Personism

We ' ll Always Have Spring Street

My ongoing obsession with 11 Spring St. (it's been YEARS now) is very well-documented in the blogosphere.

My last check-in on the topic was a while back on Unbeige, but I've been holding back on you all. This is mostly because I mangled the cord that connects my digital camera to my computer, and just saying that there's a flurry of activity there without pictures to show it seems boring.

But it's true! Major, unprecendented activity at 11 Spring St. It started a few weeks back when I walked by and they were power-cleaning the floors, exuding an aroma even more distasteful than Summer in the city streets. Then there were some rather feeble "No Trespassing" signs posted up, which is amusing considering that the building is regularly and quite famously trespassed upon by street artists. Today I walked by and the doors are thrown open and ConEd is digging a big hole in the street just outside the Elizabeth St entrance. I thought to myself: Lachlan is finally ready to be my neighbor!

It is not to be however: I just read this breaking news on FishbowlNY: Lachlan Murdoch Resigns from News Corp. Apparently he is high-tailing it back to Australia, wife and child in tow.

So, now the question is: what of 11 Spring, which was meant to be his future residence? I was semi-relieved when he bought it because his intention at the time was to convert the place into a single family residence. Since he purchased it though, our humble little strip of Spring St. has become considerably more trafficked, which makes me think that the building will be much more desirable to commerical developers. I leave it to the intrepid crew at Curbed to gather some intell for me. Do it fast guys, I'm anxious!

Later Today: Design Matters

I haven't had much time lately, so I am terribly remiss in my blogging, but I've been working on lots of other interesting things - preparing for the Fall shows at the gallery, choosing, announcing and curating a show from the winners of the Summer edition of the gallery's Hey, Hot Shot competition and actually spending time live and in person (the novelty!) with lots of other design and architecture bloggers.

There's lots of good stuff in store here, as soon as I can carve out some time to get all the stuff that's floating around in my brain transformed into bloggy goodness. Also: it's Summer. Why be in front of a computer when you can be melting on New York City sidewalks?

Later today, I'll be talking about design blogging in some very very fine company, on Debbie Millman's radio show, Design Matters.

Here's Debbie's announcement about the show:
The show is from 3-4PM EST and you can view the VoiceAmerica Business site and listen to the show from a number of places:
You can go here, through the Sterling link:
http://www.sterlingbrands.com/DesignMatters/listennow.html
or you can go here, through the Voice America link:
http://www.business.voiceamerica.com/

Please note that you will need Windows Media Player or the equivalent program to listen in. You can download the technology for free here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/default.asp

Everyone is welcome to call in live and toll free--the number is 1-866-233-7861.

The VoiceAmerica Business network radio station is the industry leader in Internet talk radio, and Design Matters is proud to announce that we have 140,000 listeners to our show.

I am thrilled and honored to let you know that joining me on today's live talk radio show "Design Matters with Debbie Millman" are the founders four of the most exciting design blogs being written today: Armin Vit and Bryony Palacio-Gomez from Speak Up, Rick Poyner from Design Observer, Bennett Holzworth and Adrian Hanft III from Be A Design Group, and Jen Bekman from Personism.

Let me tell you a bit more about this extraordinary new(ish) medium and the folks behind these sites:
Armin Vit
Bryony Palacio-Gomez
UnderConsideration
Born and raised in Mexico City, Armin Vit is a graphic designer and writer now living in Brooklyn, New York. He has written for AIGA's VOICE, Emigre, Eye, HOW and STEP magazines among others. His work has been published in numerous publications around the world and has garnered a few awards. He is a former faculty member of Portfolio Center and has lectured on topics ranging from typography to branding in locations ranging from San Diego to Berlin. He is co-founder of UnderConsideration and founder of the (in)famous Speak Up. Currently, he spends his daytime working at Pentagram and the first Wednesdays of every month as a board member for AIGA's New York chapter. Feisty behind the keyboard, Armin remains timid at heart.

Co-founder of UnderConsideration and author for Speak Up, Bryony Palacio-Gomez is a graphic designer, photographer, painter and writer. Lover of the world, she has traveled the globe while observing and challenging ideas and expectations; translating her knowledge into different media, she has been recognized by various design and poetry publications as well as galleries and her work has even been utilized by dance companies. Bryony lives, works and continues to challenge the world, in Brooklyn, New York.

Born on-line in september of 2002, Speak Up is an author-based, reader-supported community devoted to graphic design open to conversation and dialogue. Its mission is to further the graphic design profession from within with the goal of creating a stronger and clearer sense of what our role is as professionals in light of the responsibility we have as communicators.

Rick Poyner
Design Observer
Rick Poynor founded Eye magazine in London in 1990, edited it for seven years and is now its resident columnist. He writes the "Observer" column for Print magazine and he has written about design, media and visual culture for Blueprint, Icon, Frieze, Domus, I.D., Metropolis, Harvard Design Magazine, Adbusters, The Guardian, The Financial Times, and many other publications. His books include More Dark Than Shark (1986), a study of Brian Eno's early songs, Typography Now: The Next Wave (1991), and Typographica (2001). He is the author of two collections of essays, Design Without Boundaries (1998) and Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World (2001). No More Rules, a critical study of graphic design and postmodernism, appeared in 2003. Poynor studied the history of art at Manchester University and gained an MPhil in design history from the Royal College of Art, London. He has been a visiting professor at the RCA and a tutor at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, and he lectures widely on design matters in Europe, the United States and Australia. He is guest curator of the exhibition "Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties", which opened at the Barbican Centre, London in September 2004 and is touring in China through 2005.

Bennett Holzworth
Adrian Hanft III
Be A Design Group

Bennett Holzworth
His passions range from reading anything remotely related to design to letterpressing, made possible by the acquisition of a tabletop letterpress and sixteen trays of type. He finds that a nice balance of technology and trends (iPod, G4, Netflix) mixed in with some good old classics (books, letterpress, Pentax K-1000) give a nice balanced creative output. Bennett also gains inspiration along with some visual input from his printmaking wife, Suzanne. Bennett studied graphic design at Concordia University where he earned his BFA in 1999. He has worked as a designer in a marketing department and several ad agencies, including his current job at Idea Bank Marketing. While living in Omaha he was an executive board member of AIGA Nebraska. Bennett founded club(red), a graphic design book club through the Nebraska chapter of the AIGA. There are currently two chapters of club(red).

Adrian Hanft III
Adrian studied graphic design at Concordia University in Seward, Nebraska. His studies at Concordia focused on photography, wheel-thrown ceramics, drawing, and collage in addition to the traditional design curriculum.
When he isn't doing something art related, he enjoys mountain biking, playing chess, reading design books, and discovering new music. In addition to being co-founder of Be A Design Group, Adrian maintains a photo blog called Found Photography.

Be A Design Group is an invitation to all people to participate in design. We created our blog as a place where designers can test new ideas, share observations, and comment on cultural trends. Our definition of design is intentionally broad so that the subject matter of our posts can be diverse and unlimited. Our blog is intended to be more than just a discussion on graphic design as a specific career path. We have chosen to be designers because we are passionate about design. Our belief is that to be great a designer you must be an active growing designer. By exploring how design affects all aspects of life, we keep growing and help others grow. It is our goal to be an influence in the design community and the culture at large.

My bio is here: More Than You Needed to Know.

Learning How to Tie

Ian Fieggen knows his laces, let there be no doubt. His Shoelace Site is an exhaustive directory of all things shoelace related. (And he's found many, many things to catalog.).

The Shoe Lacing Methods section posits that there are over 1,961,990,553,600 ways to feed a shoelace. Slacker that Ian is, he only covers 24 methods. The Ladder Method is illustrated here.

(Via Michael Surtees.)

Looking at Old New York

I was over at a friend's place the other night and we were browsing the The NY Public Library's Digital Archive. I posted about it a while back on Unbeige, when I was thrilled to find their layouts of Classic Six NYC apartments.

The other evening we spent a lot of time looking at other NY-centric images and prints. The first two images here are from their Moving Uptown print collection. You can see a bigger image and full information about the lithograph above here. And for the stencil below, have a look over here.

We also spent a good deal of time poring over photos of the construction of the Holland Tunnel. There are 10 pages worth of thumbnail images from The New Jersey Interstate Bridge & Tunnel Commission. We went through every single page because that's just how geeky we are. The image that stuck with me most is the one below (more info on that specific photo here).

There's such a vast array of information and images, I could see where it's hard to keep everything straight interally. My guess is that prior to the Digital Gallery launch, a million different departments built myriad web-based projects and did them their own way for lack of an overarching structure to work within. Now with the Gallery and the archives both searchable on the site, it's pretty confusing at times - They are so so so not integrated!

The Digital Gallery is a step in the right direction, but I can't even fathom the task of integrating it all into one coherent chunk. Their search is very poorly indexed. (It took me forever to relocate the asylum image on my own, and then it was by pure happenstance that I found it.) I found myself wanting to have the ability to tag images a la Flickr to make the hunt a bit easier on future explorers. All in all though, it's not a bad place to get lost. So if you're suffering some Monday inertia and your Inbox seems entirely too daunting, hop on the NYPL site.

Stop + Drop

As I mentioned in my post earlier today, one of the people I ran into at last night's Swoon opening was Ryan Watkins-Hughes.

Ryan's Shopdropping project is exactly the type of thing I'd like to encounter during an otherwise dismal supermarket experience. He re-labels canned goods and places them back on the store shelves. From his site:

Shopdropping strives to take back a share of the visual space we encounter on daily basis. Similar to the way street art stakes a claim to public space for self expression, Shopdropping subverts commercial space for artistic use. The photographs act as a visual journal of my travels over the past few years. Displayed in nonlinear combinations the images remix the traditional narrative of the passing of time. The vibrant individuality of each image is a stark contrast to the repetitive, functional, package design that is replaced.

I've been known to find beauty in repetitive, functional package design, but this sort of subtle project is right up my alley too. Ryan's issued an open call (deadline November 1, 2005) for Shopdropping. If you're interested in participating, here's the info he sent me last night:

Submit all types of works on paper: photography, drawing, painting, printmaking, computer printouts, etc.etc. but please no cardboard, heavyweight paper, or other "thick" surfaces that won't adhere easily to the cans.
All submitted materials should be 4 inches by 9.5 inches. Please send 2 copies of each submission so that one set can be "shopdropped" into grocery stores and another set can be displayed as a group project in a gallery in NYC.
Include $1 US per submission to help cover the cost of buying canned goods.
Include your name, or alias with your submission, as well as your email address.
Questions?
Email atryan AT relapsed DOT net.

Mail your submissions to:
Ryan Watkins-Hughes// SHOPDROPPING.NET 194 Adelphi StreetFirst Floor Brooklyn,NY11205

Art World Leticia

Sorry to be all Scene & Herdy, but sometimes a girl can't help herself.

I stopped by Deitch Projects last night for the opening of Swoon's first NYC solo show. It is crazy and fabulous and great, but I barely got to look - there was such a crowd and as one walked deeper into the gallery things got hot and claustrophobic and decidedly musky. So I ditched and just hung around outside for a while, people watching. There were other openings just 'round the corner too - Spencer Brownstone and Guild & Greyshkul had receptions for their Summer shows too. Kristen commented that Williamsburg was probably mighty deserted that evening, what with the swarm of hipsters spilling into and across Grand St. You don't need me to tell you about Swoon's exhibit - ideally you'll check it out your own self, but I promise it'll be well-covered in the blogosphere.

I ran into loads of people, many of them artists who have shown, are showing or will be showing at jen bekman soon: Nate Page, Eliot Shepard and Darius were there. As were Tod Seelie, Bret Shirley (who shot this cool photo), and Quenell Jones, who co-directed Public Discourse with Downey and pledged to help out with the ambitious installation Darius & Downey are planning for their September show at my place.

Also spotted, but sadly I didn't get a chance to talk with them: The Wooster Collective's Marc Schiller, fellow Frank O'Hara lover Barry of Bloggy and Artcal fame as well as Summer Hey, Hot Shot contenders David Gallagher and Patryce Bak. Finally, I also saw Ryan Watkins-Hughes, who is working on a cool project that I'll tell you about in my next post.

If you have pointers to good coverage of the opening, please send me a note at person AT personsim DOT com, so I can post 'em here.

Gehrymandering

In regard to this:

I present to you this:

Or perhaps if you're feeling girlie, this: