Font Men: A Short Film About Jonathan Hoefler & Tobias Frere-Jones

Font Men is a SXSW 2014 Official Selection in the Film Festival. It is a behind the scenes look at Jonathan Hoefler & Tobias Frere-Jones. Given the recent company split it also feels like a sad obituary of sorts.  

You've seen their work. Before their recent split, they collectively ran the most successful and well respected type design studio in the world, creating fonts used by everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the President of the United States.

Font Men, gives a peek behind the curtain into the world of Jonathan and Tobias. Tracking the history of their personal trajectories, sharing the forces that brought them together and giving an exclusive look at the successful empire they built together.

Aaron Dignan: Digital Isn't Software, It's a Mindset

The most dominant companies, no matter the industry, are digital-first. Think Netflix over Blockbuster or iTunes over Tower Records. So how can we take advantage of this trend in our work and with our own projects?

Aaron Dignan, speaking at the 99u conference, walks us through how we can have the right mindset to thrive in the future: We need a purpose, a process to support it, the right people, and (most importantly) these need to combine to make products that serve a community larger than any employee or organization. Dignan shows off plenty of examples and tells us what to adopt for our own work. “When we look at the companies that are really dominating, this is what they are doing.”

Life After Pi: A Cautionary Tale About Art And Bankruptcy

“Life After Pi” is a short documentary about Rhythm & Hues Studios, the L.A. based Visual Effects company that won an Academy Award for its groundbreaking work on “Life of Pi”– just two weeks after declaring bankruptcy. The film explores rapidly changing forces impacting the global VFX community, and the Film Industry as a whole.

This is only the first chapter of an upcoming feature-length documentary “Hollywood Ending,” that delves into the larger, complex challenges facing the US Film Industry and the many professionals working within it, whose fates and livelihood are intertwined.

Fishing for Ideas

Chief Creative Officer at Ideo Paul Bennett, in The New York Times:

Creative people thrive on serendipity, spontaneous interactions, moments of ribald humor, intense debate or just simple eye contact, and I felt as if I was losing myself. I decided that it was time to act. So I tried an experiment. I just stopped saying yes and started saying no to things.

Actually, there was a bit more method to my madness. I started a ritual that I still use today: I sit down and look at my calendar every Sunday night, pore through my coming week’s meetings and cancel a bunch of them — redundant ones where I don’t need to be “in the loop,” ones where there is an opportunity for someone else to make a decision, ones that don’t particularly inspire me, or ones where I can’t really add value. My overarching goal right now, wherever possible, is to give myself more time to simply be.

I have a similar ritual on Sundays as I prepare for the week and I make as many decisions as I possibly can for the week on Sunday so I don't have to think of the day-to-day and can focus my attention on relevant details. And speaking of details, don't miss an early TED Talk by Bennett on the small details. 

As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse

Tim Wu for The New Yorker's technology blog Elements:

Comfort-seeking missiles, we spend the most to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. When it comes to technologies, we mainly want to make things easy. Not to be bored. Oh, and maybe to look a bit younger.

Our will-to-comfort, combined with our technological powers, creates a stark possibility. If we’re not careful, our technological evolution will take us toward not a singularity but a sofalarity. That’s a future defined not by an evolution toward superintelligence but by the absence of discomforts.

The sofalarity (pictured memorably in the film “Wall-E”) is not inevitable either. But the prospect of it makes clear that, as a species, we need mechanisms to keep humanity on track. The technology industry, which does so much to define us, has a duty to cater to our more complete selves rather than just our narrow interests. It has both the opportunity and the means to reach for something higher. And, as consumers, we should remember that our collective demands drive our destiny as a species, and define the posthuman condition.