Print is dying. With the recent shutterings of Domino, Craft, Cottage Living and a slew of magazines, and the layoffs at various newspapers, print is dying. That’s why it’s important for newspapers and magazines to reinvent themselves and make them relevant again in the 21st century.
That is why I love that the New York Times is innovating. With their special interactive story features to T Magazine to their Fashion Week collection browser, they are embracing the print killer and creating new opportunities for readers to engage with the news, and for advertisers to speak to their audiences.
The New York Times latest endeavor is a public beta of sorts, along the same vain as some Google products, and is called Article Skimmer. It basically takes the articles and lays it out in a nice, neat, easy-to-skim grid. It’s not Flash, just DHTML, and it’s quite lovely.
One of my favorite apps in the iPhone App Store is Ocarina (iTunes link) by Smule. It turns your iPhone into an electronic wind instrument. The interface is not anything I’ve seen before and it’s just fun—even for a non-musical guy like me. The best thing about it is listening to what other people are playing around the world right now.
So this morning comes news that after selling one million copies of Ocarina, Smule has secured $3.9 million in funding. I’m very happy to see some money come out of such innovation.
Yesterday the design and advertising community was abuzz over the leaked presentation deck for the new Pepsi logo by the Arnell Group. Yes it is absolutely a work of pure horseshit. But, I was reminded of the decks that my colleagues and I create every day and how somebody’s horseshit may be someone else’s chocolate cake.
We all have to sell our work. Ideally the concepts and ideas come from a well-formed strategy, but that doesn’t always happen. Many times the strategy must back into the creative. In other words sometimes you might have a great idea that you’ll need to justify after the fact.
This is even more true if you’re dealing with a purely formal exercise such as redesigning an iconic logo like Pepsi’s. A good design strategy would be to do the due diligence and look at the different historical variations of the logo and then just have at it, coming up with dozens if not hundreds of iterations. But afterwards when you find the new design you subjectively like, you’re going to need to explain in an intelligent, tangible, evidence-based manner detailing how you arrived at that solution—especially if you’re getting paid $1 million for the effort. So that’s when you break out the horses and shovels.
Update:Validation that the Arnell strategy deck is all BS from a freelancer:
“(the logo design) nothing to do with any of that bullshit on the PDF, that was (I believe) just a way to keep the client entertained (like we, viewers of this PDF were) and make them feel like their money (1.2B) was worth something.”
Welcome to Lunarboy.com 4.0. I have actually been working on this version for a while now, having started the design of it back in April 2008. This is a far cry from when I pulled an all-nighter to get version 1.0 up back in 1999 when I applied for a job at USWeb/CKS.
The goal with v4.0 was to convert it from being primarily a portfolio to being primarily a blog. The portfolio still has a strong presence but I felt that I needed an outlet for just random thoughts about things I’m interested in. This was before I discovered Twitter, but it’s still a valid goal.
This site uses the same backend as v3.0—the excellent ExpressionEngine. The markup and CSS were coded by hand using lovely tools like TextMate and CSSEdit. More details available in the colophon.
Although he has been designing since the seventh grade, Roger Wong officially began his design career in 1995. He is currently group creative director at LEVEL Studios in San Jose.
This site is an outlet for his musings on design, advertising and culture.
