frank chimero
The 101
I am on board with Frank’s love of A History of the World in 100 Objects and also with his SurveyCast concept. He lays it out in some detail in his post, so go check it out, but this bit resonated with me (emphasis mine):
I suppose I’m hungry for curated educational materials online. These are more than lists of books to read: they’re organized, edited, and have a clear point of view about the content they are presenting, and subvert the typical scatter-shot approach of half the web (like Wikipedia), or the hyper-linear, storyless other half that obsesses over lists. And that’s the frustrating thing about trying to teach yourself things online: you’re new, so you don’t know what’s important, but everything is spread so thin and all over the place, so it’s difficult to make meaningful connections.
Some of the teachers I remember most from college are the ones who would say something like: “Listen. There are only two movies you need to understand to understand [whole giant big cinematic movement X]. Those two movies are [A] and [B]. And we’re gonna watch ‘em.” (I feel like this is something Tim is extremely good at, actually.) It’s a step above curation, right? Context matters here; so does sequence. So we’re talking about some sort of super-sharp, web-powered, media-rich syllabus. I always liked syllabi, actually. They seem to make such an alluring promise, you know? Something like:
Go through this with me, and you will be a novice no more.
The Goldilocks project
Here’s a bit of crisp, concise, content-ful design from Frank. It’s exactly the kind of thing I was talking about (hoping for) over here. Super cool. (However, as a personal note: upon reflection, I think I do better work on Venus than on Earth.)
Stakes in the ground
I love the ideas page on Frank Chimero’s new site. There’s a good discipline on display here: you decide what you believe most, and you post it in public. (Of course, the fact that it’s beautifully designed doesn’t hurt.)
I wonder what an ideas page for Snarkmarket would look like?
The jazz standard and the stone tablet
This is mostly a pointer to Frank Chimero’s new post that connects jazz and design thinking to web platforms and APIs in a neat way. Frank is, unsurprisingly, actually walking the walk when it comes to designed content; his approach is simple and very effective. Look at a previous post to pick up on the pattern.
The illustrations remind me of some of the best sections of Watchmen—the graphic novel, not the movie—where whole scenes play out “silently” behind the main action. It’s visual counterpoint—the illustrations not simply, er, illustrating the text, but actually riffing on it. Maybe even satirizing it a tiny bit. It’s just great.
Anyway! I say “mostly” because I also want to tag on a question. Frank builds his argument on the great virtues of jazz. I think this graf sums it up best:
You know what I love about jazz and improvisation? It’s all process. One-hundred percent. The essence of it is the process, every time is different, and to truly partake in it, you have to visit a place to see it in progress. Every jazz club or improv comedy theater is a temple to the process of production. It’s a factory, and the art is the assembly, not the product. Jazz is more verb than noun. And in a world riddled with a feeling of inertia, I want to find a verb and hold on to it for dear life.
Here’s the question. Let’s change our time-scale from years or decades to hundreds of years or more. Does process-based work endure? Does pure process endure?
This might be a boring or moot to a lot of people. It’s not to me. For whatever reason, I find myself preoccupied with durability. It’s the Long Now; it’s the bat-glyph.
Will people still be riffing on jazz standards in a hundred years?
This is totally not a rhetorical question! I can imagine a whole line of thinking that goes: Oh yeah, actually, this is the secret weapon. Encode your work as pure process, and it will get made and remade over and over. It’s immaterial and therefore indestructible. This is the trick that every religion has figured out.
But I can also imagine the other line: Actually, process is fragile. It doesn’t survive the fallow periods. It depends too much on an unbroken series of practitioners—of champions. To reliably make it between generations, you need a canonical text or a finished canvas. You need to print on paper or etch in stone. Process is fine, but the finished product is the thing. Materiality is the ultimate ark. Hello, Renaissance?
But, this is pretty abstract, so let’s focus on the simpler question:
Jazz is young—really young. But the jazz icons and jazz standards that Frank invokes actually feel quite old to me. It feels like they’re on the wane, and have been for quite a while. Tell me if I’m wrong. And tell me: Do you think jazz—jazz as process, jazz as platform—is around for the long haul?
Design unstuck in time
Terrific insight into the process behind Frank Chimero’s design above—part of the Kitsune Noir Poster Club.
What a lovely phrase. Kitsune Noir Poster Club. Can’t stop saying it. Kitsune Noir Poster Club.
See also the poster for Infinite Jest.
Via @EC.