled top.

The idea to make forms within a stack of plexiglass occurred to me while working on desk drawers, earlier this fall. The holes for the pegs, when stacked, became very pipe-like. Seeing this pretty much blew my mind and I was eager to use the technique for something.

I then began experimenting (for months, it seems!) with different types of materials to figure out the best way to create the illusion of sculptural form within the block. This thin polycarbonate worked great for creating bevels, but became a solid mirror after ~30 sheets were placed in a stack:

Acrylic turned out to be the best material for maintaining crisp transparency (further aided by transmissive light) and laser compatibility (in spite of what T&T Plasticland says, polycarbonate is not laser compatible. It turns yellow and smells like chemical-death.)

The logo that I developed for FutureWorld is a graphical depiction of the calendar pits—a spatial/transparent idea of time. In the novel, Odds Against Tomorrow , FutureWorld uses data to a la “Nate Silver” to see beyond the present. For FutureWorld, time is decreasing an opaque barrier between today and tomorrow. Like the crystal ball, visual transparency seemed like the clearest metaphor for this type of prognostication. So the logo is basically a depiction of transparency—windows within windows:

And I letterpress-printed some business cards for FutureWorld (you know, in case exhibition visitors needed to contact them):

In the novel, FutureWorld’s role isn’t to predict the future for the sake of predicting the future, but rather, to identify future catastrophes and risk-likelihood for corporate clients. As a handy guide, I reprinted a handful of the National Safety Council’s odds of death on the back of each card:

Furthermore to, uh, better demonstrate Futureworld’s services, the business card has a different, more manipulative presence when the lights go out. Each card got a hit of glow-in-the-dark ink, which adds a teeny-tiny disaster scene befalling the logo… and completes FutureWord’s myriad of slogans (and phone number) with a sinister spin:

We learned that getting the word “FUTURE” into your phone number is impossible. Rob, Nathaniel, and I tried nearly a hundred google voice numbers before we found NIGH(TMARE.)

I used a similar transparency/reveal idea for FutureWorld office’s “front door” branding (actually an elevator door in the gallery, incognito.) I photoshopped in a wrecked/flooded mirror-image of the space opposite the door, applied it with double-sided vinyl, and coated the whole thing with thermo-chromatic ink which shifts from opaque black to clear with the application of hand-heat (JUST like hypercolor t-shirts.):

As show visitors touched the door, they would press and rub their way into seeing a future-disaster scenario for the very space that they were standing in. At least that was the plan… in reality, the elevator shaft was too damn cold to reveal much of the photograph. But below is what the big-photo behind the black ink looks like. I started with a photo of the ApexArt space (on the left) and Photoshopped-in a worst case scenario (right…a pre-Sandy project that seemed very eery Oct. 29th):

Check out the show at ApexArt—it is fascinating! Lots of great work in the show. More of Rob Walker’s thoughtful writing about design, branding, and consumer culture can be found here and more about Nathaniel Rich’s Odds of Tomorrow (which has one of the best cover designs I’ve seen in a while) can be read here.

Thanks so much to Josh and Hyperakt for letting me borrow your laser-cutter to indulge in this experiment!

At first glance, it may seem like “garage sale” is too narrow of a topic to fill two newspapers with worthwhile content. That is, at least, the skepticism that I initially I felt until…well: Martha Rosler. (Martha commissioned the papers for the GIANT garage sale that has presently eclipsed the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art. Yes, there is a webcam, so you can see the madness yourself.) To say that she thinks about garage sales “differently” is an understatement (read her interview with curator, Sabine Breitweisser, to understand what I mean.)

(Illustration by Kate-Bingaman Burt, Text by Gretchen Herrman, an anthropologist who has visited 3000+! garage sales)

So, what are these papers about, exactly? To generalize broadly, they are about this idea: that garage sales make visible some surprising facts normally hidden* below the surface of our social interactions. *Either because they are indecorous (haggling) or simply because they are structural (gender roles.)

This is because they host an array of uniquely garage-saley interactions. Grassroots selling is an occasion for worlds to collide in odd and sometimes uncomfortable ways. Garage sales bring together people from all walks of life—with different motivations—and they have conversations about what objects are worth. In this sense, a garage sale is like a science experiment:. A chemistry lab is a framework where, through interaction (Potassium + flame = purple)—and the critical questions that follow (why purple?)—a light is shined on a small piece of the chemical/biological structure of the universe. Similarly, the occasion of a garage sale presents a framework for observing all kinds of odd social interactions in the controlled [logical] setting of $buying and $selling. It provides entrée into the structure of society: revealing the pure-and-strange about us—about American culture and consumption. It is an unintentional (and insightful) social experiment, in other words…   At least this is what I think after reading/obsessing-over these papers.

With a curious eye to these issues, the papers expand upon this topic of “garage sale” in an ambitious ripple—using them as a jumping-off point to study the objects that we surround ourselves with, what happens when we throw those objects away, and how we labor to get $ to obtain those objects in the first place. It is about consumption, waste, negotiation, obsolescence, value, and community.

Martha Rosler (the artist) and editor Sarah Resnick (Triple Canopy, The Occupy! Gazette), defined the project, shaping its outlook and philosophy (the above is merely my own self-indulgent interpretation of what they created.)

Issue 1 is largely from an anthropological perspective (Gretchen Herrmann, an anthropologist who has studied garage sales for the past 30 years informed much of the content.) Here is every page in Issue 1 in the ever-dignified format of an animated gif:

Issue 2 concerns itself more with issues of value and waste. How are we compensated for our labor? What do we buy and where does it end up? (The “centerfold” is a rather glorious flowchart tracing the horrifying lifecycle of e-waste.) Here is every page in Issue 2:

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Aside from designing the papers, I also art directed. Do you honestly know what art direct means? (I didn’t really.) Art directing (at least for this project) seems to mostly be about pushing around ideas, twisting people’s arms, and then finessing visual ideas to fit with text ideas. My process/experience with it went a little like this: I spoke with Sarah about the anticipated themes of the paper, scoured my brain for artists working within those themes, pitched project ideas to the artists+Sarah+Martha, got consensus (miraculous!), and then let the artists work. And man, did I persuade some great people to collaborate on this. Take Don Hamerman, who has been documenting the hard-knock-life of baseballs for the good part of a decade—revealing how objects carry with them mysterious stories of human abuse. Or Sara Cwynar, who makes collages of de-familiarized domestic objects that are delightfully bizarre compositional explosions. And Wendy MacNaughton, who is something of a visual journalist (just send her out on a field trip, and she will come back with an expression of some hitherto-unspoken-but-undeniably-true-nugget about life.) Comic-book artist, Josh Neufeld, also provided some wit and storytelling to the pages. I work alone normally, so learning how to collaborate (and having such fantastic collaboration experiences) is a big deal.

Here are a few of my favorite visual snapshots of the things we made:

A “diagram of a negotiation” by Wendy MacNaughton, is a portrait of how real-time pricing plays out at garage sales:

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Lisa Congdon visits garage sales frequently and find patterns. She amasses these strange little collections of things that seem to pop up again and again from the garbage bins of domestic life:

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Detail:

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I used a trio of Don Hamerman’s baseballs to bridge a few pages of articles dealing with life within a community —to–>; death alone (it gets a little heavy in this part of the paper—this notion of dispensing with a loved one’s possessions after death.) I placed Don’s baseballs strategically so that the reader moves from the most gnarly baseball to the least gnarly, thus gradually revealing the identity of the festering object:

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Here is a detail of the infographics accompanying an article by Christine Smallwood about Etsy’s community (aka the internet’s garage sale):

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Kate Bingaman-Burt’s amazing full-back-cover illustration about $ was collaboration-perfection. Sarah and I researched the history of currency (primarily using David Graeber’s Debt), I made quick-and-dirty pencil sketches, Kate sent back raw illustrations, and I colored and arranged them into a proper graph. Some snapshots from that process (can you believe that woodpecker scalps have been a vessel of value?!):

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Another collaboration (of a completely different nature): I photoshopped together some grocery-store-circular style advertisements for common garage sale items (tangled cords! records no one wants! etc etc) and sent them to the very-literally-named “Color Signs NYC” shop in Bensonhurst. If you’ve walked down 5th Avenue in Park Slope or Court Street, you’ve probably seen their distinctive hand-painted lettering advertising pizza-and-garlic-knots specials. I painted the big, blocky (obviously hand-painted) letters/numbers first and then they added the fine print with their professional hand-lettering-paper-sign touch:

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The centerfold in Issue 2 features a giant collage-heap, courtesy of Sara Cwynar, and a heavily researched (by Sarah Resnick, mostly) flowchart tracing the material destiny of e-waste:

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Detail:

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Another successful collaboration example: Dana Totorici wrote a fantastic (and borderline tear-jerker) article about how the burden of “women’s work” has been shifted to [largely-immigrant, largely-underpaid] domestic workers, in upper-middle class + households. Her article explores the reality of this line of work: the long thankless hours, what it means to raise other people’s children when you have your own at home and how objects (hand-me-downs) are often exchanged between households—given second and third lives as they move down class lines. Lisa Congdon provided some collection images for this piece related to traditional women’s work (sewing stuff, clothespins, etc) and was kind enough to let me pick them apart, turning them into photo-infographics:

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More of my stuff—remember the game theory matrix for The Prisoner’s Dilemma? I illustrated it to represent a buyer’s and seller’s 4 potential interactions in a negotiation (showing how their efforts affect the final price of an item):

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Detail:

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Here is another piece by Wendy MacNaughton—one of my favorites in the paper— with a very insightful and very witty map of a “typical” garage sale:

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Friends from all over the world ripped the tags off of their sofas and hair dryers, mailed them to me, and I put them into a [somwhat threatening] collage of “domestic tags”:

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Getting to dream up and actually execute these visuals, working with many people I admire, was tremendously rewarding. The process was also exhausting and all-consuming. Seeing them roll off the press was a victory—no small miracle.

We did it! More process shots follow below:

(Photo by Jesse Chan-Norris)

Editing with Sarah and Martha:

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I “wireframed” the issues before doing any design (oh- and everything is laid out according to Gerstner’s Complex Grid):

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Here is my favorite unsused page layout:

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Most glorious moment of the project:

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(Photo by Jesse Chan-Norris)

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Thanks to everyone that made this happen!

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I worked with the team at OFFBOOK last year to create their logo. So when they were planning an episode about logos, they invited me back in for an interview. We chatted a bit about process and about this shorthand-system-of-communication that we call logo design… and we reminisced about just how many different iterations of their logo I made. Watch the short episode below:

For me, logo design/branding cleaves neatly into two main trains of thought.

Whenever big corporations start to talk about “branding,” my knee-jerk reaction is to brace myself to be astounded and dazzled by the gulf between what-I-know-is-true and what-I’m-being-told-to-believe. Few visual experiences inspire more skepticism than a friendly, bland logo. (Bright green dots and Helevtica, huh? So…What body of water did you poison?) Focus-grouped positive ideas are all too frequently grafted onto an organization/company/product that is host to some really bad ideas. The white-washing, green-washing, and otherwise-Lady-MacBethian activities that ensue can provide some of the finest and most cynical cognitive dissonance that the corporate world has to offer.

The second train of thought is about the craft of articulating an idea visually.  There are many fledgling projects/companies/organizations for whom success means connecting with the correct audience. For them, clear visual ideas can suss out and showcase the gist of whatever-is-awesome in their hitherto anonymous project. It can provide the focus and clarity necessary to boldly state “X is the most important thing here” and rally people around it, helping form a shared foundation. These are all good, honorable functions of good branding, which can foster a deeper understanding of an idea, catalyze more efficient conversation, and generally make the world of ideas and visuals easier to navigate in some small way. The process of taking a pure idea and turning it into a visual signifier is highly interesting to me. It trades directly in the vocabulary of culturally-assigned signs and symbols that float around, unacknowledged, in our everyday. We’re always learning what these visual vocabularies mean, but it is rarely articulated and is always changing. When sitting down to make an identity, you become painfully aware that the tiniest adjustments to a shape or a color can yield completely different meanings. It feels like learning a new language every time.

Designing the OFFBOOK identity was no different. The show’s name is a readymade illustration, so I knew from the outset that I wanted to create an isometric logo that gave the illusion of 3-dimensional space.  They didn’t really need a bug—the action of the text running off of one surface and onto another would be what was necessary and sufficient to describe the nature of the programming.

As described in the video, I began by making 3-D mockups: just printing out the word OFFBOOK onto little slips of paper, bending it in a variety of ways, and then flattening it again through photography:

I realized later that I could get crisper, more exciting results using the scanner and moving the paper mid-scan:

Here are a bunch of the more successful explorations:

And the final that I sent to OFFBOOK:

Just returned home from a few weeks traveling and speaking at Semi-Permanent Sydney and Auckland to a luscious pile of printed maps from Herb Lester in my mailbox. Collaborating with the mapmakers a few weeks back, I designed a map along their specific-and-wildy-appropriate theme of “Paris for Pleasure Seekers.” (Why else go to Paris?)

Written/researched by Jane and Ben from Herb Lester and designed/illustrated by me, the map explores the best opportunities to delight the senses in the City of Light, per its description:

We are unapologetic. With this guide to Paris our goal is simple: pleasure in its varied forms, gastronomic, aesthetic, romantic.

Our explorations have yielded the 30 locations contained within, each of which has the capacity to awaken something in the visitor. It may be the simple joy of a cooling glass of tart citron pressé, the bustle of a market, the elegance of Le Bon Marché or the belle-époque opulence of Le Train Bleu. There are places to buy fine cheese and eat oysters, restaurants with private rooms purpose-built for seduction, and bookshops and museums to indulge other senses entirely. 

My role in the process entailed first confronting the fact that (even as a hardened, map-obsessed New Yorker) I find Paris daunting…and a bit insider-y. (Almost certainly due to the fact that I opted for German in school.) Fantasies of flawless Parisian romance and the perfect cheese experience collide with a myriad of logistical confusions. Streets abruptly change names or disappear, business hours are oftentimes mysterious or undisclosed. Keeping my own experiential gripes in sight, I aimed to make as practical & usable a map as possible—marking streets, arrondissements, and landmarks—along with those all-important points of sensory debauchery.

Since Herb Lester is known for their design, I also spent quite a bit of time finessing the style of the map. (A city so heavily romanticized in text and film defies an unmediated reading—so I freely incorporated some of  my favorite Parisian influences: 60‘s pop records, Godard’s style, a little La Durée coloring, etc, they’re all there.) For the front cover, I illustrated a giant, blinking “P” light—based on my fantasy of how the 3-dimensional mechanical signs of the Moulin-Rouge-era might have looked.

The guide on the verso is filled with smaller illustrations, bookending the guide’s sections:

Beginning with a Google map from Jane, I traced the main streets and arrondissements using illustrator.

In Photoshop, I then added color, layered in some textures from actual printed ephemera, and added some photographic lighting effects (subtle vignetting, etc) in order to showcase the beauty of the city’s constellations of boulevards.

Paris is an interesting city to draw, as the city-plan itself embodies a distinct philosophy of how a place should look and how it should be experienced. Georges Hassmann, the designer of this system of axises wrote that “geometry and graphic design play a more important role than architecture itself” and designed the streets to accentuate Paris’s best features from street level. Monuments and key buildings approach the pedestrian slowly and can be fully enjoyed in the parallax perambulation of a roudabout. It is a city of dramatic strolls. (To learn more about the dark side/human cost of the design of modern Paris, read a bit on the history of Haussmannization.)

And… maps are for sale here!

“Springtime in New York / when demolishing a building brings the smell of 1890 to the breeze.” —Jonathan Richman, Springtime in New York

I recently finished up some press invitations for a Brooklyn Philharmonic concert. They incorporate the borough’s handsomest of street-features: the brownstone row house, as well as historical maps, typography, and a fake-newspaper-as-a-concert-program. Led by Artistic Director, Alan Pierson, the Philharmonic takes an inspired approach to concert-theming (like Russian Cartoon Music from last year ), creating experiences engineered with surprising little historical touches. This most recent concert, entitled Brooklyn Village, explored the history of life in the borough (once a farming village, then an autonomous city) and highlights the dramatic way that Brooklyn has shape-shifted over time. Here’s DUMBO way before Two Trees ᔥ Brooklyn Historical Society Blog—

The concert included disparate works such as the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s own inaugural performance from 1857 (a piece from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony) and snippets from Sufjan Steven’s “BQE”—weaving this musical history together with dialogue, projections, and other narrative details.

The printed materials for the evening needed to reflect the odd state of place that is Brooklyn—one that is simultaneously awash in its own history and rapidly-changing present.  I wanted to nail down some of the constants of Brooklyn life, while making something that didn’t slavishly adhere to standards of times-past. Street life and street interactions define Brooklyn (for me, at least): public, private, and municipal realities overlap here much more readily than in other places I’ve visited. So I sought out maps first.

The invitation itself was originally slated to be a fairly traditional map, but I ended up screening back the map to minimize competition with the invitation text, enhancing legibility. I Photoshopped-in some of the lettering, hand-drew some of it, and then used modified fonts for the rest.

I added a burst of resplendent perforations to the invitation surface:

This inner invitation sheet arrives folded-up map-style and is delivered within a sleeve shaped like the most salient of Brooklyn architectural mascots: the brownstone! The reverse side is printed with Victoria upholstery patterns, a bit of interior decor which can be reconfigured by folding the map in different ways. Removing the inner invitation entirely reveals a peek into brownstone life with its semi-anonymous silhouettes of human drama.

The sleeves turned out pretty clean + crisp, but there were many surreal/awesome registration misadventures along the way—

The program for the performance also borrows from historical ephemera. In the form of a shrunken period newspaper, it is filled with contextualizing stories from the Brooklyn Phil’s past, stories revealing inspiration for  pieces in the performance, and fictional news stories about the composers themselves (Sufjan Stevens is detained by the NYPD, for example, for wandering aimlessly on the BQE.) It looks a little like a Brooklyn Daily Eagle from the early 1900s, but I took liberty with the type treatments. (The kerning on those early newspapers would drive modern readers mad.) Here is the whole pdf if you want to take a gander.

It sounds like it was an amazing performance, which I regrettably missed (I stayed in and finished another project instead and am now kicking myself).  However, I’m also working on materials for the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s fundraising gala, which I anticipate to be and equally inspired experience (and will have an affordable after party), so I’m eager to beat out my workaholic tendencies and get out there to see it in full!

On Friday, we unveiled a system for attribution on the web called Curator’s Code.

Initially, I was ever-so-slightly skeptical about the Curator’s Code. Creating a formalized “system of attribution for internet content” sounded a bit like piling on rules—and perhaps even creating limitations—in the blissfully limitless (and essentially anarchic) space of the internet. And then I spoke to Maria more about it… (and, immediately inspired, signed-on to create a visual presence for this new movement.)

Maria, who writes the blog, Brainpickings, and works as a contributor to the Atlantic (among a half-dozen other hats she wears) is in the business of content curation+creation—and speaks passionately about attribution as an act of ethical responsibility and an act of creativity. Through attribution, we acknowledge authorship: the creative work of the artists, writers, musicians, et al. who have created the content in the first place (an ethical must in a culture where more powerful entities can exploit this free-floating labor. ↬ Serfing the Web) But through attribution, we also simultaneously give weight to “content curation” itself as a form of authorship—a creative act  (from a real person’s point of view) which adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

On a philosophical level, by attributing sources, we also honor the very concept of discovery. Any one who has lost themselves in hours of reading+clicking on the web and have found themselves wandering down a rabbit hole of links, knows that this can be a magical thing. Interconnectedness is, undoubtedly, one of the preeminent superpowers of the internet as a medium—one that has the potential to better and more realistically maps the flow/exchange of ideas than other mediums. And the ways that those connections happen can be fascinating.  Maria argues that this meta-narrative of where information comes from might be just as interesting as the content itself.

There are two ideas implicit in the Curator’s Code, which made me fall in love with the project:

1.) As there is value in content, there is also value in making the interconnectedness of this content transparent.  By leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for others, we are acting good stewards to others’ ability to discover, learn, interpret, and process. Rather that hoarding it for ourselves, why not acknowledge that influence and knowledge are gift economies? ↬ Lewis Hyde

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.” — Chuck Palahniuk ᔥ Curator’s Code

2.) By celebrating that ideas do migrate and evolve, we work at dispelling that annoying/dangerous myth of the creative-genius-hit-with-a-lightning-bolt. By paying homage to the fact that all creation is cumulative, collaborative, and gradual, we can evolve the conversation about creativity beyond the inaccurate binary of original/plagiarized. This inaccurate binary worldview is oppressive (at this very moment, there are a hundred art school students simultaneously mouthing “it’s all been done before!” as a lame, but sincerely-felt excuse.) If you disagree with my assessment of creativity, please stop reading this now and see if Jonathan Lethem can sway you with his essay, The Ecstacy of Influence. He makes the argument that every idea has a life independent of its maker. The more that these life-of-ideas gets mapped, the more we actually/functionally defend creative work as a culture.

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Given the weightiness of the content and the delicacy needed in the tone, the design of the Curator’s Code had to walk a fine line. It had to inspire, rather than scold. It had to portray attribution as small acts of activism (enriching the web), rather than simply being an “annoying rule” to follow. So… I decided to have legitimate, honest fun with it.

When Maria began talking about the notion of attribution opening up rabbit holes, I thought, “why not make the site itself a rabbit hole!?!” So for each quote that inspired Maria’s thinking, I illustrated a tunnel of attribution—receding back into the infinite space of the web. It is a completely literal (and self-consciously absurd) picture of the depth brought to the internet through the interconnectedness of attribution. The source-sites fall back in space, and can be casually explored with a responsive, parallax rollover state.

We did it. We poked a hole in the internet to show why the internet is awesome. The Internet is burning a hole of discovery through your very screen!

Read more about Curator’s Code on Brain Pickings, on The New York Times, in The Atlantic, or in Wired UK.

Credit where credit is due: Cameron and Jonnie built the handy-dandy attribution bookmarklet. Ciprian Badea helped me code by building a large part of the site.

A few things that I designed are now for sale on the internet!: a benefit poster and a couple of temporary tattoos.

I created a “children’s poster for adults (or for children)” for Help Ink. Proceeds benefit Room to Read, an organization that promotes literacy by improving access to books and education (with a focus on improving gender equality in education) all around the world. They do amazing work and their statistics correlating literacy with mortality is truly shocking.

When Drew from Help Ink emailed me last year inquiring about a poster, I was already knee-deep in obsessing over voluminous type and wondered if there was a connection here. I felt that the weighty physicality of the type could be turned into a simple reflection on the uneasy authority of our language system. Letterforms can be beautiful, but they are also very strange symbols. During language acquisition, when children begin to map “things” to “constellations-of-letterforms,” this strangeness must be clearly evident. Small tweaks can alter meaning drastically. Letters can be rearranged to create their opposite meaning. Design signals embedded in the written word can deconstruct or wholly change the meaning of that word. The system under which we communicate with words is logically-flawed, fantastical, and surprising (all observations presented and explored to great effect by many of my type-art/design heroes*.)

This print, although it looks like a drawing, is primarily a collage. I scanned in bits and pieces of the textures from etchings in rare books and made a new composition. (There is a little bit of hand-drawing in there, but it is mostly old books that you see, build up piece by piece to make something entirely different.)

Get it here and support a really great organization!

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On a lighter note: Tatt.ly’s! Tina of Swiss Miss has an incredibly fun online shop called Tattly, which secures your ability to cover your body in your favorite artists and designers work without the commitment or pain of a real tattoo.

I made a tattoo encouraging the beholder to “Carpe Futurum!”—a cry to defend the future against the plague of short-term thinking (although you can probably both seize the day and seize the future, they aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive sentiments.)

My new Tatt.lys, requested especially by Tina are numbers, plain and simple. You can now wear your anniversary on your arm, broadcast your love of the number three, or throw a birthday party for the single-digit crowd.

*For more on this type of work and these ideas, refer to Ed Ruscha, Tauber Auerbach, Mario Hugo, Steve Lambert…and there are probably another dozen artists that deal with this idea (albeit in different ways) in their work to whom I am indebted…