Rome is a beautiful city to visit and be a tourist, but it is also a place that can show you how to be. For those who are visiting there, I made some notes, with some literary quotes, to try to help the place be more alive. Invisible City: Rome — A Booklet of Literature […]
Category Archives: beauty
Design is a good story
February 13, 2013 – 4:06 pm
(I’m going to build out the ideas for the talk I’m giving in April here. This post will be incomplete and changing.) (tl;dr: There are many stories in design, first the stories a team tells each other about what they want to make, then the stories describing what to make, then the story an audience or users […]
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 […]
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 […]
in praise of assholes
February 18, 2009 – 8:19 pm
Recently I’ve found myself having very unpleasant conversations with people about work. Often, both of us are in a bad situation, and there is no easy way to make the project better, only ‘least bad’ answers. It’s a negative situation. Dealing with the disappointment and upset in this situation often leads people to act badly, […]
my camera, the zone system, and twenty years
January 12, 2009 – 1:26 am
I’ve been taking pictures for a long time (far too long to have learned as little as I have!). When I was a teenager, I developed and printed black and white film, at the Salt Lake Art Center (now I can admit that I should have been paying for the darkroom time, but I simply […]
sarah is four!
October 23, 2008 – 4:14 pm
Sarah is becoming a big girl at a torrid rate! When I think of how fast it’s all happened I get into a weird emotional state of bliss and regret that I can’t hold on more tightly to her days as a baby. We’re so, so lucky to have her. I never knew what a […]