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A Diaspora from Facebook, or from Reality?
For those of us plugged into tech news, the development of Diaspora is a promising one: true decentralization of social networking.
Diaspora is a grassroots-funded open-source project started by four NYU students. The idea? Instead of hosting photos, links, messages, and friend connections on a centralized server, host it on your own computer. Each person's host is called a "seed" in Diaspora lingo, a borrowed term from bittorrent.
The Land and Sea Belong to Us All
The past two months have seen a pair of tragedies out at sea, both stemming from much larger problems that loom over humanity. On April 20, the BP-owned Deepwater Horizon oil platform suffered a blowout, causing a massive explosion that killed 11 workers and sent countless millions of barrels of oil gushing into the sea.
On the last day of May, Israeli warships and helicopters intercepted and violently commandeered a flotilla of aid vessels bound for the Gaza Strip while the ships were out in international waters. At least 10 civilians were killed and dozens wounded in the nighttime attack and forceful boarding.
These events, while horrific, merely unmask for us once again the ghastly twin visages of the modern corporation and the modern nation-state as they are in their purest forms: exploitation and oppression. These human-made tragedies are stark reminders of what happens when average people don't have control over the resources they need for their survival.
A larger version of the graphic is below the fold.
First Things First: What (and How) We Design Matters
Last week Andy Rutledge trained his political sights on the "First Things First" manifestos, by way of Jon Tan's excellent essay on the same topic.
1964's and 2000's First Things First manifestos are, if anything, vague. But that's common among manifestos that are as brief as these are: a broad-brush critique, followed by an equally broad-brush call to action.
The FTFs are arguably the signature documents in the design world that push back against the idea that our profession is value-neutral. Tan's article puts them in their proper historical contexts, and muses on their meaning to the contemporary world of design and its current trends.
Rutledge, whose writings are no stranger to this blog, isn't getting it. After reading his essay, it became clear he just never acquired the conceptual tools needed to deal with what's being presented to him. At the risk of stating the obvious for some, I'll do my best to go through a few of Rutledge's major confusions.
External URL aliasing in Drupal
For clients, I often need to make short URLs that link to long ones, and while services like bit.ly and tinyurl are great, it's even better to have a URL that comes from the client's site. For example, you want www.mysite.com/yoursite to redirect immediately to www.yoursite.com.
There's no terribly easy way to do that in Drupal, and the few modules I've played with are pretty cumbersome and each have their shortcomings. So here's a quick php ditty that will redirect everyone who isn't logged in, and show the actual page for those who are:
Michael Beirut on Clients
Michael Beirut, one of the few living universally-known designers today (largely through his association with the firm Pentagram), discusses something that far too few of us really ruminate on: clients. Because as Michael stresses in this talk, it takes two to tango. You can't have a designer without a client, and the best work comes out of healthy relationships between the two.
Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization
Check out this presentation by Alex Lundry on the way in which visualizations are becoming a new medium for political warfare:
And 9 times out of 10, we designers are the ones who are tasked with creating these visualizations. So before we copy that spreadsheet into Illustrator, let's look for the hidden agendas that may be lurking under the numbers.
UPDATE: A great example is the Obama job loss chart making the rounds, particularly on Twitter. Check out the graph and some great analysis here.
Obama, Nobel Peace Laureate, Escalates in Afghanistan
Former anti-war Presidential candidate, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and current Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama has decided that to end the war in Afghanistan and pull out our young soldiers we must actually escalate the conflict and send thirty thousand more soldiers. What should one really expect though, from a "progressive" that keeps George W. Bush's Defense Secretary on board?
Particularly galling is the reaction from otherwise sane anti-war progressives. David Sirota over at OpenLeft has a nice collection of diagnostic questions everyone left of center should be asking (and what does it say that William "The Bloody" Kristol is cheering Obama on?).
While we wait for our dear President to hope and change us to victory in Afghanistan, let's have some designy fun below the fold. Suggestions for other catchy slogans for me to make? Leave them in the comments!
Wheatpasting for Social Change
Artist, designer, and author Josh MacPhee has a great blog post over at AK Press' blog, titled "Twenty Poster Books of Note."
He's got quite a collection of amazingly hard to find books, filled with progressive and radical posters - covering everything from wide topics, like Germany and Northern Africa, to very specific situations, postwar Chicano culture in California and the Black Panthers.
Sadly, many of these books are out of print. Given Josh's politics, we can only hope he'll scan in and distribute these fascinating political artifacts.
On a more visually satisfying note, I've just run across a great collection of high-resolution scans of posters from France in May 1968 - getting to look at rare posters I hadn't seen before, as well as seeing classics in such high quality was a real treat.
I Mashed Up Kanye West and Barack Obama.
It took far too long to actually post about it, but I became famous on the internet (well, my video did, which is close enough!). I was able to get this uploaded within a half hour of Kanye West's infamous drunken interruption:
It's currently at almost 3 million views - not bad! I got frontpage inclusion as well as top honors for category pages. But most awesome? Being played on übermensch Bill O'Reilly's show:
10 of the Best Free Fonts for Protest Posters
I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of seeing protests full of nothing but large signs full up with that wretched font, IMPACT (I'm looking at you, ANSWER Coalition!).
For those radical designers among us who either can't afford or don't have access to mainstays like Gill Sans, Futura, or the 8 million flavors of Helvetica and Univers, I figured I'd assemble some of the best free fonts out there that will help make your posters both readable and awesome-looking. And even for those who have all the commercial fonts in the world, some of these free gems have a character not easily found in professional fonts.
A word of caution, however: the general rule of thumb with free fonts, even in this list, is "you get what you pay for." Expect to have to heavily tweak kerning, spacing between words and leading. And don't assume you'll find accents (or even lower case letters!) in all of these.
Enjoy the ten below, and by all means make more suggestions in the comments!
