The previous post mentioned Porter Square Books in Cambridge. View Larger Map
I was lingering there, I was early for something and had a few minutes. But after a time, I felt like I was “using” the place. I wasn’t planning on buying anything. At that moment, it was less a store than a fresh-stocked library.
Regarding this guilt:
1) I wanted to make a donation, a tip jar for the store itself, not particular employees. I wanted to treat it like a WiFi connection, with an optional, pay-for-use “jar”.
2) Could frequent tipping, with no purchasing, buy you into the discount club? The co-op…*
I was at Porter Square Books, leafing through their magazines and found the Art issue of The Believer was out. I’m not a reader, but I decided to pick it up.
Leafing through it, I found this nice “discussed” device they use at the head of each of their articles:
It’s another kind of teaser to tell you what’s in store, what’s touched on. For instance, this piece touches on “Three-Dimensional Storytelling”, that caught my eye.*
I’ve noticed that I’ll miss out on reading New Yorker articles because the titles are a bit oblique or because of the frequent lack of supporting images. An article that I’d like to read, if I was willing to give it a 2 minute trial, I’ll just page right by because of impatience. The New Yorker sets their articles’ barrier to entry pretty high. There’s not much seduction in a wall of text. (But wow it’s the best thing going…)
Thanks Believer, I like that trick. I hope it’s cool for others to use it.
*There is a strong narrative/imaginative aspect to the Discussed. It’s worth re-reading it after you read the piece to try and imagine how the article did touch on these things/themes/ideas/tangents.
This is a great post by Karin Fong, a motion graphics/designer at Imaginary Forces. She’s talking about 2.5 d.
Depending on when/if you choose to read her post. Wikipedia defines 2.5 D as
2.5D (”two-and-a-half-dimensional”), also called pseudo-3D, is an informal term used to describe either a) graphical projections and techniques which cause a series of images or scenes to fake or appear to be three-dimensional (3D) when in fact they are not.
Here’s a stellar example Karin Fong cites in her entry:
Tara was all shot stop motion with real lights and everything. That, in part, is what makes it so beautiful. As the director Jamie Caliri put it, to paraphrase, ‘the stop motion animation gives you warmth for free’.
Most likely, I’ll just be applying adobe’s drop shadow to sketches I scan in and cut out. But it’s a start. Seems a fantastic device for transitions. (See Karin’s reference to this scene in The Kid Stays in the Picture)
………….
I’ll also toss in this similarly not-easily-forgettable presentation by Scott McCloud, courtesy of Michael Surtees/Design Notes . Check out his rapid fire transitions (my favorite kicks off at 4:55):
I was leafing through Brookline Massachussetts Adult & Community Education Catalog for 2010, and I noticed this nice move.
Probably much more common than I realize, but in the outer margin they included a teaser for other class listings on other pages. They also had famous quoutes and the like.
But this other dimension of communication caught my attention as I browsed. I think this may be a useful browsing pattern.
Google’s kinda trained us for relevance in the right margin, I wonder how this should inflect print.
Here’s what the wikipedia entry says: “A brief description, usually located at the end of a book, describing production notes relevant to the edition
A printer’s mark or logotype”
In web usage it seems like a bibliography of tools. It’s an interesting view behind the scenes… Seems an honest practice, transparent.
Historically, according to the entry cited above, it included information about the owner of the document or scribner, etc. — it is a kind of metadata, but a bit different. Will this broadened definition of colophons be important to scholarship? A new bibliographic necessity?
I’m trying to resolve my relationship to a blog. For the moment, this is how I’m thinking of it.
The blog will focus on thoughts related to media. Not links, I think I’m not gonna include that stuff now, the one’s I’m liking can be found on delicious: http://delicious.com/jeffgoldenson
I’m also interested in overall issues related to design, but at this point, those are more personal, so I put them down on notecards. This is where all the rest goes.
A little while back I was chasing some links and I landed on the amazon page of a book I like. It turns out that I searched this book in Amazon not too long before, but it looked different — it had a lot fewer reviews. Then I realized, I was on the Wabi Sabi page of amazon.co.uk, as opposed to amazon.com
Looking deeper, I realized the books other people went on to buy in the UK were more interesting to me than those Americans went on to buy. For sure there are many overlaps in the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section, but there was also a sufficient number of differences.
I’ve found that my reading tastes lean toward those in the UK, as opposed to here (US, Cambridge). I find Amazon.ca (Canada) not so interesting. There is no Amazon Australia, South Africa… etc.
A little while back I was chasing some links and I landed on the amazon page of a book I like. It turns out that I searched this book in Amazon not too long before, but it looked different — it had a lot fewer reviews. Then I realized, I was on the 
