This essay on the ethics of moonlighting designers seems to be making the rounds, and strikes me as completely ignorant of how reputations are built in the web industry.

Full disclosure, I’m a friend and ex-colleague of Luke Wroblewski, a designer at Yahoo whom the author uses as an example of a well-respected web professional, whose personal design consultancy “makes him look flighty and unprofessional” and “makes both his consultancy and Yahoo!’s design practice look a bit dodgy”.

On the contrary, I bet that the existence and maintenance of that very site is part of why Yahoo decided he was right for the job in the first place. The work and thinking contained within the site shows that Luke is aggressive, independent, well-rounded and engaged with the outside world, all qualities I look for and admire in AQ’s small staff. Likewise, as a prospective client of Luke’s, his position at Yahoo combined with his lukew.com presence would give me a pretty good idea of the type and caliber of design problems he’s capable of addressing.

More than ever, people in general create multiple online identities as a way to make themselves easy to find, give the world a more complete understanding of who they are, and attract and maintain interest in what they’re doing. While the writing style of lukew.com may be a bit more corporate than it needs to be, the site essentially acts as one these identities for Luke, and I, for one, am glad that he continues to maintain it. I imagine his employer is too.

I’m going to be hosting the next TAB Talks, featuring a presentation and Q&A with type designer Christian Schwartz. Christian has created custom typefaces for publications and companies like Esquire, Wallpaper*, The New York Times, Bosch and Deutsche Bahn. His typefaces for the Guardian were an integral part of the newspaper’s acclaimed redesign in 2005.

The talk will be held in English with Japanese translation, at Gotanda Sonic in Gotanda. Hope to see you there!

Stag is available for purchase at Village

Late March/Early April promises to be a good time for art and design fans, with major auctions, awards, exhibitions and festivals happening throughout the city.

In January, we started working on a handful of related projects with TAB and Marunouchi to get ready for their respective contributions to the celebration. This week, we finally have something out in the open to show for it, a one-pager for Marunouchi Art Weeks, an umbrella for all the Marunouchi-area art events happening this season. There’s much more still at the printers, but I couldn’t wait to share the link.

These veggies showed up at my local Ito Yokado about a year ago. Each one has a line drawing of the (Japanese) face and name of the farmer responsible for the crop.

I’m not certain there’s a significant difference in quality, but it’s a clever way to calm food source paranoias in a country where American beef with spinal tissue and frozen Chinese dumplings laced with rat poison lead the nightly news.

During a recent visit with type designer Christian Schwartz, he described his encounter with original Granjon type with the awe and adoration usually reserved for great works of art or architecture.

My own exposure to metal type has been limited to the small collection at my design school in Illinois. At the time I was immaturely suspicious and disinterested in anything that wasn’t made tomorrow, so regrettably I never got around to rummaging through the cases. At the time, my only other exposure to older type was the frustration of trying to design with digitizations, an experience that turned me off to serif faces for years.

Thanks to a great new article explaining why “digital classics” like Bembo underperform compared to the originals, I’m relieve to know that my distaste was at least partially because of the digitizations themselves.

This is a pretty smart re-ordering of comment fields.

Classic Comments Form interaction:
“I have something to say about this!”
“Okey Dokey, just fill out these thr. . ”
“Argggh!”

So let people get the thought in their mind on screen first and take names later. (Although the traditional ordering could be seen as the comment form equivelent of the Brady Bill.)

In case you haven’t heard, the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe resigned last week, three days into the new parliamentary session, and way to far into a comically long string of corruption scandals. He immediately checked himself into a hospital for “stress related stomach problems”, neatly avoiding the inevitable shitstorm.

Aera, a weekly general interest magazine, managed to capture all this in one gutsy crop. Now that’s editorial design!

You may have seen the series of interviews we’re doing with typeface designers over at the AQ blog. We just released the fourth today, and we probably have another two or three in us before we retire (in the Jay-Z sense) the series.

O-bon gave me a few moments to reflect on what I’ve learned about type designers, the state of type, and interviewing. Incomplete and in no particular order:

• With output of just a few fonts a year, it may not seem like it, but type designers are very busy people. In addition to actually designing fonts, there’s research, customer support, gathering of specimens, website maintenance, customizations for special clients, teaching, conferences, type history consulting for movies, newspaper articles, not to mention all the usual office b.s. we all deal with.
• Like great artists of any kind, ability/interest in talking about their work is not always proportional to the quality of the work itself.
• The best typeface designers generally love and know type history, but don’t let it stop them from searching for entirely new forms, made by manipulating just a handful of variables within fairly-tight constraints of acceptability.
• Asking type designers to pick their favorite letter is just barely easier and smarter than asking a composer to pick their favorite chord, but the non-compliant answers reveal as much about type design as the compliant ones.
• The technology of type design is still changing. The adoption of OpenType and new time-saving software like Superpolator seems to be resulting in bigger, more complete font families, with more weights, better multilingual support, small caps, ligatures, and alternates. But chatting last week, Craig pointed out the possibilities that programming may open up for type in the coming years. The movement he described vaguely resembling what’s happened with software synthesizers. The re-introduction of chaos into clean forms in a much subtler way than the grunge fonts of the 90s, in persuit of the tasty imperfections of past technology to “warm” up the cold consistency of high-definition screens and the flatness of offset.
• Type designers are as susceptible to fashion or suspicion of fashion as any other creator. As far as I can tell, grunge fonts are equivelent to hypercolor t-shirts, and Dutch-inspired humanist sans serifs are foie gras.

Okayama Prefecture took over the Ginza line a few weeks ago with these ads. The concept is simple. They asked a bunch of locals and visitors what they want to “push” about Okayama. Each was presumably given one of these big posters and a handful of markers.

I really like the series for a few reasons:

• They’re authentic. I walked up and down the carriages and couldn’t find any duplicates. Some are even signed: “A. Maeda, age 80″. Because of the gloss of the paper, it was hard to tell if the handdrawn designs were scanned and offset printed, but it sure didn’t look like it.
• The choice of markers that were passed out (mostly black and red) was just enough to establish some aesthetic consistency across the series, without the need for a designer to rein in the personal drawing and writing styles with heavy handed graphic effects.

My first article for TABlog was just published: a review of the Tokyo Art Director’s Club exhibition at Ginza Graphic Gallery, in the form of 6 suggestions.

“Award shows are tough to get right. They have no over-arching narrative, no common aesthetic, and enjoyment by the general public is only one of their purposes. But they are also a great opportunity to put the current thinking and values of an industry on display, improving awareness of how design works, and when it’s working.

The ADC and Ginza Graphic Gallery could be doing a lot more to embrace this opportunity. Here are a few suggestions on how.”