Subtraction

I feel like I’ve just been relieved of a tremendous burden I never knew that I had. For serious, I am so happy to learn the story of how Trapper Keepers came to be. For those who did not grow up with them as a coveted school supply&#58’;

“Launched in 1978 by the Mead Corporation (which was acquired by ACCO Brands in 2012&#41, Trapper Keeper notebooks are brightly colored three-ring binders that hold folders called Trappers and close with a flap. From the start, they were an enormous success: For several years after their nationwide release, Mead sold over US$100 million of the folders and notebooks a year. To date, some 75 million Trapper Keepers have flown off store shelves.”

Read the whole story ̵ which I admit is somewhat unremarkable, but which I savored word for word nevertheless — at Mental Floss. Via Digg.

Artist Diem Chau carves miniature sculptures on the tips of writing implements.

See more at her site. Via Potluck.

Hustwit is the director of three already classic documentaries about design: “Helvetica,” “Objectified,” and “Urbanized.” For each, he scored copious interviews with design luminaries, including:

“Paola Antonelli, Alejandro Aravena, Chris Bangle, Michael Bierut, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Neville Brody, Tim Brown, David Carson, Matthew Carter, Candy Chang, Yung Ho Chang, Wim Crouwel, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Tobias Frere-Jones, Experimental Jetset, Dan Formosa, Sir Norman Foster, Naoto Fukasawa, Jan Gehl, Jonathan Hoefler, Jonathan Ive, Hella Jongerius, Bruce Katz, David Kelley, Rem Koolhaas, Rahul Mehrotra, Bill Moggridge, Marc Newson, Oscar Niemeyer, Enrique Peñalosa, Michael C. Place, Rick Poynor, Dieter Rams, Karim Rashid, Alice Rawsthorn, Stefan Sagmeister, Paula Scher, Erik Spiekerman, Davin Stowell, Jane Fulton Suri, Massimo Vignelli, Rob Walker, Hermann Zapf, and many more… over 75 of the world’s most creative and innovative people. ”

Because of the constraints of documentary film length, his movies only include a small fraction of the wisdom conferred in those interviews. Hustwit is now raising money via Kickstarter to turn the interviews in a book.

The final product will be a “high-quality paperback, approximately 400 to 500 pages long,” and is being designed by Michael C. Place. Find out more and back the project at Kickstarter.

Highly entertaining images captured from The Stasi Museum, which immortalizes the paraphernalia and tradecraft of East Germany’s infamous state security apparatus. These shots highlight the Cold War era’s infatuation with hidden cameras, like the one below, with its lens disguised as a coat button, allowing the camera itself to be concealed under the garment.

Other examples include cameras hidden in tree trunks, watering cans and of course brief cases — straight up Sean Connery style. See the images here.

“Have you ever felt like being alone in the world, without communications and the comfort of our daily life? Well I have a word for you, the Arctic.”

Photographer Jonathan Björklund took these breathtaking photos of the Arctic. They are consistent with the Arctic you see in your imagination, but unexpectedly more colorful, and about a hundred times more majestic. See all the photos here.

This is a crowdfunding proposal to build a new kind of user-upgradeable phone made of modular parts. The concept lets the user swap out components as necessary, so if you feel like you want a faster processor or a better camera or a bigger battery, you can just pop out the old one and replace it with a new one. Similarly, if a single part breaks — like, say, the screen — just that part can be replaced, saving you the pain of having to toss out the whole unit or buy an entirely new one.

The video is incredibly well done and very compelling, though it does seem like an idea that’s too good to be true. I know very little about industrial design but it strikes me that there’s a certain naïveté to the idea that a commercially and technologically viable phone can be made from a fully modularized, endlessly reconfigurable system of parts. Then again, maybe we’re at a stage in technology where a little bit of naïveté or audaciousness is all that’s necessary to build something truly amazing. If the Phonebloks team can do it, it will certainly be that. Watch the full video.

Ameet Ranadive, product manager at Twitter, dives into the conspicuous gap between consumer time spent on mobile devices and ad spending on mobile devices. In short, ad spending lags consumer attention, and mobile usage and behavior are the reason why. These are hard problems but they’re solvable — and they represent a tremendous opportunity. Full article here.

This post by startup Intercom is a little self-serving, but it does hit the nail on the head for something that is happening right now: a fundamental shift towards a new interface paradigm based on cards, or compact, specialized, focused units of mobile-optimized functionality. To its credit, Google has been talking about this for some time, and others are starting to concur. In my view, cards could very well be what the mobile web is supposed to look like. Read more here.

Photographer and friend Joseph Holmes project “The Booth” captures the dying days of film projection with these beautiful portraits of the people who run the projectors and the hidden rooms that house them.

You can view the entire series online, but starting in October and running until early February, you can see prints in person at The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York.

This is the kind of nonsense that results from fundamentally misunderstanding what a logo is. As has been widely reported (and lamented by designers), Yahoo engaged in a bit of stunt identity design over the past month or so, fielding thirty re-imaginings of the company’s logo, one per day, You can see the first twenty-nine on this page, and when it loads in your browser, don’t feel bad if you think for a moment that you’ve stumbled across one of those sites that promises you hundreds of fonts for free — most of these logos are half-hearted at best.

To Yahoo’s credit, they did not put the logos forward as candidates, i.e., they refrained from asking the Internet to vote on them. That didn’t stop market research startup Survata from doing just that, though.

“We were curious about which logo consumers preferred as the best fit for the Internet giant, so we used the Survata logo testing tool to find out. We asked 12,725 respondents to pick their favorite of five logo variants (randomly selected from the 28 variants released prior to publication).”

Just skimming the results they’ve published on the Survata blog demonstrates the absurdity of both their own research and the fact that Yahoo put these logos out into the world. This “face-off chart” in particular has all the charm of pulling out a spreadsheet on a date.

A logo is really a visual manifestation of all the complex ideas, values and people that fuel a company — crunched and munged and somehow blacksmithed together to look simple and understandable. It does nothing for one’s confidence in the Yahoo brand to see that the company cares so little for its public image that it would be willing to float thirty random, meaningless expressions of itself out there, expressions that have clearly not been through the real process of logo development. It just looks like Yahoo doesn’t take this seriously.

Imagine that I threw four wheels and a mess of auto parts together, with no regard to how they actually function or work as a single machine, and said, “What do you think of this car?” Actually it’s as if I did that thirty times. And then someone came along and asked 12,000 people to vote on their favorite pile of wheels and auto parts. What good could come of that?

Feast on Yahoo’s thirty or so logos here, and read the Survata report here. Also, if you’re a company in the market for a new logo, please don’t follow these examples.

Jayse Hansen designs imaginary interfaces for Hollywood movies. His credits include “The Avengers” and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” In this interview, Hansen talks about how he came to specialize in FUIs (fictional user interfaces)”; “Star Wars” was an early influence, but I was happy to see him mention being influenced by K.I.T.T.’s then-fantastical dashboard in “Knight Rider” too. He also discusses his process, and how his work is an offbeat mix of interface design, motion design, research, staging, animation and client service. Great stuff. Full article here.

Sketch, which I now use for the majority of my design work, has a new version out today. It still lacks the feature that I want most — symbols/smart objects — but there are lots of promising improvements nevertheless.

Two of the biggest are integration with Sketch Mirror, a new iOS companion app that lets you preview your Sketch documents in real time, and background blur, which as the name suggests renders a Gaussian blur-like effect on anything directly beneath a shape set with this property.

In this example, the right half of the coffee cup image is obscured by a yellow rectangle set to 7% opacity, with a 10 pixel background blur. The blurring effect updates immediately when images below are moved on the canvas. Just in time for iOS 7, people.

(Image courtesy of Unsplash.)

More on the update here. By the way, while writing this post I just noticed that Bohemian Coding, the publishers of Sketch, cite an interview I did with .Net Magazine praising Sketch right on the app’s marketing page. Just to be clear, I am in no way associated with Bohemian Coding.

“In August of 1970 Lou Reed quit The Velvet Underground. This decision was followed by a severe mental breakdown and two long years of regret and isolation… These demos were recorded during the fall and winter of 1970. They reflect Lou at his lowest point. He didn’t make any more live appearances that year after leaving The Velvet Underground. The only thing he recorded were these twelve tracks. They are the first known recordings of Lou Reed as a solo artist.”

Twenty-eight-year old Japanese artist Kazuki Umezawa assembles digital collages from imagery he encounters online.

Nice enough stuff but not much better than lots of the stuff that used to be done in Mixel on iPad. Sniff. More on Umezawa’s work at Spoon & Tamago.

A petition to the World Meteorological Organization to switch away from naming extreme storms after normal people, e.g., Katrina, Sandy, Andrew, and instead name them after climate change deniers like Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann and Marco Rubio.

“Since 1954, the World Meteorological Organization has been naming extreme storms after people. As scientific evidence shows that climate change is creating increasingly frequent and devastating storms, and with climate scientists declaring these extreme weather events as the new normal, we propose a new naming system. A system that names extreme storms caused by climate change after the policy makers who deny climate change and obstruct climate policy.”

The proposal is of course meant to provoke a laugh, but the accompanying video is surprisingly well made. Watch it and read more at Climatenamechange.org.

Photographer Charles Morgan Smith combed science fiction movies and television series to cull these various depictions of outer space. Shown together, it really becomes apparent how each creative team’s vision of the cosmos is unique.

More at It’s Nice That.

A new product from two students at The School of Visual Arts’ MFA Interaction Design program. Sticky Jots are pre-printed sticky notes that facilitate sketching and brainstorming for digital products. There are versions for user stories, for phone apps and tablet apps — and there are even clipboard-like device mockups of the iPhone and iPad that the stickies fit into, for more convincing presentation of your ideas. Sticky Jots come in several different combos, and they’re already sold out of their initial run, but you can pre-order the next run.

As a side note, the app POP — which stands for Prototype on Paper — lets you snap pictures of your sketches and make them interactive easily. More here.

My friend Erika at Mule Design Studio wrote a really salient follow-up to my post yesterday about designer founders of startups. It’s an essential complement to what I wrote, so I encourage you to read it in full on Mule’s blog.

Compiled by Andrew Losowsky and Jeremy Leslie to benefit Bob Newman, a legend of editorial art direction who suffered a serious accident earlier this year, leaving him in a coma. “My Favo(u)rite Magazine” features dozens of designers, writers and artists honoring their favorite magazines in text and images. It’s available for sale in standard and limited editions, with all proceeds going to Newman and his family. See also the full list of contributors.

In this video, veteran documentary photographer John Free gives five minutes of unrehearsed advice on how to become a better street photographer. His central concept is that tension is a major impediment to getting the right shot, and that practice — which is normally foreign to the art of photography even as it’s a core concept of most any other skill — is a key to “getting rid of tension.” It’s good stuff. Watch the video here.

Deakins is responsible for some of the most stunning and memorable cinematographic works of the past two decades, including almost every major Coen Brothers film and last year’s “Skyfall.” In this short piece for Vulture, he gives background on ten of his works. Full article here.