It's all in the curves

Driving through Beverly Hills with the windows down, I heard the driver of a passing Mercedes utter an involuntary “Whoooaahhh!” that rushed past in the slipstream. I realize that flashy new cars tend to draw an inordinate amount of attention in the first few months of their life, but Beverly Hills is about as jaded an environment as you find, and the R8 was the subject of more cellphone photos than a Lindsay Lohan-Paris Hilton bar brawl.

And when so many cars hide their motors under a plastic shroud, the R8’s overachieving 4.2 is proudly displayed under a transparent cover for all to see. You can even order twin white L.E.D. lights in the engine bay to bathe the motor in a soft glow when the parking lights are on. That’s cool.

The Times has a gushing review of the 2008 Audi R8. This beauty is like the one reason why I wouldn't want to save the environment by buying a Prius. Look at those curves! Never mind the 0-198mph in 15 seconds or whatever, that thing is just flat-out hot.

Designers are people too

Yesterday I went to MoMA and happened upon their collection of all the covers of Emigre magazine. Designer's paradise! Hee, this one was quite cheeky too:



I actually went there to see the Jeff Wall exhibit, which was absolutely lovely. It's so refreshing to see real life portrayed in art, in full size, in full detail. Ok much of it was staged real life, but nonetheless, it was something recognizable and more relatable than abstract squares or interpretive conceptual video stuff. Also, having the photos mounted on lightboxes made them so alive, such that even the weeds growing from a sidewalk seemed interesting and poignant. There was this one photograph (heh I typed painting by accident; they kinda had the same aura about them) called "Eviction", which showed an aerial view of lower class suburban street, where in the middle there were two officers grabbing a man on a lawn and a woman running towards them. That was the focus, but you see three doors down a man holding his son with another son on his bike just peddling along. Then you go deeper in, and you see there's a monorail in the background, and between the monorail and the roofs of the houses in the foreground you see another street, where other people are just going about their day. Beyond that you see the taller buildings and a bit of the skyline. This is a suburban neighborhood, this is life! It was magnificent.

* * *

Random bits of designery ephemera:
- Children and Cameras, animated by Chris Ware!

- A type designer talks about his work, including stuff about using the first font digitizing machine. It's like hearing a master craftsman at work.

(both via design info)

Redesigns

The New Yorker has recently gotten a facelift. Though I think it looks a bit too much like New York Magazine's site, it's definitely much better than before. I like the little box on the right with the links separated with semicolons, but it doesn't really look like a box of links.

Other notable recent redesigns: AIGA and White House. Hooray, the web is becoming prettier! Though designer Andy Rutledge had some choice words to say on the former, and pointed out the shortcomings of the latter a long time ago:

The fact is that this site has a host of design problems – real design problems that I’ll examine and suggest remedies for. Also, there’s that business of the website for a seat of world power conveying very little in the way of gravitas..

The entire header area is crowded and ugly. Yes, ugly counts, especially when you’re talking about typography...

The bottom line is that this page’s design fails to communicate anything except inconsistency and blandness. While it should be engaging, it’s boring instead. While it should be intuitive and affordable, it’s confusing instead. Oh, and the code and construction of the page is utter crap (to use developer lingo).

He always reminds me of why design is so important.

Edward Tufte, An Academic and Otherwise Life

Last night, Professor Edward Tufte came to speak at an IIC seminar. He's a pioneer in the study of visual data representation, and though I haven't read his books, they are reputably beautifully written and crafted (he's designed all of them himself). Well you can read the rest of his impressive CV on his site.

The talk was at a room in the Biolabs, a quite hideous building, and getting to the room involved walking through a narrow hallway flanked with labs and having huge tankards of various gases and things obstructing the way. (It always amuses me to see the little shelves outside each door that serve to hold bottles of Coke and other beverages. Contamination threat!)

He looked very classy in a dark jacket and white shirt, no tie. He spoke of his life, of various "turning points" that got him where he was today, and at the end showed slides of his huge metal artworks (we also got free posters of them). Here're some notes from the talk:

- He began with an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

- from the age of 15, he knew he wanted to be a scholar

- his mother told him, there are no shoulders to cry on

- in high school in Beverly Hills, he met people for the first time that were as smart or smarter than him; they'd play classical music games where a part of a piece would be played and instead of identifying the piece, they'd have to identify the conductor

- The Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, where he once had a fellowship, was where people went to finish their books or decide what to do. It was described by some as the "leisure of the theory class."

- on a paper he wrote, one professor noted that a paragraph he wrote had echoes of Veblen. That's when he realized that he should be working in the "big leagues." (This was a theme he focused on a lot. He described the statistician John Tukey as in another league apart from the rest of the brilliant faculty.) He needed to work on "forever knowledge," whereas the most recent book on political science was filled with names and dates like Gerald Ford and 1976, which aren't eternal. He thought that up until then he'd been choosing problems to work on based on whatever came by his desk, or by a hallway chat with a colleague. Problems should be chosen by thought, and he decided to choose ones that were a) important and which b) he could make progress on.

- when trying to publish his first book, Harvard University Press wouldn't print it because it was too expensive to print the charts and images. So he decided to publish it himself. To publish a book you need three things: a garage, a lot of money, and a book designer. He spent a summer working with a designer learning about typography and laying out the book.

- his first three books were set in lead, because there was no digital version of the font Bembo that was of high enough quality. For his latest book he worked with a designer to make his own version of Bembo, "ET Bembo." (eee, type design!)

- he values his "acute sense of relevance," of being able to parse out the most important information from the noise, so that one could start to get "leverage" on a problem. He wishes people can cultivate this skill.

- scholars should be publishing their work. There's a large support system that got them where they were, and they are very overprivileged to do what they do. So to give back, they should show people what they're working on, what they've learned. If you don't publish your work, it doesn't exist.

- when he brought curators to see his art pieces, they'd say "that reminds me of so-and-so": very few people now speak in terms of visual experience. They talk in metaphors, about how something reminds them of something else, not about what's right in front of them.

- his next project is to work on representations in 3 dimensions. We are all used to seeing representations on paper and on screen, but there are always aspects (like volume of space), that they don't adequately capture.

That's the gist of what I can remember. The IIC site should have a video of the whole thing soon. Apparently the video is for internal uses only, according to Tufte's site.

Today I went to a forum about positive psychology and its links with Christianity. I'm too tired from reading, or attempting to read, this, so, til tomorrow.