Khoi Vinh on the book Never Use Futura:
I’m so happy to see this new book by designer, writer, and historian Douglas Thomas all about the typeface Futura which, it’s worth noting, predated Helvetica by three full decades—and it looks as beautiful and timely as ever.
Futura is probably my favorite typeface that ships with macOS by default. It’s one of the few bundled with an OS with more weights than just Regular and Bold.
This week’s On the Media includes a discussion with the Tow Center’s Emily Bell, talking about a piece she wrote in The Guardian.
Yes, it’s about Twitter faves/likes/hearts. And yes, website design choices do influence user behavior!
I found myself not bookmarking, as I would have done a day earlier, a horrifying image retweeted by journalists depicting men using phones to film a woman being stoned to death for adultery. I did not “like” let alone “love” the image but wanted to note it as important. We must have a system which allows for capturing the significant as well as the appealing.
Jennifer Daniel on self-important rhetoric within the design field. I think this critique can easily be extended beyond the realm of design.
Loved this quote about professional provincialism:
“When you think about it—and I mean really think about it—everything is meat distribution engineering.”
—a meat distribution engineer
I am 100% in favor of “flesh tones” reflecting a broader range than the usual “pasty white.”
On August 25th, Slack unveiled a new way for developers to connect to Slack, the “Add to Slack” button. It was the culmination of a great deal of work from many Slack employees, and just the beginning of what we have in store for Slack in the near future. Today, though, I want to talk about a seemingly small detail that has been more important to me than I would have expected: the skin color of the hand in the launch graphics.
I’m also 100% in favor of writing up the thinking behind these kinds of choices.
Diógenes, Brown Person: This hand should totally be brown. I’m brown.
Diogenes, Person: I’m trying to get good design work done and get this project out, not become an activist and start a movement or something.
Diógenes, Brown Person: It’s not a big deal, you’re the designer, you get to make it brown.
Diogenes, Person: Yea but, I’m going to ask Matt to do it, that’s like, making a thing of it.
More of us should make a thing of it. Especially us pasty folk.
This makes me want to stop whatever it is I’m doing, slam my laptop shut, and go spend the rest of the day at a used bookstore.
Animation by Henning M. Lederer, music by Jörg Stierle. Cover images from Book Worship and Julian Montague Project.
Link via BoringPostcards
“Design is communication; communication is political.”
via Andre
I just put some finishing touches on the subsite for Sanja Iveković’s exhibition Sweet Violence.
Designed by Shannon Darrough, it follows a similar approach we used with the Francis Alÿs site, maintaining a spare and understated presentation.
I’ve been tinkering with a new design for this site for a few months and have finally gotten to the point where it feels polished enough to start using. It’s not a huge departure from what was here before, but I’ve made some structural changes to how the WordPress theme works that should make it easier for me to maintain and improve. The old theme was ambitious, I invented my own object-oriented template system that shunned the well established conventions of making WordPress themes. This is all fine and good when a site first launches, but over time I forgot how all the parts fit together and was left puzzled by my earlier choices. This new theme is much more straightforward, no PHP fanciness this time around.
I did indulge a bit in some front-end fanciness though. You may notice there’s a new header element that gradually changes in response to your mouse movement. The gradations of green squares correspond to regions of the page, but rotated 90 degrees. If you move your mouse up or down you’ll see changes in the header, only your mouse movements show up horizontal instead of vertical. So the more you browse below the fold, the more visual changes will appear in the header toward the center and right. All this is private to your browser (and saved, per-browser, using something called JavaScript localStorage), I’m not sending any of the mouse movement data to the server.
Aside from that I’ve mostly just trimmed back some text in the sidebar, added a new archives interface in the footer, and beefed up my links to projects and friends. It’s still a work in progress, but with a bit more fit and finish I could see releasing the theme for others to use.
