Educational as well as entertaining

Michael Bierut tells us why everything he knows about design he learned from the Sopranos.

My favourite:

On creative blocks:
"My advice? Put that thing down awhile, we go get our joints copped, and tomorrow the words'll come blowing out your ass."

Just finished Suite Francaise, a damning novel of the actions and attitudes of the French middle class during WW2. Disconcertingly the book finishes in in 1941 with the occupying Germans heading to the Russian Front. The book is two of five planned novellas that were disrupted by Irene Nemirovsky's arrest and later death in Auschwitz. Her daughters grabbed the notebooks when fleeing and left them unread for more than 50 years thinking they were diaries that would be too painful to read.

Check out Moto's wonderful site.

Reminds me of the work of Joshua Davis, one of the very best things in the US design triennial at the Cooper Hewitt in New York. He's an artist who designs vectors, brushes, palettes, etc., but then lets the software do the composition.

We talk internally about the importance non-linear experiences online, but I don't believe they are an imperative. One can have a compelling linear experience online, but the quality of the narrative has to be high - something which rarely happens online. It is most interesting to me when experiences combine both an interesting momentum and a serendipity.

Peter Morville, author of the O'Reilly books Information architecture and Ambient Findability has a blog, and an interesting model of social information architecture.

I just read a book called, 'You are here: Personal geographies and other maps of the imagination' by Katharine Harmon
She talks about how humans have an instinct or need to map the world - both to create sense and possibility. To make a cartography of the world to make it known and real whether it's corporal, physical, psychological.

'Maps intrigue us, perhaps none more than those that ignore mapping conventions. These are maps that find their essence in some other goal than just taking us from point a to point b. They are a vehicle for the imagination, fuelled up and ready to go. We look at these maps, and our minds know just what to do: take the information and extrapolate from it a place where they can leap, play, gambol - without that distant province of our being, the body, dragging them down...that particular terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique contour lines of experience.'

'Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.'

Gore Vidal

On speaking

In June I'm speaking at the Online Marketing Show in London come along and cheer or watch me go wildly off-topic.