On digital luxury and digital intimacy, Jony Ive and Marc Newson with Suzy Menkes

The Apple Watch is the first Apple product that has not enticed any kind of curiosity in me. I think it mostly has to do with the fact that I’ve not worn a watch in decades and don’t feel the need for one. Though I suspect at some point the functionality of the watch will lead me to get one, probably two versions down the road, when it is fine-tuned further. 

However, I am very curious about the conversation happening around the watch. A conversation about digital luxury and digital intimacy. Those two subjects now join the conversation around digital privacy and what it means to have technology so closely know what you are doing. 

The above video is Jonathan Ive and Marc Newson discussing those subjects with Suzy Menkes, International Vogue Editor.

Michael Bierut: Finding Your Voice

In an interview at 99u, Michael Beirut discusses his career, advice for students and finding your voice: 

I am not one of those designers who are eager to expand the role of a graphic designer. I’m a graphic designer. I know I’m good at that. I’m not an expert about customer service. I’m not an expert about coming up with the valuation of an IPO. If someone comes to me and has a shitty product, I will say tell them upfront that I don’t know why people would use this and that, to me, it doesn’t make sense, and I’m not sure a logo is what they need right now. But I’m not someone who is dying to have a seat at the table and have input earlier in the process; I’m surrounded by people who have goddamn opinions about things they don’t know anything about, and I don’t want to be one of those people. Sorry if that sounds like bad advice for students who should be expanding their horizons, but I think that everyone should work out what they are good at and do that thing.

Paula Scher's Productivity Trick

In Fast Company Scher discusses her worst jobs, her biggest challenge as a designer, and her productivity secret:

I have a productivity trick that I didn’t know I had until I heard about it on a radio program. NPR did this interview with experts about boredom. iPhones and other forms of digital media were disrupting boredom, because people can occupy themselves all the time. You don’t have any more downtime—you go on your iPhone, look at email, or you’re playing video games. The fact of the matter is, that eats up really good creative time. I realize that when I’m sitting in a taxicab in traffic, or on my way to the airport, or waiting to get on a plane, or trapped in some other boring situation, that’s when I get the best ideas, because I’ve got nothing else interfering with it. I didn’t realized until I listened to that broadcast how important boredom is to me. I have to stop reading emails or being anywhere near the internet to be able to create.

First and Final Frames

A fantastic supercut by Jacob T. Swinney. Structurally speaking a good story begins at the end and ends at the beginning, keeping a cycle going: 

What can we learn by examining only the first and final shot of a film? This video plays the opening and closing shots of 55 films side-by-side. Some of the opening shots are strikingly similar to the final shots, while others are vastly different--both serving a purpose in communicating various themes. Some show progress, some show decline, and some are simply impactful images used to begin and end a film.

Timothy Young: Books Matter

Timothy Young writing in Design Observer, gives ten good reasons the book is important:  

7. A book is an object fixed in time. 
A book can tell us about its status in history. If we look through first editions of Moby Dick or Leaves of Grass, we find that they give away information not only about when they were created, but also about the worlds in which they were created, by way of advertisements, bindings, the quality of their paper, and watermarks on that paper. Such components are often not captured by scanning or are flattened out to make them of negligible use. In Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold—his saga about how libraries microfilmed runs of newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s and then discarded them—one of his chief complaints was that the filmers skipped advertising supplements and cartoons: things that had been deemed unimportant.