January 12 2012
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Last November our new Creative Director, Criswell Lappin, designed an illustration for The New York Times.
In this post he shares the story behind the creative process.
Lion in the Valley
How an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times came together.
In approximately 6 hours.
Matt Dorfman at The New York Times called one Thursday at noon to see if I could pull together an illustration for the next day’s paper. I was able to clear my schedule the next six hours to meet his 6:30 same-day-deadline and was proud to pull together a reasonably neutral piece on what has been a volatile news topic. The editorial was penned by a professor at Penn State, who despite obviously lamenting the recent travesties to occur there, felt conflicted due of the lack of conversation about the good works that Joe Paterno had accomplished while at PSU. Rather than focus on Paterno as an individual, the stronger ideas looked at ways to get across the notion that football and academics are integrated in the narrative of this (and most) college towns.
Below are my initial idea sketches which I sent over to Matt after about three hours. We discussed our favorites and he presented the two marked with red squares to the editors, who chose the book as football field concept. After discussing with Matt how I might execute the final version, I wandered over the Housing Works Cafe and stumbled on a $1 copy of Lion in the Valley. Fate, it seemed, wanted me to draw on an actual book. So I drew, people watched, I scanned, retouched, and sent off to my new friend, Matt.
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December 15 2011
The Merry Newsinator its back!
It’s simple, go to merrynewsinator.com, add in a few snippets of information and generate a witty and charming newsletter to share and send to your friends and loved ones this holiday season!
July 11 2011
The Eyeo Festival: Converge to inspire
I had the chance to attend the first Eyeo festival two weeks ago in Minneapolis. Eyeo aims to “bring together the most creative coders, designers and artists working today, and shaping tomorrow.”
The line up was incredible and it was very refreshing to be in a conference centered in ideas and open source tools without big corporate sponsorships.
The showcase of projects was very impressive but without doubt the most interesting part was getting an insight into the processes and back-stories behind the great work the speakers are doing. This is a brief resume of the highlights of some of the sessions:
Day 01
Ben Fry and Casey Reas – Processing 2.0
The first Eyeo session was a presentation about the soon to be released (August!) processing 2.0.
There are now close to 70,000 people using processing monthly, and they’ve had over 300,000 downloads of their last release and over 50,000 downloads of their May release.
For the 2.0 version there are really exciting new implementations, like better ways to deal with data (JSON) better performance for OpenGL, and a new Android and Javascript mode.
Moritz Stefaner – Truth and Beauty
“Data visualization is about telling a thousand stories, but not all at once.”
Moritz Stefaner talked about the process and different iterations and explorative phases of some of his projects like Notabilia, Map your moves and OECD Better Life Index.
He shared early sketches and drafts from the projects, highlighting the need to explore data in different visual forms.
Also at all of the breaks during the festival, his project Revisit was displayed on the screens. Revisit is a real time visualization of the last few hundred tweets around a topic, in this case about #eyeo, showing the most influential tweets. You can see and archived version of the top 400 messages relating to the festival here.
Emily Gobeille and Theo Watson. Design I/O – Playful Spaces and Generative Design
Theo Watson is one of the founding members of the team behind Openframewoks. Design I/0 creates beautiful, immersive and playful installations for kids like, Funky Forest and Knee deep.
Jesse Louis-Rosenberg and Jessica Rosenkrantz – Growing Objects
Nervous System is a design studio that works at the intersection of science, art, and technology. Drawing inspiration from natural phenomena they create software simulations of natural patterns and use digital fabrication to produce jewelry and lamps. In their talk they shared some of the algorithms they have been researching as part of their design process.
In one of the adjacent rooms they were displaying this mechanical Hele-Shaw cell machine built using Arduino.
Natalie Jermijenko – On Indicators, Indications and Representing Irreducible Complexity
“What are the opportunities for social change as technology changes over time?”
Natalie Jermijenko is the director of the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic at NYU, where environmental issues are treated as heath issues, and vice versa.
Some of the Environmental Health Clinic projects include:
Feral Robots, commercial robotic dogs altered to sniff out pollutants in schools.
How stuff is made, an academic project in which students chose a product to research and document the whole process of how it is made.
Fwish, a physical real time visualization of aquatic life in the Hudson River.
Golan Levin – Gestural Computing and Speculative Interactions
“I don’t just think the absurd is important, it’s crucially important!”
Golan Levin is the director of the STUDIO for creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.
Being one of the pioneers of using computer vision for gestural interfaces he had a long history of projects to show. He shared some of his installation work in collaboration with Zach Lieberman like Messa di voce, some of his robot exploration like Double-Taker (Snout). The talk ended with a teaser of the possibility of the GML (graffiti markup language) being used to mark the surface of the moon.
Day 02
Jake Barton – Read / Write / Speak Memory
Jake Barton presented some of the projects his studio, Local Projects, has produced, including the 9/11 Memorial and Museum as well as Change by Us.
Local Projects specialized in projects about collective memory and storytelling.
Change by Us officially launched last Friday. The idea of the project is to allow anyone to send in ideas for how we’d like to see the city changed and create projects with goals and resources around those ideas to make them happen. The project is an extension of the Give a Minute project.
The 9/11 Memorial Exhibition Archive allows people to contribute memories, photos, recordings and texts, which will be used in the exhibition. It’s the first museum designed to continuously expand based on the experience of visitors.
Zach Lieberman – Drawing, Movement, Magic
“Artists are the R&D department for humanity’s future.”
Zach Lieberman is another of the founding members of the Openframeworks team. His background is in fine arts, painting and printmaking and projects like Drawn and IQ font show how drawing is still present in his software-based work. The talk ended with the presentation of Eyewritter, a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system created to allow the graffiti artist Temptone to draw using just his eyes after he was diagnosed with ALS .
Marius Watz – Random Thoughts on Code and Form
Marius Watz is a Norwegian artist who works with visual abstraction through generative software processes. The slides from his talk are available here.
Robert Hodgin – Looking Forward to Infinity
Robert Hodgin is an amazing and very entertaining speaker. For the Eyeo session he shared some of his previous work in real-time audio visualizer, particle systems and his experiments using kinect.
He also showed his latest project Planetary, an iPad app to visualize music libraries. In Planetary, every artist is visualized as a star and every album is a planet orbiting around the star. Each song is displayed as a moon of a planet. The orbit speed of the moons is based on the track lengths. The size of the moons is based on how often you play a track. You can find his post-Eyeo thoughts here.
Heather Knight – Why Prometheus Loves Robots
Heather Knight runs Marilyn Monrobot Labs in NYC, which creates socially intelligent robot performances and sensor-based electronic art.
Her presentation about robots ended with a stand up comedy routine performed by Data, one of her robots.
You can see her talk at TEDWomen here . Heather also announced the Robot Film Festival happening in NYC on July 16/17.
Day 03
Nicholas Felton – Numerical Narratives
Nicholas Felton talked about his now famous Feltron Annual Reports and described in detail the process behind the 2010 version celebrating his father’s life.
For this project he went through an archive that encapsulated 50 years of travels, from naturalization certificates to calendars, receipts, postcards, photographs and slides.
One of the most interesting insights was to learn how he was able to label the hardest places to recognize by crowd sourcing the identity of the slides and photographs.
Ben Fry – Mmmm…Data
Ben Fry recently won the 2011 National Design Award for interaction design. In his talk he share some of his visualization projects like All Streets and Stats of the Union .
He also showed a new personal project that is not yet public. It is a project based on his interest in typography, in which he pulls types from random PDFs and uses them to reconstruct a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Aaron Koblin – Data Arts (Software for Storytelling and Exploration)
Aaron Koblin leads the Data Arts Team (DAT) at Google. In the talk he shared some of his previous work like the installation ecloud at the San jose Airport in which 3000 panels of privacy glass change based on weather patterns.
More recently he has been working in online music videos projects like The Johnny Cash Project The Wilderness Downtown and ROME project.
The last session of Eyeo was a panel discussion about visualization and social justice with Lisa Strausfeld, Laura Kurgan, Mark Hansen and Michal Migurski. This panel raised interesting questions about making the data more meaningful not just more beautiful, and the risk of the lack of statistic rigor or oversimplification in visualizations.
It was a great wrap-up for the festival which was characterized for a very enthusiastic and inspiring atmosphere, but that could have benefited from the addition of more context and critique to the presentations.
To read more about Eyeo:
- Jan Willem Tulp has written several guest posts on Infosthetics and Visualizing.org.
- Megan Erin Miller has started a community collection of all the projects that have been seen at Eyeo.
- Michael Wang created a visual overview of some of the talks.
May 18 2011
Creativity, Collaboration and Hacking
This past Saturday I attended Seven on Seven, organized by Rhizome at the New Museum.
Sponsored by AOL, the Seven on Seven conference matches seven leading artists with seven creative technologists and challenge them to a produce new project—be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine—over the course of a single day.
The pairs are asked not to plan out their work too much in advance, and to show up ready to collaborate. The following day the seven teams present their projects and discuss the ideas and process of collaboration.
Catherina Fake, co-founder of Hunch and Flickr did the introduction to the presentation of the projects. You can find the text of the introduction “Creativity, Collaboration and Hacking “ in her blog.
This year teams in the order of the presentations:
- Liz Magic Laser and Ben Cerveny.
- Andy Baio and Michael Bell-Smith.
- Zachary Lieberman and Bre Pettis.
- Emily Roysdon and Kellan Elliott-McCrea.
- Ricardo Cabello and Christopher Poole.
- Camille Utterback and Erica Sadun.
- Jeri Ellsworth and Rashaad Newsome.
Some of the most interesting projects:
An obsessive-compulsive montages of video clips in an automated way (http://supercut.org/) by Andy Baio and Michael Bell-Smith.
An Installation that projected videos of people talking abut the most important people in their lives on to sculptures of the interviewers by Zachary Lieberman and Bre Pettis.
A browser add-on that lets users engage in an active browsing experience by putting a layer over web pages where comments can be left by Ricardo Cabello (moot) Christopher Poole (mr. doob.)
An iPad app, that forced users to use physical and intentional movements to take a picture. One mode made users shake the iPad to take a picture, the other made users hold the iPad still in place, the longer it stayed still, the clearer the picture by Camille Utterback and Erica Sadun.
This is the second year of 7 on seven. The idea to pair programmers with artists came from betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who is also a board member of Rhizome, the New Museum affiliate that puts the program together.
Rhizome’s blog has a post with the participants answering the question: Do you think artists and technologists create things the same way?
May 11 2011
@Plaid last week: Socializing outfit decisions & young women finally get some helpful budgeting guidance
Last week we heard from two different Harvard ladies representing two successful tech start-ups. While the two companies have very different functions, both help women do better with what they have and be smarter about the future.
Who: Marissa Evans, Founder
What: GO TRY IT ON
Marissa noticed she repeatedly uttered the same words in response to her friends’ queries about which outfit to wear out, “Go try it on!” In December 2009, she decided it was time to take her own advice to a new level and create a place where people could share photos and get honest and helpful feedback about what to wear or what to leave on the hanger. She blended her retail/entrepreneurial background developed by running her previous company, A Shirt Thing, her digital marketing professional experience gained through her work at Digitas, and her educational know-how as a recent graduate of Harvard Business School to launch GO TRY IT ON. The website launched in beta form at the 2010 South by Southwest conference, where it was a finalist at the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator competition.
The site and its successful smart phone app work like this: users upload a photo of themselves and then they can add descriptions of the brands they are wearing and add context around their outfit (e.g., first date). Users can then seek advice from the community, just their friends, and/or a fashion expert.
GO TRY IT ON has seen lightning speed success since its inception with over 200,000 iPhone app downloads and 6 million opinions on the site. The company is continuing to develop new experiences to help even more women (and men) get feedback on their look.
Marissa and her GO TRY IT ON team are entrepreneurs in residence at Plaid, and we couldn’t be more thrilled about it.
Who: Allison Fast, Chief Marketing Officer
What: LearnVest
In 2006, Allison was about to graduate when her friend Alexa Von Tobel asked a group of their friends how it was possible that in their four years at Harvard they had not received a single course on personal finance—they had no training on how to handle their money when they entered the working world. At the peak of the recession in 2008, Alexa took a leave of absence from Harvard Business School to found LearnVest, which stands for “Learn, Earn, and Invest” and functions as an online platform to help women gain control of their finances.
LearnVest has managed to pool together a drool worthy board of advisors which includes the former CEOs of Daily Candy, eHarmony, and The Huffington Post. Their Chief Content Officer, who comes from UrbanDaddy, helps a team of writers translate complex financial issues into compelling prose that’s easily relatable to their core audience of young women. Recent articles include: “6 Tips For Scoring A Cheap Wedding Dress” and “Osama Bin Laden’s Death & Your Money: What You Need To Know”. LearnVest now boasts a booming website, e-mail newsletters, Facebook page, and just this past year it launched a series of on-demand web tutorials called “Bootcamps” with great success. The company has partnered with leading brands like Real Simple magazine and Reebok on a number of innovative co-branded initiatives.
Today LearnVest has over 100,000 users and has an approximate 40 percent open rate of its e-mail newsletters. Its founder, who has been labeled by the press as “Suze Gorman 2.0”, just helped secure a second round of financing with Accel Partners which will help the company continue to grow its offering.
April 22 2011
This week @Plaid inc. Hacker Ninjas and Kindle killers
This week we had the pleasure of seeing some new start-ups, personal projects and hacking skills from the teams of our entrepreneurs in residence– Basno and Prehype
Who: Steve Kashishain
What: An App and simulator for enabling CPR training
Aidapp is a prototype developed by Steve and four other students of interactive media at the London College of Printing. Designed for inexperienced individuals who are interested in learning the basic methods of first aid and life-saving techniques, the goal of the project is to educate and empower individuals with these skills; taking advantage of the richness of multi-sensory stimulation and skills developed though our constant interaction with the physical world. Looking beyond traditional computer input devices, the experience seamlessly delivers information through physical computing and a web-application built for the iPad, allowing the user to remain concentrated on the step-by-step tutorials and work alongside the simulated casualty.
Who: Andras Szalai
What: Media Hacker Ninja (His words)
Sly is a Hungarian multimedia hacker who has been connecting everyday objects to computers since his teenage years. He is currently working as part of the Basno team and studying Innovation Design engineering at the Royal College of Art in London, UK.
He is primarily interested in alternative usage of recent and everyday technologies, new media, art and interaction design (both human-computer and human-human interaction).
Sly shared with us an amazing array of projects from Kitchen Budapest media lab and the Picnic conference a couple of years ago. By far his most exciting project is a table that utilizes NFC technology to simulate messages in sand sitting in the centre of a coffee table. Sounds bizarre but it is quite brilliant and will be showcased at the RCA’s summer show in July 2011.
Who: Henrik Breggen
What: Readmill
Henrik is founder of Readmill. One day last year him and some friends decided to start building a platform that makes it easy for people to share what they think about books, regardless if they are using a kindle, iPad, Nook, Smartphone or any other reading device. Their goal was to do this without ever having to enter your entire library manually, again.
Since that day they’ve assembled a team, hacked day & night, convinced investors and had lot’s of fun.
Readmill will launch in summer 2011.
March 29 2011
Design, Illustration, Emotion
Technology, including computers, creative suites and various other programs, has inevitably leveled the playing field for designers, giving us all access to the same tools and triggering a mass of computer-generated design in our industry. In spite of this, designers and illustrators have started a no holds barred movement to use illustration and hand composed elements to reinvent their style and highlight what makes their talent unique.
Computer-based design can be great, but has a tendency to feel cold, sterile and let’s face it, corporate. With the design community tiring of this approach, we are yet again faced with the eternal search to discover the next inspiring thing. Luckily, illustration and hand-composed elements have recently catapulted to the forefront of design and have captured our attention as well. Handwritten typography, tactile images and photo illustration all induce an emotional reaction with their intended audiences, are expressive and yes, inspiring.
Nevertheless, creating a balance between design and illustration is not a simple feat. Not every designer is an illustrator, and not every illustrator is a designer. When a person can successfully merge together these two disciplines an incredible phenomenon occurs. An original evocative piece is created.
In the past, the successful merging of design and illustration can be found in the works of Stefan Sagmeister, James Victore, Alan Fletcher, Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser. These designers boldly utilized illustration to create impact, and whether you loved or hated their designs, you at least felt something.
New designers/illustrators like Mike Perry, Jessica Walsh, Mario Hugo, Matt Luckhurst and Hello Von have pushed the boundaries further by mixing modern technology with carefully crafted illustrations to create emotionally-driven design for specific clients and causes. Each of the designers’ own experiences, beliefs and passions helped to shape their unique aesthetic approaches and make them stand out.
These designers and their work should inspire us all to seek out our individuality and incorporate it, as well as our own life experiences, into our work. It’s time to create some passion, some excitement and some emotion. At the end of the day, a designer can only strive to invoke a reaction, and we’re glad to see this new movement taking hold and look forward to new ground breaking design.
March 25 2011
A Blossoming Cause
Last Friday evening, members of the Plaid team had the opportunity to attend and enjoy the Endometriosis Foundation of America’s Third Annual Blossom Ball at the New York Public Library. The event, of course, boasted all the hallmarks of a big New York benefit:
A great venue - You can’t get much better than the New York Public Library.
A delicious menu – Which shouldn’t have been too hard given EFA’s co-founder is Padma Lakshimi, host of Iron Chef and celebrated cookbook author.
A star-studded guest list – The event was opened by Dr. Oz, and Susan Sarandon was the main speaker of the night. 
Incredible gift bags – We’re pretty psyched about a free pass to Soul Cycle and dinner at Philippe Chow.
But, what made this event truly standout was that is was thrown in support of a very important cause, helping those who suffer from Endometriosis. The EFA aims to shed light on what is easily the most unspoken about, pervasive women’s disease. Endometriosis affects 176 million women and girls worldwide, is the leading cause of infertility, and is strongly correlated to the development of cancer, but it receives only a fraction of the attention that “bigger” women’s health issues, like Breast Cancer and HPV, do. A lack of awareness has caused many women and girls to suffer in silence, translating to an average time of 10 years between the onset of the disease and a proper diagnosis and treatment.
We hope that this event garners mass attention and donations to fuel future EFA activities that will ultimately raise awareness of Endometrioisis. A big budget awareness campaign on Endometriosis that targets young women is long overdue.
March 21 2011
Sleep No More
Sleep No More, a new theater concept showing in a hotel in Chelsea, completely turns the idea of a play on its head. Instead of simply sitting and watching actors perform, the audience has to move through six floors of beautifully, detailed, realistic 1930’s film noir sets to discover their own story and experience, which is comparable to a Hitchcock-esque, ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book. Environments change dramatically, from a misty street to a UV lit psychiatric ward to the cold solitude of a graveyard with soil under foot, all linked via a drape or secret door. Your sense of direction is continuously challenged, as well your entire sense of mood. Music is also constantly playing and actors frequently appear to play-out a dramatic scene, only to disappear moments later.
Anyone interested in new experiences will not be disappointed. We traditionally write about about how technology has helped reinvent old art forms or platforms for communication, but this is quite simply a brilliant idea that is executed in the most fantastical way. Tickets have been selling fast, so go and see this before its too late
Sleep No More, Punchdrunk productions, Mckittrick hotel, 530 W27 St, New York City,
February 11 2011
We’ve moved!
Well, not too far actually. Just up the street to 270 Lafayette. We started to outgrow our studio on Spring street but just couldn’t give up our favorite spots in SoHo. Since we couldn’t imagine moving anywhere else, we decided to share with you some of our hand picked places around the area that make it so hard to leave.
