My friend Cindy Heller, wonderful designer of Bidoun magazine and a building mate here at 195 Chrystie Street is doing a great project called Wanderbag. Wanderbag is “a collaborative art project through which artists and small businesses promote greater environmental responsibility.” Cindy’s asked a handful of friends, artists, and other inspiring folks to design the fronts of cotton tote bags so we’ve got a fashionable way to use the same bag to go from bookstore to grocery store and back again.

My contribution is an homage to the groundbreaking Concrete poet and Fluxus chronicler Emmett Williams, who passed away this February as Cindy had started asking for submissions. My WASTEBASKET poem (above) works in almost exactly the same way as Emmett’s famous poem SWEETHEARTS (the introduction to which was written by none other than Richard Hamilton.).

My poem reads, “weak webs / a teak base / seas east west / wake bake / take wastebasket.” For further reading on Williams’s work, try starting with this interview from Hans Ulrich Obrist. Designers may also find it interesting that one of his poems comes up prominently at the end of this interview with Experimental Jetset [PDF]. Williams’s work has been very influential for me, and I’m sure for many more. He will be missed.

Wanderbags, Cindy tells me, will be available early next year. Stay tuned.

I’ve made a few improvements to the site over the last few weeks, and now that they’re working the way they should I figured I’d let everyone know that they’re there to use. I envisioned L&UL as a big collection of resources, readings, and (hopefully) useful information, and I think both of these upgrades are in keeping with that spirit. A big thank you, as always, to Renda for her help and advice.

Google Search
The first major improvement is that I’ve swapped out Wordpress’s search engine for a custom search engine (or CSE) powered by Google. I got this idea from Khoi Vinh of Subtraction.com, who’s switched his site over and written thoughtfully about that process in this post. The Google CSE is free and the only downside is that visitors have to deal with a few Google ads off to the side, which at this point I think everyone’s used to. The benefits, though, are huge. You can now search the library and the recommended readings much more comprehensively, for potentially long-lost things like this reading about the Hausdorff dimension or maybe a book by Clifford Stoll.

Designers, Booksellers, and Broadcasts
Delicious is an incredibly powerful tool for storing information, and one of my favorite things they offer is a Linkroll bookmarklet, which allows you to feed any set of links with a particular tag to your own blog or website. With this tool, I’ve built three new pages—one for Designers’ websites, another for Booksellers’ websites, and a third for Blogs and Podcasts—each of which will be dynamically updated anytime I tag a new site. I love scanning blogrolls for valuable new links, but often times lists can get so long that they become unwieldy. Hopefully this approach alieviates this problem by focusing the content a bit, as Delicious itself does.

Recent critiques of Olympic Games imagery have understated the difference between identity and symbol.

A game’s identity embodies a specific place and time, while its symbols are placeless and timeless. London 2012’s jagged neon constitutes those games’ identity, while the International Olympic Committee’s five rings are the institution’s enduring symbol of global unity. The IOC insists on this distinction, laying claim to its symbols explicitly, which triggered the recent rethink of Chicago’s Olympic bid.

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The new NYC TAXI logo is ugly and unsuccessful. Before I get to why, however, we should all be grateful that none of its many contributors—Smart Design, the Taxi & Limousine Commission, or NYC & Company and their designers at Wolff Olins—considered changing the taxi’s signature yellow color. The reason why cuts to the heart of what actually constitutes a taxi’s “idenitity” and what doesn’t. An identity is something we use to identify something out in the world. McDonalds’ golden arches help us to identify the fast food chain from the highway. The fact that it’s a McDonalds of Greater Cincinnati isn’t really part of its identity. We probably know we’re in Cincinnati and all we care about is getting something to eat.

The idea of a logo for NYC TAXI fails along the same lines. It’s an NYC TAXI because it’s yellow and we hail it in New York. It’s not an NYC TAXI because it says NYC TAXI on it, no matter what form those letters might take. Many designers, if faced with this brief, would question the need for this particular logo in the first place. The logo probably matters more to the Taxi & Limousine Commission as a sign of driver complaince than it does to people hailing a cab. It’s secondary to the customer’s experinence, so its placement, size, and form should indicate as much.

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This trip to the Cloisters with my girlfriend Susan was my third trip. I have now been there a total of five times, but we have only gone together once. Most of our visit that day was comparable to my other visits. Here again was the studied precision of the religious icons and illuminated manuscripts. Here again I felt the serenity of the abbeys and the reconstituted chapels. Like anything brought brick-for-brick across the ocean, the Cloisters retains the feeling of being somewhere else. It is equal parts unnatural and magical, a place grafted onto its surroundings but somehow still living, even blossoming, as a result.

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Above: Richard Serra, “Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself,” (1967–1968).

Serra’s list inspired me to make one of my own, which is drawn from some of the peculiarities of a designer’s particular lexicon.

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Above: Justin Beal, “RE: The Un/happy Ending of Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway.”

Last summer I contacted a bunch of friends and asked them to give me the materials for a 16-page pamphlet. The pamphlet could be about anything they wanted, and I would design it for them. In my email introducing the project, I wrote,

The content for these pamphlets will be provided by you, edited by me, and about anything you would like. You can use these 16 black-and-white pages to promote a polical platform or republish your favorite short story. You can showcase your portfolio or the photos from your vacation. The pamphlet may be thematic and unified or intuitive and random. I will take whatever you decide give me.

In exchange for your participation, each of you will get a complete set of the 10 pamphlets I create, along with 10 additional copies of your own pamphlet to share with your friends and family. It would be impossible to replace any one of you in the group, so I hope you all decide to take part.

The idea for the project came out of my reading of Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, and much of this thinking was channeled into a subsequent article I wrote called “Form-giving.” But I also wanted there to be some kind of creative expression beyond that essay, a reaction I’d make to Hyde’s book as a working designer. A project with friends seemed like the thing to do here, both because friends are people we enjoy giving gifts to, and because as a designer my friends sometimes hit me up for things I don’t particularly want to do—business cards, etc.—and this seemed like a more even exchange, a way for me to enjoy their talents just as much as they were hopefully enjoying mine.

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In conversation with a friend the other day I was reminded of the following assignment, which I used in a Senior Thesis class at Parsons not long ago. As students go back to school and begin working on new projects, it seemed worth sharing here. —RG

Now that you’ve done some basic reading and research, I’d like you to begin synthesizing some of your ideas in written form. For those of you who feel comfortable writing an academic paper or scholarly essay, this format is perfectly fine. However, I’ve found students sometimes struggle with this form, especially in describing their own projects and processes. If this is the case for you, you may want to try some other strategies for generating the text required for next week’s class. I’ve outlined five options for you below.

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Above: Richard Hamilton, Collected Words. Thames & Hudson, 1983. Cover design by Richard Hamilton.

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Ames Room
Occupants of an Ames Room appear to those viewing it from a peephole at a fixed point to be greatly distorted in size. Someone may appear the size of a giant one moment, and, crossing the room, seem no larger than a baby the next. In fact, it is the room that is distorted, not its occupants. Created in 1946 by American opthamologist Adelbert Ames, Jr., almost none of the walls or floors of an Ames Room are at right angles, even though the room appears to be a perfect cube. Floor and ceiling slope; one back corner is much farther away than the other. The room plays on our predisposition to judge size comparatively and gauge space according to fixed laws of perspective defined during the Renaissance by Alberti and others.

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Above: Amercian Apparel product page featuring ITC Grouch, 2007.

Some things are made for summer. The summer hit, for example. Recently, I’m thinking of “Crazy,” by Gnarls Barkley, “Hey Ya” by Outkast, or, this summer, Rhianna’s “Umbrella” (which you might want to stand under whether it’s raining or not). Summer brings us beach reads and popcorn flicks, and, of course, summer food—light, cool, and refreshing. Designwise, we’ve definitely got summer clothes and summer places: wear your flip-flops out on the deck or your seersucker and khakis out to your country house.

So: why not summer fonts? I can’t think of a good reason why not. Like all things summer, a summer font need only follow a few simple rules. Be catchy. Be simple. Be happy. And be gone soon enough to belong to a single summer only.

Everyone’s heard of the Summer of Love. But I predict that this summer—in nerdy font circles at least—will be the Summer of Grouch. ITC Grouch, that is.

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Above: Old vs new—the homepages of studio-gs.com.

Kevin and I have just completed a serious revamp of our old website, http://www.studio-gs.com, and naturally a lot of thinking went into it. The broad strokes of what’s new about the site were included in our email to clients and friends: a lot of new work, a showcase of details, and a richer and more dynamic “News” section. These changes are fairly obvious to anyone familiar with the old site, but some of the models and discussions that informed the new site are not. L&UL seems like an ideal place to capture and share some of these ideas while they’re still fresh in my mind, so that’s what I’ve tried to do in the collection of notes below.

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As part of my teaching at Parsons, every so often I get asked to be a part of or help with student projects or exhibitions. One of these opportunities crossed my desk a few days ago, and read in part:

I am emailing you all on behalf of the Senior Thesis Exhibition Core Team. As a result of tonight’s meeting the students decided that their objective is to represent all senior students in the design of the card and therefore agreed upon creating a collaborative opportunity for all students to participate in the creation of the visuals for the post card. We ask each of you to decide upon a 1×1 inch icon/image that would represent yourself and/or your work. This image will become part of a larger grid.

I must admit, if I were a student, I would have had a really tough time with this particular assignment. For one thing, trying to encapsulate a senior project, especially midway through the process of making one, is pretty difficult for my students, many of whom are making a long-form, large-scale project for the first time. I also wonder—though it’s certainly well-meaning—how truly “collaborative” a grid of 1×1 inch images is. Sure, it gives you a cross-section of styles and approaches and everyone gets equal play, but it seems like saying my sock drawer collaborates with my underwear drawer to form a dresser, or my car collaborates with the car next to mine to form a lot of parked cars. Yes, they show parts of a whole, but a “collaborative” whole, to me, it’s not.

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