• posted by Robin Sloan
• posted 2.5.2012
• tagged: illustration, jillian tamaki, writing
• commented on 1 time
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Great advice from the great Jillian Tamaki, and it applies to more than just illustration:

I know you’ve answered this question like a bagillion times but I thought I’d throw it out here anyway, since I can: any advice to a excited/somewhat terrified 21 year old artist who is working towards having an illustration career some time in the not-so-distant future?

Hm. I teach a lot of very freaked out 21-year-olds. I think a lot of people psych themselves out. “What do people want?” “Will I get a job/jobs when I graduate?” “What is illustration anyway?” Those questions are hard to avoid and I certainly struggled with them myself. However, my piece of advice is to try not to think so “large”. Think small. Think about the marks you want to make on the paper in front of you… the ones that bring you pleasure and satisfaction. You can’t control what other people think or if they’ll give you a job. You can only control your own actions and the work you produce. You have to be a little delusional to pursue a life in the arts, so throw caution to the wind and make pictures that excite you and hopefully the world will agree.

I actually don’t agree completely—I think creative life in the year 2012 requires that you think both large and small at the same time—but really, “think about the marks you want to make on the paper [or the screen] in front of you” is still the kernel. That’s worth painting on your wall. That’s where everything begins.

• posted by Robin Sloan
• posted 1.31.2012
• tagged: adam lashinsky, Apple
• commented on 1 time
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I found this long interview with Adam Lashinsky, author of the new book Inside Apple, pretty absorbing. Two things to note:

• For me, Lashinsky exemplifies a certain type of reporter that I really like. In all the times I’ve seen him on video (and once in person, though I can’t remember when) he’s shown a sort of brusque, restless manner leavened with deep curiosity and candor. Sort of like one of those Army commanders with a Ph.D: super smart, but not leaning on the smartness, not dwelling in it. A Lashinsky-esque reporter believes that facts laid out in order have real power, and he or she will work hard to get those facts, often by using a telephone. In the cosmology of reporting, I think of it as “old-school,” but maybe not—maybe it’s always been rare.
• But, even after months (years?) of Lashinsky-esque reporting, we still don’t know that much about how Apple works inside. Not really. And that makes me think, in turn, of the organizations I’ve been part of; it makes me think of all the stories written about them, all so woefully incomplete. But that’s the best you can do when you’re on the outside. Even in our weird information-saturated world, there’s so much we don’t, and can’t, know, even about something as mundane as a company. The writer M. F. K. Fisher said: “Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.” Every company, until it breaks (i.e. gets its email subpoenaed Enron-style, I guess) is that egg. Every family is that egg. Every person is that egg. And that’s a wonderful thing, because it means there are always mysteries, and more mysteries, and mysteries beyond.

• posted by Robin Sloan
• posted 1.28.2012
• tagged: he's a laywer, no he's a typographer
• commented on 2 times
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Like a lot of people, I enjoyed Typographica’s sprawling review of the best fonts from 2011, with contributions from folks like Caren Litherland and Jason Santa Maria.

My favorite find was not a typeface but a person: Matthew Butterick, a lawyer/typographer (!) who both wrote a terrific review and had a couple of typefaces reviewed. One of those, Equity, is designed specifically for the needs of lawyers: contracts, court filings, crappy office laser printers, etc. It came out of Butterick’s Typography for Lawyers project, which would be pretty cool on its own, even if he wasn’t also designing typefaces.

I mean seriously: lawyer/typographer? How cool is that? Almost as cool as library police.

• posted by Robin Sloan
• posted 1.25.2012
• tagged: design, fbi, megaupload
• commented on 1 time
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My erstwhile Twitter colleague Ryan Greenberg has some advice for the FBI regarding the current site design of MegaUpload:

You must plan these operations, right? I mean, it’s not like you just randomly seize private property on a whim. This is a failure of project management. You can’t just bring in a designer at the last minute and expect them to polish your design turd. This is your chance to shine. Go wild. Animation, maybe a Matrix-style flow of numbers in the background. Ominous type. Here are some ideas:

• posted by Robin Sloan
• posted 1.24.2012
• tagged: physics
• commented on 2 times
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I am over the moon about this interview over at The Atlantic. Ross Anderson dials up a philosopher of physics (!) and comes away with a long, thoughtful, surprisingly penetrable conversation. It’s the most startlingly synaptic thing I’ve read in weeks.

As you might expect from a conversation with a physics philosopher, it’s hard to blockquote—really, just go make some coffee and read the whole thing—but I did like this part, because it makes the case that physics might still be part of our human universe, not just an increasingly abstract description of some uber-folded N-dimensional meta-scrapple:

Do you think that physics has neglected some of these foundational questions as it has become, increasingly, a kind of engine for the applied sciences, focusing on the manipulation, rather than say, the explanation, of the physical world?

Maudlin: Look, physics has definitely avoided what were traditionally considered to be foundational physical questions, but the reason for that goes back to the foundation of quantum mechanics. The problem is that quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world. And that’s very clear when you look at any of the foundational discussions. This is what Einstein was upset about; this is what Schrodinger was upset about. Quantum mechanics was merely a calculational technique that was not well understood as a physical theory. Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn’t do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong, Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong about that. But the effect of it was to shut down perfectly legitimate physics questions within the physics community for about half a century. And now we’re coming out of that, fortunately.

(Emphasis mine.)

Props to Anderson for introducing me to Tim Maudlin and props to The Atlantic Tech for running something like this.

• posted by Robin Sloan
• posted 1.16.2012
• tagged: art, the hobbit
• commented on 4 times
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I watched one of the production diaries from The Hobbit recently, and now I need your help: is this—that’s a link that will take you to about 8:30 in the video—for real?

It’s not a real technique that they use every day, right? I think it’s just a little tongue-in-cheek joke for the video. It has to be.

If it’s real, it is the greatest thing I have ever seen in a production diary. Not just for the technique, but for the Bert-and-Ernie banter between the two master Middle-Earth renderers, Alan Lee and John Howe, sitting side-by-side, peeking at each other’s picture, sketching… well, you’ll see.

• posted by Robin Sloan
• posted 1.13.2012
• tagged: droidmaker, history, loren carpenter
• commented on 1 time
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I’m reading Michael Rubin’s Droidmaker, a history of Lucasfilm’s work with computer graphics and computer-assisted editing, and really, a big chunk of Bay Area history I didn’t know much about. (The book’s first section was particularly interesting. It’s largely pre-Star Wars, and Francis Ford Coppola looms large in the SF filmmaking scene.)

Here’s a detail that made me smile. I love a good you’ve-got-to-hire-me story:

Sometimes it seemed as if everyone in the computer industry wanted a job with the Lucasfilm researchers. The small team were sent resumes constantly. As soon as he was situated at Bank Street, [Alvy Ray Smith] began receiving “love notes” from a scientist at Boeing. The term “notes” was perhaps misleading. Someone was sending Alvy 8x10 prints of a mountainscape…

…almost certainly of digital origin, with no explanation. These images caught his eye. He had never seen a computer-generated mountain look so detailed, and although it was likely the result of an application of mathematician Bernard Mandelbrot’s new ideas, neither he nor [Ed Catmull] was sure how it had been done or who had done it.

In time they understood that the pictures came from someone making a presentation at that fall’s Siggraph conference in Seattle. They both made a mental note to find out more about him. Alvy pinned one of the photos to the wall.

The Siggraph presentation—set to a Beatles song—was the two-minute short Vol Libre, an insta-classic in the history of computer graphics. The Boeing scientist, Loren Carpenter, went on to join Lucasfilm and co-found Pixar.

• posted by Robin Sloan
• posted 1.12.2012
• tagged: china mieville, comics
• commented on 1 time
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China Miéville is writing a new series for DC Comics.

There’s no way I can’t give that a try.

(It’s not a Batman series though. Sorry if my headline got you excited; I couldn’t resist.)

• posted by Robin Sloan
• posted 1.6.2012
• tagged: Business, nick denton
• commented on 14 times
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I’m a bit obsessed with corporate communication, broadly defined: how do organized groups of people talk to each other? More specifically, I’m obsessed with the culture of the all-hands email or memo. The fiery rally-the-troops memo, the anodyne corp-speak memo, the new-hire announcement memo, the he’s-fired departure memo—I think they’re all fascinating.

Corporate communication needs context, though. Nick Denton gives good memo, of course, and his latest is no exception—or is it? I wonder sometimes: do Gawker Media staffers roll their eyes at Denton’s memos? Do they say: “Not this again. He’s writing for the Observer, not for us”? Optimistically (maybe naively) I would like to believe that no, they say, maybe quietly to themselves: “Damn. I’m proud to work for a guy who can write something like that.”

Now I’m trying to think of famous memos. Maybe there aren’t that many that we know about? You’d probably have to go looking for subpoenaed corporate corpuses available to the public, right? And then you’d have to find the memos. Researchers went to work on the Enron emails, and I’m sure they’re hungrily devouring the State Department cables, but the focus there is on the entire corpus, and I really am just interested in one particular kind of message: the one-to-many announcement.

So you’d be looking for cc: all. You’d be looking for the email describing the re-org, the printout announcing the acquisition, the mimeograph detailing the new cost-cutting measures. You’d be looking at the length, the vocabulary, the style. You might even be looking for Nabokovs among the cubicles.

So seriously: famous memos? (Post-2000 tech-company murmurings are disqualified.)

• posted by Robin Sloan
• posted 1.5.2012
• tagged: noah brier, Recommended
• commented on 2 times
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Here’s a really tremendously good list of long-form journalism from Noah Brier—his favorites of 2011. In particular, I was riveted by this collection of photos and captions, titled The shot that nearly killed me. Like Laura says: it’s the photo and caption together that are the real unit of visual storytelling.

(It’s interesting: I’m here in Italy for a little while, so my web reading hours are out of sync with everyone else’s in the United States. Therefore I can’t really post little links and things to Twitter… and therefore, I’m posting more here on Snarkmarket!)