Clever Movie Posters Advertise Classic Films with Style

Not Your Mother's Literary Classics

By Elizabeth Alsop

I was browsing in a bookstore recently when a copy of Little Women caught my eye. The cover featured crude, inky sketches of the March sisters, arrayed in a quadrant. They seemed to be suffering from a collective bad hair day. "Oh God please!" Meg laments in the thought bubble over her head. "My skin is so bad I want to grow up, and fast!" Next to her, Amy reads from a Bible, sounding like an evangelical Molly Bloom ("Yes Yes God says hey girls be good …") while the sickly Beth frets below ("But I want to be good I'm trying that's what I'm doing all day!"). On the bottom right, tomboyish Jo scoffs at her sisters. "Grow up and then get married?? Forget it I'm not interested ha ha ha hell no!!"

My mother's hardback, this was not. But something about it looked familiar. Flipping to the back flap, I realized why: The cover was drawn by Julie Doucet, a Montreal-based artist much admired in underground comics circles. In college, I was devoted to her now out-of-print comic, Dirty Plotte. But what was she doing with Louisa May Alcott?
Doucet's cover, I learned, was commissioned by Penguin as part of a series called Graphic Classics. In 2005 the publisher began asking well-known cartoonists to redesign selected titles from its catalog. The results, according to Penguin's Web site, are "timeless works of literature featuring amazing, one-of-a-kind cover illustrations from some of today's best graphic artists."
[...]

That we can now appreciate this sort of mash-up of comics and literature may be further proof that we are witnessing the ascendancy of what Charles McGrath, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 2004, called "the comic book with a brain." Since then, comics have only gained legitimacy; meanwhile literature, we are repeatedly told, is losing it. Graphic novels now regularly appear on college syllabi, and even the Louvre is feting la bande dessinée. In 2007, Art Spiegelman taught a course at Columbia University called "Comics: Marching Into the Canon"—but in fact, they may be walking all over it. And that's probably a good thing. With R. Crumb's cross-hatched version of the Book of Genesis now on shelves, I'm betting that more than a few people will actually read it.

http://chronicle.com/article/Not-Your-Mothers-Literary/48887/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Serving Literature by the Tweet

The founders of Electric Literature, a new quarterly literary magazine, seek nothing less than to revitalize the short story in the age of the short attention span. To do so, they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days.

In its first two issues, this year, the magazine showcased some of the country’s best writers — Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard — and created the kind of buzz that is a marketer’s dream. With a debut issue in June and an autumn issue out last week, each consisting of five stories, the magazine has racked up complimentary reviews everywhere from The Washington Post to a blogger on Destructive Anachronism, who wrote, “High quality content + innovative marketing + multimedia could just equal the new model for literature, post-print.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/books/28electric.html?_r=1&ref=technology

A Life of Light and Shadow

After decades of playing a “best supporting” role in 20th-century art and design, albeit an intriguing and seductive one, Mr. Moholy-Nagy is being bumped up to a leading role. Long praised for pioneering film and photography, as well as for working across different creative disciplines, he is now recognized as a critical influence over the increasingly important medium of digital imagery that flickers across our computer and mobile telephone screens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/arts/design/19iht-design19.html?ref=design&pagewanted=all

Does the Brain Like E-Books?

Writing and reading — from newspapers to novels, academic reports to gossip magazines — are migrating ever faster to digital screens, like laptops, Kindles and cellphones. Traditional book publishers are putting out “vooks,” which place videos in electronic text that can be read online or on an iPhone. Others are republishing old books in electronic form. And libraries, responding to demand, are offering more e-books for download.

Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?

• Alan Liu, English professor
• Sandra Aamodt, author, “Welcome to Your Brain”
• Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development
• David Gelernter, computer scientist
• Gloria Mark, professor of informatics

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/

Just 30 firms dominate the Internet

THE INTERNET has undergone radical infrastructural and economic changes in the past two years, leading to the dominance of just 30 large companies, according to a major study from Arbor Networks and the University of Michigan.

The two year-long research analysed more than 256 exabytes of web traffic across 110 large cable operators, transit backbones, regional networks and content providers across the globe, and found that 30 "hyper giants" account for 30 per cent of all traffic.

Arbor Networks said in the 2009 Internet Observatory Report that five years ago Internet traffic was fairly well spread out globally across tens of thousands of enterprise managed web sites and servers, but that content today has moved to just a handful of very large hosting, cloud and content providers.

Craig Labovitz, the firm's chief scientist, said that half of Internet traffic in 2007 was generated by between 5,000 and 10,000 companies. Since then, however, a major aggregation of content has meant that just 150 companies are now responsible for the same amount of traffic on a daily basis, led by household names such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

[...]
"The first 12 years of the Internet was all about getting homes and businesses connected. That was the technology and that was the story. Now connectivity is ubiquitous and prices are falling and the innovation is happening not there but in content - getting it closer to the consumer and business," said Labovitz.
"As content is getting faster and better quality it will change the face of the Internet, which is exciting for enterprises and consumers. We are entering the second era of the Internet."

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1558384/just-firms-dominate-internet

Seeing Design as Intellectual Rather Than Just Practical

Until recently, treating design as an intellectual medium, rather than a practical one, was rare in Europe and rarer still in the United States, where designers are more deeply rooted in the “build a better world” optimism of 20th-century modernism than in other countries. For years, the Boyms’ conceptual approach cast them as outsiders in American design, as did their obsession with the “undesignerly” phenomena of tragedy and neurosis. They had other “outsider” traits too: Nationality for Mr. Boym, who was born in the Soviet Union and emigrated to the United States in 1981 on a legal technicality; and gender for Ms. Leon Boym, as design is still a boys’ club in America and just about everywhere else. They also came to design from other disciplines. He from architecture, and she art. Those differences remain, but “conceptual design” — or “critical design,” as it is sometimes called — has become increasingly influential, even in the United States, particularly among young designers for whom the Boyms, who are 54 and 45 respectively, look like seers, not mavericks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/arts/12iht-design12.html?ref=arts&pagewanted=all

Art and Science in a Small World

Web fonts: the talk of Typ09

"Web fonts" are one of the hot topics of Typ09, the conference of ATypI in Mexico City later this month.

Posted on 10 October 2009 by Mark Barratt,

With more web browsers supporting a tag to bring new fonts onto web pages (Microsoft has done so since 1997), a tipping point has been reached in the design world. Designers are excited about the idea that they can use fonts other than the "core set" with the familiar Verdana and Georgia. They are finding out how to get them to users of all the different web browsers.

There are several competing formats in use (EOT, supported in Internet Explorer 4 and above; regular TrueType and OpenType fonts, supported in Safari and Firefox; and more recently WOFF [Web Open Font Format], which will be supported in the upcoming version of FireFox), but a number of well-known type foundries and some interesting startups are promising to solve that problem. Web sites may soon be a much richer place for typography, and perhaps even easier to read.

Participants for this track include:

• David Berlow of the Font Bureau, who is keynoting the main conference
• Roger Black, a New York designer who is introducing web fonts at MIT.edu this month
• John Daggett and Jonathan Kew of Mozilla, the organization that owns the Firefox browser
• Jeff Veen and Brian Mason of Typekit, a new site that will distribute web fonts
• Frank Wildenberg of Linotype, a company dating from the hot metal era that is active in new technology
• John D. Berry, recently hired by Microsoft to help improve typography across Microsoft products, and president of ATypI

Typ09 is the first annual congress of the Association Typographique Internationale to be held in Latin America. Members of ATypI are type designers, typographers, and type foundries from all over the world.

The five-day event starts Monday, October 26 at MIDE, the technology museum in the historic downtown, "El Centro." The web-font sessions will be held at Anáhuac University, host and co-sponsor of the conference, as part of a series of workshops on Thursday and Friday, the 26th and 27th.

http://www.atypi.org/news_tool/news_html?newsid=509&from=/

SYNESTHESIA, a film by Jonathan Fowler.

Synesthesia: A film by Jonathan Fowler

October 8, 2009

Short Outbursts on Twitter? #Big Problem

By LAURA M. HOLSON

TIMES are tough for the “tweet before you think” crowd.

Courtney Love was sued by a fashion designer after she posted a series of inflammatory tweets, one calling the designer a liar and a thief. A landlord in Chicago sued a tenant for $50,000 after she tweeted about her moldy apartment. And Demi Moore slapped back at Perez Hilton over a revealing photograph of the actress’s daughter.

A growing number of people have begun lashing out at their Twitter critics, challenging the not-quite rules of etiquette on a service where insults are lobbed in brief bursts, too short to include the social niceties. Some offended parties are suing. For others, extracting a public mea culpa will do. In some cases, the payback is extreme: Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association, was fined $25,000 for criticizing a referee in a tweet after a game.

Blogs, of course, have long been rife with the discontented heaping abuse on foes. But academics and researchers who study online attitudes say that same behavior has been less common on Twitter, in part, because many people use their real names. Now it is migrating to the service, attracting lawsuits and leaving users to haggle among themselves about what will be tolerated.

Complicating matters, there are few prescribed social norms on Twitter like those in more closed communities like Facebook. The service has attained mass popularity without much time to develop an organic users’ culture. On top of that, with tweets limited to 140 characters, users come right to the point without context or nuance.

“It’s the same reason why schoolyard fights don’t start out with, ‘I have a real problem with the way you said something so let’s discuss it,’ ” said Josh Bernoff, a researcher and an author of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.” “You get right to the punch in the nose. Twitter doesn’t allow room for reflection. It gets people to the barest emotion.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/fashion/08twitter.html?_r=1&ref=technology

Rethinking the Shape of Everyday Life

After decades of being an evolutionary process of incremental improvements, design is now revolutionary. Just think of how quickly we have come to depend on once unimaginable innovations like cellphones, the Internet, BlackBerries, iPods, Bluetooth, satellite navigation and iPhone applications. That’s just the start. Advances in technology are accelerating, and the social and political pressure on businesses to develop environmentally responsible alternatives to existing products is increasing. Over the next few years, many more familiar objects will be reinvented. Here are a few possibilities.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/arts/design/05iht-design5.html?ref=arts

movie posters for minimalists

Apple Tablet To Redefine Newspapers, Textbooks and Magazines

Steve Jobs said people don't read any more. But Apple is in talks with several media companies rooted in print, negotiating content for a "new device." And they're not just going for e-books and mags. They're aiming to redefine print.

http://gizmodo.com/5370252/apple-tablet-to-redefine-newspapers-textbooks-and-magazines