May 2007 Archives
Rick Poynor sparked an online firestorm when he took on design blogs (Speak Up in particular) in the May/June issue of Print. The upcoming long weekend presents an ideal opportunity to catch up with this often-heated debate. One of the most lacerating commentaries I've encountered on the subject can be found on Joe Clark's Fawny.blog. Clark is a Toronto-based writer and business consultant whose ferocious broadside brings to mind the bat-wielding high-school principal (played by Morgan Freeman in the movie Lean on Me) with whom he shares a name. Sample sentence: "Why are we even having a debate about Poynor-style unreadable, unillustrated, turgid, overintellectualized design writing on the one hand and design blogs on the other?"
I caught two interesting presentations at yesterday's AIGA Design Resource Expo at the Puck Building in Soho.
Strollerderby's Kelly Mills expresses excitement about Target's new line of pink sporting goods, which includes soccer balls, golf clubs, tennis rackets, and baseball gloves. Mills hopes that increased availability of these items will help to encourage young girls to participate in sports. She also sees in this trend aesthetic implications for the adult world, writing, "My long range hope is that with more and more girls participating in athletic endeavors, we'll see some serious improvements in the current palette of black-red-orange-forest green-white-gold that dominates most sports."
Banksy gets the New Yorker treatment this week with a lengthy article that makes for a helpful introduction to the work and persona of the mysterious street artist. No, journalist Lauren Collins doesn't reveal Banksy's famously withheld identity, but she does provide extracts from an email interview she conducted with the man himself. The New Yorker's website also has a Banksy slideshow that includes a black-and-white image created especially for Collins--with no less cheek than you've come to expect.
A List Apart, the online magazine run by acclaimed firm Happy Cog, is conducting a comprehensive survey in which all "people who make websites" are invited to participate. The ALA staff hopes that the results will help to bring the loosely organized web-design community into sharper focus.
In Voice: AIGA Journal of Design, novelist David Barringer writes about the difficulties of taking his kids to Blockbuster, where straight-to-DVD horror movies with titles like Mr. Hell and The Pumpkin Karver share space on the new-release shelf with PG-rated major studio releases. Despite his best efforts, Barringer has been unable to prevent his young children from glimpsing the gory images on these DVD covers. As a result, he's suffered through "nights of nightmares on my street."
