I'm papa large/ Big shot on the east coast.

• Steven Johnson illustrates "half serious products and predictions". He's also got an entire book of this stuff available for free on Google Books (What the World Needs Now: A Resource Book for Daydreamers, Frustrated Inventors, Cranks, Efficiency Experts, Utopians, Gadgeteers, Tinkerers, and Just About Anybody Else.). I love exploring and illustrating absurdities- I've got a sketchbook full of them.
  
  
• In fact, my latest creative side project (do I really need another?!) is using cartoons and illustration in semi-ridiculous concept visualizations. I'll be posting them along with "Lunchbreath" over on Core77. In fact I just posted some illustrated "reportage" from NYC Design Week and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair today.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Olivier Kugler's illustration work is really brilliant. Aesthetically, it’s gorgeous stuff—authentic, loose, details scattered here and there, linework without color/color without line work. But from a content standpoint it’s also interesting—he uses sketching as a method of ‘reportage’—he goes on location, talks to people, then captures them and their environment in a loose collection of drawings. The possibilities for crossovers into design-thinking are huge. This is the first time I've seen illustration and ethnography/observational research come so close to one another, and it's exciting...
  
  
• "Twitter needs to be differentiated from what people write on Twitter. The fact that so many people now use Twitter as a public email system, or as a way to instant-message their friends in front of other people, is immaterial; Twitter is a note-taking technology, end of story. You take short-form notes with it, limited to 140 characters. "
  - from "In Defense of Twitter" on BLDG Blog
  
  
• John Vanderslice w/ the Magik*Magik Orchestra performing "Too Much Time". This song is amazingly catchy, and the added drama of the strings really makes it epic. I truly believe there's nothing better than strings in rock songs.
  
  
• Candy Chang in an urban-planner, graphic designer, and artist, and her website is full of really really great ideas and projects. I stumbled across her site through a NY Times article on her recent redesign of the NYC Street Vendor Guide, which she transformed into an gorgeous inforgraphic poster. Once in her site, though, I was entranced with project after project that engage the urban environment and really think about community and public space. Her diversity of skills and interests is really inspiring.
  

  5/22/2009