German shopping bag

Since today is Earth Day, it’s the perfect opportunity to post something a little different. We know there are so many things that humans do which could be more eco-friendly, and innovating with design is a big part of trying to improve things. But there are lots of small, easy things one can do everyday to feel a little less guilty. I’ll try to avoid the usual stuff like “turn off the faucet when you brush your teeth,” which I’ve heard so many times over the years I can’t believe anyone is still doing it, but I guess they are.

So here’s a list. Go ahead, call me a crazy self-righteous tree-hugging granola-eating hippie. I’ve been called worse.

1. Rinse hand-washed dishes in batches.
   Most of the time we use a dishwasher (an even better option if you have it), but since we fix meals at home a lot, we wash some items by hand. This technique (if you can call it that) seems so simple and obvious, but I’ve seen a couple people experience an “Ah ha” moment when they see it in action. After you fill your soapy tub/sink/whatever, do the following:
   • With the water off, wash a bunch of dishes until you fill the empty side of the sink.
   • Turn on the water to rinse all those dishes and put them in the rack.
   • Repeat as needed.

   Extra bonus tip: Soaking those particularly nasty pots and pans for a while saves mucho agua as well (but you already knew that).

2. Save water in a container as you’re waiting for it to heat up.
   Living on the second floor, we sometimes have to wait quite a while for water to heat up. I’d love to have one of those instant heater doodads, but we’d have to negotiate with the landlord and I doubt he’ll ever go for it. So we keep a bucket in the shower and a pitcher by the kitchen sink, then use that water for our indoor and outdoor plants. Since we started this about a year and a half ago, I’ve used the hose outside maybe 3 or 4 times, I kid you not. I admit that most of my plants are drought-tolerant succulents, but, well, isn’t that the best way to go anyway (at least in SoCal, which most of us tend to forget is mostly desert)? We do actually have some more water-needy plants like herbs, lavender, even bamboo, but there’s still plenty to go around during the course of a week.

3. Get a “reduced” newspaper subscription.
   If you’re a newspaper junkie like me, you’ve probably found it hard to replace the physical paper with online reading. I just love sitting with my coffee in the morning reading the paper (and doing my puzzles with a pen, natch). I’m not sure how much newspapers figure into the paper equation any more since subscriptions have declined so much, but they were still adding a lot to my own eco-debt, despite the recycling. So rather than go cold turkey, we changed to a Thursday thru Sunday plan. Not only did this cut the amount of paper by about 1/3 (would be even more if it weren’t for those darn Sunday ads), but I now feel compelled to do other more useful chores in the morning. An unexpected productivity boost! I’m hoping to jettison the pulp format entirely some day, but I’m not quite ready for that yet.

4. Use half-sized paper towels
   I can feel the controversy brewing on this one already. Some people hate these and whine that they’re too small. Well, if you need a larger size, just tear off two of them together! Most of the time I don’t want or need the larger size. As a result we’ve cut our paper towel consumption in half. As a side note, we already use a lot less paper towels than in days of yore – I now cringe when I see those paper towel commercials espousing their spill-slurping virtues. People! Use old sponges or towels – it’s not that bad, honest.

I’ll close with this link to a gallery of silly but creative shopping bags (thanks to mom for the initial email full of too many attachments that prompted me to find the original web article). If all shopping bags were this fun, maybe they’d be re-used a little more often…

Tweets/quotes from AIGA's One Day for Design

I had first heard about the One Day for Design project a few weeks ago while perusing the AIGA Los Angeles site. I admit I was skeptical that much would be actually accomplished. The idea was to devote the day to discussing “the meaning and future of design” on Twitter (hashtag #1D4D). Although crowd sourcing continually shows its power in many interesting ways, it usually requires a lot of horse wrangling to end up being truly useful. Twitter just seems both too open and too limiting for meaningful conversation. But it definitely seemed like an interesting experiment, and I have been proven wrong before (yes, it’s true!).

And of course when the appointed day arrived, I forgot all about it.

Then today I found a post mortem about it on the GOOD site, and it seems that some of my fears were realized. Assuming that the selected tweets on the 1D4D site were deemed some of the juiciest, I was a bit disappointed. “Any means to learn from each other, come together and network is valuable in my eyes.” So, what did everyone learn exactly?

Well, AIGA thought it was a success (hey, there were 30,000+ tweets), so I’m guessing they’ll do it again next year. I’ll try to remember to get in on it if they do. Maybe you just had to be there.

Kafka book covers re-imagined

Absolutely love these Kafka covers recently redesigned by Peter Mendelsund. He illuminates his process on his blog, and also throws in some interesting publishing history. The use of color is wonderful and the eye motif is perfect.

Thanks to the The Fox is Black.

Every time you make a PowerPoint, Edward Tufte kills a kitten

This still makes me chuckle and I’m always a sucker for a clever ISO-style graphic, so here’s an oldie but goodie – a wallpaper created by Mark Goetz.

This is of course in reference to Tufte’s rather strong distaste for PowerPoint, opined back in 2003. Joking aside, Tufte is not alone in thinking that PowerPoint presentations are generally (not gonna mince words here) awful. As Seth Godin has argued, it could be a great tool, but most people don’t use it correctly. How many of us have sat through interminable presentations with slide after slide of illegible data and charts and text, hoping for a merciful end sooner rather than later? The key is to not put your presentation content on the actual slides, but create slides with powerful imagery and minimal words to reinforce your talking points. All the stuff that’s usually crammed onto slides should instead be crafted into a coherent report that you hand out or make available after the presentation. If it’s all on the slides, what’s the point of the doing a presentation, since everyone will pay more attention to the slides than to you? And, as Tufte explains using one particular example, the PowerPoint format is an inferior tool for writing a real report anyway. It seems likely that time is issue – if you put the report into the presentation, you have less work to do But you do it at the expense of communicating effectively. And what of those who use PowerPoint for reports that they have no intention of actually presenting it to anyone? Why create a document using a tool with such pathetic document-creation features? It’s simply not what PowerPoint was designed to do.

It’s been 8 years since Tufte’s first rant, and in my experience very few people seem to understand this problem, or even realize that there is a problem. I don’t believe PowerPoint is particularly evil, but we need to rescue it from the black hole of moribundity. So I’ll try to reignite the flame – check out Seth’s presentation tips or maybe his book Presentation Zen (it’s available on his web site somewhere). You might just save a kitten or two (insert link to video with adorable kittens here).

Montage from typarchive.com

Who doesn’t love typography? It’s even harder to deny its wonderliciousness when it’s out in the wild manifested in neon or paint or other tangible materials, as showcased on Typarchive. It’s always comforting to know that I’m not the only one who can’t refrain from photographing signage (often at the expense of more conventional scenery).

This will have to comfort me until I can somehow manger to attend a future Type Camp. Thanks to ratherfancy.

I’d seen the blog Read the F*cking HIG a while back, and admit I was a little put off by the general tone of it. In its withering criticism of some of the apps in the iTunes store, the author prefers inarticulate crudeness over insightful commentary. And I now I see that Jason Z. at 37 signals has similar sentiments.

The task of designing almost anything is fraught with peril and politics and everything in between. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard a person rant about how awful a particular design is, to the point of mocking it – sometimes when the designer is standing right there. This behavior is unprofessional, whether or not it contains any useful criticism. Of course any designer has to learn to take criticism, it’s part of the job. But there’s no need to be a pill about it.

Is it any surprise I love I Love Charts? I’m still looking for that post about celebrities mapped to browsers, but this venn diagram will have to do for now: How would you like your graphic design?”. You may pick only two!

Of course, this could also apply to web or app development, or just about any other human endeavor…

Love Martha Colburn’s animations incorporating painting, collage and plenty of humor. Check out her YouTube channel. She’ll be appearing on February 14 at REDCAT for a show entitled “Animating Mayhem.” Hopefully I’ll manage to drag my carcass there…

Over the course of approximately 8 years, I designed and developed several web sites for the band Glycerin to meet their changing needs and also to complement their evolving brand. As with most music acts, the priority was to showcase the music and provide promotional material (particularly photos and bios). Not surprisingly online marketing via blogging and social networking increasingly became a more significant component of the site.

Here’s the latest version of the site, which was built with WordPress and integrates Bandcamp’s player for handling the songs, as well as a blog and dynamic photo gallery.

Current Glycerin home page

The following version of the site stripped things down a bit and featured the music more prominently. It incorporated a customized Flash player, along with some Flash animation to the right of the player (several animations rotated periodically about every minute or so).

Glycerin home page - circa 2008

This still older version of the site was actually built in WordPress like the current site and had similar features, including a blog and dynamic photo gallery.

Glycerin home page - circa 2005

As I began working on this site for the first time in 2003, it was obvious that the site wasn’t nearly as useful or fun as it could be (basically, it was a regurgitation of the press releases). So over the years I’ve worked with the organizers to revamp the site completely, including an archive section to document past tours, a form to gather volunteer information and stronger copy and structure to improve search engine ranking. I also work with the print designer each year to redo the visual design to complement the latest print campaign, as well as handle all page markup and other updates that are needed.

I look forward to working on this project every year. This event has become a highly successful fundraiser for at-risk kids in the Venice neighborhood, and I feel that improving the web site has played an important role in that accomplishment.

VGHT home page - 2011

VGHT tickets page - 2011

VGHT home page - 2010

VGHT home page - 2009

VGHT home page - 2008