After almost a thousand years of trying it out, I think it’s safe to say that the book as a way of publishing things is a success. Yet all the things that make books work are being abandoned in the latest tool to make ebooks. A “book” still means something made out of paper-like material; [...]
Author Archives: benjaminclemens
why make pictures?
September 13, 2010 – 10:55 pm
Top: Tricycle, Memphis, 1969-71 William Eggleston, Dye transfer print Over the last twenty-five years, I went to school to be an artist, abandoned that, became a designer, married, and had a daughter. After many life changes, I think about almost everything differently. But I still have this incoherent desire to make pictures, not much different [...]
David Foster Wallace and the Failure of Zen
February 24, 2010 – 12:56 am
David Foster Wallace, giving the commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, among many other things, said: I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head [...]
design and agile
October 6, 2009 – 3:15 pm
New methods for managing people making Web sites are big these days, with the most popular being Agile. Basically it boils down to making a small team of builders completely responsible for a project, and enforcing constant communication as people work on it in well-defined chunks. There are many engineer/programmer proponents for this, but few [...]
Republican House Districts Emit More Carbon per Capita
August 26, 2009 – 9:44 pm
Shown are U.S. House districts (average population of 650,000 people), red for Republican and blue for Democrats, with districts that emitted more carbon per capita last year shown in darker colors. I discovered project “Vulcan” at Purdue University, which is mapping carbon emissions on a detailed level in the US; very cool. I wondered whether [...]
data as interface: flow
July 16, 2009 – 11:31 pm
I believe that there are two kinds of ideas in the world: those that divide things into two types, and those that don’t… and then there’s a third, which tries to wriggle out of either. This is one of those. The basic idea: a better interface to data would be to turn the data itself [...]
Generation M: an Unmanifesto
July 14, 2009 – 10:44 am
The below is my attempt to remove the frothy and breathless tone from “Generation M manifesto” by Umair Haque, because I liked it in many ways. It is definitely more boring, but I hope more real as well. I don’t believe any manifesto can express the right amount of humility towards these questions, but it [...]
sharable media design convergence
April 21, 2009 – 9:38 am
Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook have seemingly converged on what has become the major reason to be connected to others on a social network: sharing short updates, links, photos, etc. A concept for mozilla’s Firefox also looks similar, and lifts ideas from iTunes to help organize things. The designs share some major elements: Publisher an area [...]
don’t hate the designers
March 21, 2009 – 8:17 pm
Douglas Bowman had to quit Google, and Valleywag explains it all for you (to hell with Owen!). I had a similar experience at Yahoo, so I’m only surprised Douglas lasted this long. The comments on Valleywag are really sad though; a palpable hostility towards “precious,” “childish,” “short-sighted” designers (you can look for yourself, I’m not [...]