Quartz: Why major creative breakthroughs happen in your late thirties:

So why the late 30s? The most obvious factor is education: Scientists spend ages 5 through 18 in school, and then ages 18 through 30ish getting their academic degrees. Then a few years of learning on the job, and presto! You dig up an uncertainty principle. Meanwhile, scientific breakthroughs tend to be less common in old age because we invest less in learning as we get older, and our skills gradually become less relevant.

There’s evidence from the humanities, though, that genius doesn’t decline with age at all. Over 40% of both Robert Frost’s and William Carlos Williams’ best poems were written after the poets turned 50. Paul Cézanne’s highest-priced paintings were made the year he died.
I’m 36 years old, and a few years ago I got back into screen printing for the first time since college and since then I’ve been creating new designs on a regular basis.
In tandem to regularly creating art, I’ve been regularly updating a backlog of project ideas so I don’t forget them (I keep my lists in iOS app called Simplenote).
Why did I wait so long to start making art? I think it’s because I never had anything to say or express before now. For years I’ve been reading and learning and collecting things. Then I reached a point of supersaturation and things are precipitating out of my head.

Over the weekend I found a book on cartoonist Chris Ware for $2.76 in the discount bin of a bookstore. After flipping through the book for a few seconds, I realized I recognized Ware’s work when it was featured in the The New York Times Magazine (back when I used to buy the print edition on Sundays!).
The essay by Daniel Raeburn at the beginning of the book reveals Ware to be a fascinating artist:

In sum, comics are a map of the fourth dimension, composed not only of the intersection of words and pictures but also of words that act like pictures and pictures that act like words, with color and composition shaping the map with their own structure and emotional meaning. This requires Ware to be not only a writer, drawer and painter — an illustrator if you must — but a calligrapher, typographer and, to tie all the arts together, a graphic designer. When we extend the demands of comics from actuality to analogy and consider for a moment that Ware must create a world and portray convincingly every character who inhabits it, it is fair to say that Ware’s chosen art also requires him to be a casting agent, wardrobe artist, set designer and actor. In short, Ware has to work like a theatre director. Given that he also has to frame and crop our every view of this world, he also has to work like a cinematographer. He has to be a control freak.

One has to wonder why people shrugged off this confounding art as kid’s stuff. One also has to wonder why Ware stuck with it. For 40 to 50 hours a week, every week, for nearly 20 years. Ware has sat at his scarred drawing table composing one page additions to this most disrespected of all mediums. He has done this work in relative isolation, a part of no movement, no school and, until recently, for almost no money. When we consider this grind it is impossible to overestimate the role of grit in Ware’s honing of his art. As early as 1990. Ware was bucking himself up with these exhortations: “DON’T GET BITTER”, “DON’T STAGNATE”, RESPECT YOUR OBSESSIONS” and the quintessentially Wareian war cry, “VALUE YOUR WORTHLESSNESS”. Under these dictums he added, “READ A VARIETY OF THINGS” and, as a final commandment, “DON’T JUST READ COMICS!” This he added, Keep making stuff, too! Or the above will no be able to happen.” Ware’s latter two pronouncements and his postscript are a key to his art. By working on arts and crafts that would appear to have nothing to do with his art, Ware enriched not only his own comics but also our understanding of what comics require.
The book is called Chris Ware by Daniel Raeburn.

Inspired by Chris Ware

A few weeks ago, my buddy Jory Kruspe suggested I do a poster about KRS ONE.
I’ll admit KRS ONE gets a little too intense for me in a lot of the interviews I’ve watched of him, but I admire and respect the mark he’s put on Hip Hop. He’s a smart dude. MC’s Act Like They Don’t Know is one of my favorite hip hop tracks.
So here it is, a poster spelling out his acronymic hip hop name. The font? Black Slabbath.




A version of this entry first appeared on The Combustion Chamber

The news this week that Comcast is set to take over Time Warner Cable dropped like a bomb. The immediate, visceral reaction from most folks on the internet, and from writers actually paid to understand deals like this, is that there is little hope a merger between these two giants would be good for customers. But there are more than just cable customers at stake. The big get for Comcast isn’t the people who are watching television. Rather, it’s the internet.
If this deal is approved by government regulators, the merged Comcast/Time Warner behemoth will have more customers purchasing internet access than any other company in the United States. This becomes even more significant in light of the court ruling last month striking down the FCC’s net neutrality rules. If that ruling stands, and Congress fails to pass legislation restoring net neutrality, then a giant ISP such as Comcast stands to reap a whirlwind of profits, all for essentially doing nothing.
With millions upon millions of customers behind Comcast’s wall, businesses paying to allow faster access to their services online will essentially be paying extortion to Comcast. It will be a tax on American business. That is the game Comcast is playing. They are seeking to position themselves as a gatekeeper between American businesses and American consumers. With every transaction that takes place, they will get their cut. The larger the company becomes, the more impact they will have on the American economy’s ability to function.
If that seems unsavory, that’s because it is. It has the same feel of mob tactics (protection, extortion, hijacking, etc.) only with the imprimatur of government approval.

via Instagram

Editorially is shutting down. It was a site that allowed for collaborative editing and writing, and had gardered a lot of positive reviews.
Seems, despite being able to design a great product, they couldn’t make money off it:

WHY NOT JUST CHARGE FOR USE?

We thought of that, and in fact, it was always our plan to do so. But Editorially is a sophisticated application that requires a team of engineers to maintain and develop. Even if all of our users paid up, it wouldn’t be enough.
I’m not happy a great product failed, but that sounds like a pretty shitty business model.
After doing a little digging, their Crunchbase profile reveals they received Series A funding in January of 2012. Sounds like they didn’t come up with a monetization strategy in the 2 years since and the money ran out.
This is why I think in more cases than not, taking on investors in a new business is bad if you haven’t figured out your business model. Most companies don’t have the scaling power of Facebook or Twitter. Those guys can integrate advertising and be okay.
Supply chains, pricing models and marketing are just as important as how pretty your product is and how well it works.

Christopher Mims for Quartz:

Apple’s Mac desktops and laptops may still count for a fraction of the global market for PCs, but when you tally up all the computers (iPhones, iPads, etc.) on which people actually get things done, the number of computers sold by Apple exceeds the number of Windows-based PCs shipped worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2013.
When you realize that an iPhone 5s in 2014 has approximately the same specs (hard drive space, memory, speed) as an iMac from 2004, I don’t think it’s cheating at all to count iPhones and iPads as “PCs”. Hell, even people from Microsoft have said the tablet is a PC.

“I like to think the same words that hurt can heal. It’s a matter of how you pick them.”
—George Carlin


Taken from The Combustion Chamber

—Nas
Ain’t that true.

Jordan Price loves Apple and landed a job there, but his experience was shitty:

I tried to tough it out and look at the bright side of things. I was working at Apple with world-class designers on a world-class product. My coworkers had super sharp eyes for design, better than I had ever encountered before. I loved the attention to detail that Apple put into its design process. Every single pixel, screen, feature, and interaction is considered and then reconsidered. The food in the cafe was great, and I liked my new iPad Air. But the jokes, insults, and negativity from my boss started distracting me from getting work done. My coworkers that stood their ground and set boundaries seemed to end up on a shit list of sorts and were out of the inner circle of people that kissed the producer’s ass. I started to become one of those people that desperately wanted Friday evening to arrive, and I dreaded Sunday nights. Few of my friends or family wanted to hear that working at Apple actually wasn’t so great. They loved to say, “Just do it for your resume.” or “You have to be the bigger man.” or “You just started. You can’t leave yet.”
As Price points out, he was a contractor, not a full-time employee. They shouldnt, but sometimes contractors have a shittier experience than salaried employees. Sometimes they have a better experience. Sometimes salaried employees who aren’t in the inner “cool” circle have a shittier experience than those inside the circle.
Your perception of a company all depends on who you are and what you do in relation to that company.
I had a great experience at the last company I worked at. I look back happily at the 5.5 years I worked there. It wasn’t sunshine and rainbows every single day, but shit, that’s why it’s called work.
Once while I was still working there I decided to look it up on Glassdoor.com and see what people were (anonymously) saying about it. What i found was a huge discrepancy between reviews. Generally speaking, the lower someone was in the pecking order, the more negative their comments and perception were for their company. Given I was an associate creative director and part of management, the negative comments were foreign to my experience.
This is why I think sometimes it’s better for designers to work at smaller companies earlier in their career and move to bigger companies as they gain experience and grow their portfolios. Junior-level designers typically end up doing a lot more production (read: non-creative) work at large companies than at smaller companies.
Sometimes you work with assholes. Sometimes you’re an asshole. Sometimes you join a company on the downslope and people are leaving in droves and everything sucks and you find out from the people leaving that last year was the awesome year where management flew everyone out to the headquarters and paid for open bars and hotel rooms and gave away prizes.
It all depends. Everyone’s perspective is different.
The older I get the more a realize, even if you do land a job at a truly great company, there are very few jobs that are as glamorous or cool as they look. Once you get an inside peek at a company or an industry and you see how the sausage gets made, your perspective changes. There were tons of design agencies in New York City I wanted to work at when I began my career but then I worked for a few years and I found out that beneath the amazing website, portfolio and client list a lot of places were chop shops with a designers being worked like dogs and not staying for more than a few months (no, it ain’t working in a coal mine, but you can get burnt out staring at a computer screen for 18 hours a day).
When my wife and I moved to San Francisco last year, she immediately thought I was dying to work for Apple, given our proximity to Cupertino. I told her no, I’d rather enjoy Apple from a distance. Using an iPad and being one of the many Apple teams responsible for designing, marketing and producing an iPad are two completely different things.
Apple is full of incredibly creative people, but Apple is also a machine. A huge, well-oiled, multi-billion dollar machine. Some people are driving the machine and many others are cogs inside the machine being driven.
Does Apple suck to work for? Sure, probably.
Is Apple great to work for? Sure, probably.
Now give me back my iPad, I have some reading to do.

Bijan Sabet:

We often hear about new products that promise to beat the current market leader by being the “blah blah blah on steroids”.

I’m not a big fan of this strategy.

That doesn’t mean that the market leader isn’t vulnerable but it’s a question of the approach.

Apple didn’t put a hurt on Microsoft desktop business by a better version of Mac OS. They put the hurt by nailing a new category altogether with the iPad.

By contrast Microsoft has adopted the “on steroids” strategy in many of their products.

The Surface tablet is an attempt to be an “iPad on steroids”. It has a keyboard, it shipped with a pro and consumer model. It can do split screen. The list goes on.

You know how well the Surface did.
via Marco Arment

—taken from Manhattan (1979)

I spotted this gorgeous BMW 2002 over the weekend.