Stephen Holden (he of the puzzling Basquiat movie review) redeems himself to this reader. The following spot-on sentence from his review of Jennifer Aniston’s new movie The Switch just about killed me at breakfast:
“Ms. Aniston relies on her wholesome appeal as a walking vanilla milkshake to emerge from the movie relatively unscathed.”
Zing!
Renewing New York State license plates online gives drivers a clear visual of their options for the appearance of the new plates. Keep the old number and blue and white plate ($130), opt for the new gold plates with a new number (add $25) or go for the gold but keep your old alpha-numeric string (add $45). I like the gold plates; the stark simplicity is more appealing than the fussy landscape trying to add some interest at the top of the former design. The “new” look is a throwback to NYS tags from the 1970’s, when I learned to drive, though the first license plate with a gold background debuted in 1962. My dad always held on to one plate for his collection hanging on the garage wall, and told the DMV he lost the other when it was time to exchange old plates for new.
I was surprised that I was willing to pay a little more for nostalgia, because mostly I agree with Diana Vreeland: I loathe nostalgia. In that case, why not keep the old plate number while I’m at it? Hardly a momentous decision but it was past midnight and I was already tired of thinking about the whole thing so I flipped a coin and allowed random chance to make the decision. It came down heavily on the side of nostalgia: gold plate, old number.
I finalized the transaction, then savored the Dept. of Motor Vehicle’s automatically-generated email response, below. Why should email be any different than actually going to the DMV, where you also will not receive a response? Some experiences generate no nostalgia at all.
I really don’t have a good reason for posting this except that it popped up on Google image search (I was researching the previous entry about seed package art) and I found it pretty great, in that 60’s moptop kind of way.
How many bands and album covers from this era relied on art direction along the lines of: take confused/stoned band to location, shoot, done? Concept pretty spare. “OK lads. This time, in a greenhouse. Things are growing. Look meaningful.”
Or: “OK lads, by the water. Look meaningful.”
Or: “OK lads, just look meaningful. Don’t worry about the dead leaves…”
Here’s a post I just wrote for AIGA Voice about the virtues and vices of actual travel vs. Google Earth. Mostly, I adore Google Earth. Except I hate clicking on an icon thinking it will pull up a photo and instead getting one of these weird 3-D renderings people insist on attaching to a location where I know a lovely castle stands, in real life.
That’s better!
More often than I’d like to admit, I buy stuff more because of how it looks than how well it works. I can’t help it, though I know the functionality should be part and parcel of the appearance of any well-designed thing. (Remind me to tell you sometime about my gorgeous sofa that dresses up the living room and is a heinous mockery of sitting in comfort.) But here we’re talking about headphones.
Today the Robert Venturi-designed Lieb House, uprooted from its foundation in New Jersey, sailed up the East River on the last leg of its two day journey to a new plot of land on Long Island. The 1969 house was set to be demolished in January by a developer who bought the property as a tear-down, until filmmaker James Venturi, the architect’s son, alerted Deborah Sarnoff and Robert Gotkin to its plight.
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I love the cooking section in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, as much for the writing as for the recipes. So it was more than a little alarming to turn to my favorite page recently and find the first installment of Cooking With Dexter, the painfully clueless parental chirpings of the Times’ food editor Pete Wells. You see, his four-year-old son Dexter is a naturally gifted chef, a kitchen whiz kid. Don’t buy it? Neither do I. (more…)
And speaking of very unappealing redesigns of games, take a look at Flinch. The script typeface on the old logo at left was really fantastic. How gorgeous is that swashy capital F? Maybe the old-style graphics wouldn’t work for today’s consumer, would bomb in focus groups, etc. etc. but does the current product (at right) have to look like THIS? Isn’t there a happy medium, modern and attractive? Next on my regrettable redesign hit list: the venerable Sorry.
Despite amazing online versions of poker and the astonishing world of Wii, some of us still like to play with actual cards, or on game boards with real pieces. Analog games rock. I know an 8 year old who is a fiend for any kind of game, the medium doesn’t matter one bit. Nintendo DS or gin rummy, any format and he’s your opponent. So I thought I’d pick up a card game I absolutely loved as a child, Mille Bornes, as a gift for him. The object of Mille Bornes is to accumulate miles on a 1000 mile road trip while preventing your opponents from doing so by throwing speed blocks or flat tires in their way. The game I remembered playing was gorgeously designed, with the original French terms on the cards (Increvable means puncture proof! how great is that?) and beautiful graphics. When I saw its current incarnation, above at right, my heart sank. Oh how hideous the design has become. I can’t bear the look of the new cards. My eyes! Parker Brothers, was that really necessary? Evidently others felt the same way, because thankfully you can now buy a Collector’s Edition. Same awful new box, but inside are the much more appealing older versions of the cards. Hallelujah.
Say you were idly flipping through a new magazine and, type aficionado that you are, you suddenly fell in love with that fantastic headline font used throughout. Once upon a time you needed a certain amount of professional knowledge, usually gained the hard way via tormented years in design school, to be able to visually identify a typeface cold. Meet What the Font, a new iPhone app that will do it for you. (more…)