I’ve started a new project and output of this project will be showcased on new website – Tangled Web of Vice. Simply put – I’ve superimposed quotes from Mad Men episodes on top of screen grabs from the scene I’ve pulled the quote from.
Making these quote-graphics wasn’t my original goal. It started out as an exercise to improve my penmanship after reading this depressing article in the New York Times. So I decided to practice my writing skills in my moleskin notebook, but I needed something to write. I wasn’t interested in starting a diary or journal (that’s what this site is for, sort of) and since the new season of Mad Men won’t start until 2012, I decided to start watching all my DVD sets and write down lines I like:

Once I had dozens of these quotes written down (and I started to feel a little better about my penmanship) I started reading them over and realized they would make great little graphic pieces:

Something about the simplicity really appealed to me.
From here, I thought I’d see what adding a screen grab from the show would do it:

The words had impact on their own, but adding a screen grab behind them gave the piece emotion and context. I also crop the images individually – they’re not all dropped in at full frame. The crop amps of the level of impact and emotion.
I’ve started arbitrarily with Season 2 of Mad Men, and I’m going to continue to create these in no particular order. It will be my daily graphics exercise.
Enjoy.

Electronista: Huadian promises to directly clone iPad 2 (my emphasis):

Chinese electronics maker Huadian has stated it will soon build a tablet that will mimic many of the design features of Apple’s very popular iPad 2. These include an alloy contstruction, 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen and identical 8.8mm thickness. According to GizChina, the device will be noticeably inferior on the inside and sport an 800MHz AMLogic CPU, 512MB of RAM and 8GB of flash memory. There is no word on the OS, but it’s likely to be Android or a freely distributed system.

Imitation is the first phase of the creative process, it’s how you find your voice – be it music, design, or art, but as a final output? Yes, I know about the Chinese culture of shanzai, but I still think direct duplication like this is bullshit.

Skype is not profitable. It’s really more like a moderately good post-impressionist painting than a company: it only makes money for people when it changes hands.

—Andy Ihnatko

via Ben Brooks

All these years of living and I’m still surprised to see Q come before R, S, and T. Q should be hangin with V, W and X. I’m sure of it.

via my brother on Twitter

NYTimes: How Manhattan’s Grid Grew

via Kottke

A big congratulations to my team at Roundarch and the team at Bloomberg Sports on the new Trade Analyzer 2011 app for iPad – especially my design colleague Silvia Brown for the beautiful work she did on the interface design.
With that said, what makes this application great isn’t just the great interface design but all the technology and databases and algorithms working behind the scenes. It’s the transitions between screens, the reaction of buttons to your touch. It’s about all the data getting pulled from MLB for the player cards.
Details, details, details.
As Steve Jobs has said, design isn’t just about how it looks, it’s about how it works.

From a comment on Phillip Greenspun’s review of the Motorola Xoom (via Daring Fireball):

I invented a drinking game a while ago.
For any article or other written piece about Android, take a drink if any of the following are in the article:

“Open” (take two hits for this one)

“expected to…”

“soon”

“when ____ arrives…”

“will be able to when…”

“update will enable…”

“in the next few ____…”

I have noticed many people seem to be less fans of Android and more anti-Apple. Microsoft is barely hanging on with its phone OS and they’re nowhere to be seen in the tablet game, so PC people have nowhere to go but Android, with all it’s inconsistencies and excuses – like why having Flash is great, except Flash doesn’t always perform great.

Why Leaders and Innovators Need Solitude to Do Good Work

Forty years of research on brainstorming shows that individuals produce more and better ideas than groups do. Studies also suggest that the path to excellence in many fields is not only to practice, but to practice alone. And creativity researchers have found that many highly creative people were shy and solitary in high school, and recall their adolescence with horror. (I explain all this in detail in my forthcoming book, QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.)

This is one of many reasons that introverts — who are more likely than others to carve out solitary time — are often very creative, and make unexpectedly fine leaders.

While a different idea, this brings to mind having one decision maker on on a project versus design-by-committee. As anyone who’s been on a project (design or otherwise) knows, when there isn’t a go-to person and everyone’s voice has to be heard and incorporated into the product, that product inevitably ends up a watered-down mess. Barely competent at many things, great at nothing.

We work because it’s a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.

—Charles Eames

via Frank Chimero who has some interesting words in reaction to the quote:

The Eames were sharks. One just has to read what Charles said. In work, it’s not that one project leads to the next, it’s that one subject leads to the next. If we’re really sniffing out solutions to the problems of people, then we’ll be going down some serious rabbit holes.

We don’t need to say “multi-disciplinary designer” any more. If we’re truly trying to make things that help all of us to live better, it’s implied and redundant.

*I stole that title from this isn’t happiness. I laughed my ass off, it was too perfect.

Bill Cunningham New York, a film by Richard Press:

The “Bill” in question is 80+ New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends and high society charity soirées for the Times Style section in his columns “On the Street” and “Evening Hours.” Documenting uptown fixtures (Wintour, Tom Wolfe, Brooke Astor, David Rockefeller–who all appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between, Cunningham’s enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. In turn, Bill Cunningham New York is a delicate, funny and often poignant portrait of a dedicated artist whose only wealth is his own humanity and unassuming grace.

I love documentaries, I love photography, I love New York, and this looks great.