BMW Zagato Coupe

BMW Zagato Coupe, unveiled at the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este, is the unique collaboration between BMW and Milanese coachbuilder Zagato. BMW Zagato is an exciting and emotionally charged coupe in the finest tradition of automotive workmanship.

History : From Simplicity To Complexity

The story of usability is a perverse journey from simplicity to complexity. That’s right, from simplicity to complexity—not the other way around.

If you expect a “user-friendly” introduction to usability and that the history of usability is full of well-defined concepts and lean methods, you’re in for a surprise. Usability is a messy, ill-defined, and downright confusing concept. The more you think about it—or practice it—the more confusing it becomes. We learned that the history of usability is a “perverse journey from simplicity to complexity”.

(Smashing's side note: Have you already bought your copy of our brand new Smashing Book #3? The book introduces new practical techniques and a whole new mindset for progressive Web design. Written by Elliot Jay Stocks, Paul Boag, Rachel Andrew, Lea Verou, Stephen Hay, Aral Balkan, Andy Clarke and others. Thank you for your time and your support.)

What Is Usability?

Assignment Creativity

I’ll admit that for various reasons I was not immediately interested in Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment, until I Dwight Garner’s enthusiastic review in The Times. All in all, turns out Dwight was right: the book is pretty great. I suspect it would be useful to anyone teaching anything creative, and maybe just as useful, in slightly different ways, to anyone who does anything creative for a living or for fun (or both).

I’m using the word “creative,” which is vague and lately somewhat irritating, for a reason. There seems to be some kind of creativity panic going on: Among other things, this video of John Cleese talking about creativity has been linked by all the popular blogs lately, and Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works, has become a best-seller. An advertisement for the latter appeared a few weeks back in The New Yorker, and featured this image:

Long Live Graphic Design

Clockwise from top left: Karen, Karen, issue 3, 2007; Laurenz Brunner, Akkurat typeface, 2005. Courtesy Lineto; Fanette Mellier, Specimen, 2008; Mike Perry, Eames Eiffel Side Chair, 2010; Felix Burrichter and Dylan Fracareta, Pin-Up, Issue 10, Spring/Summer 2011; cyan, Flieger, 2010. Courtesy Maharam Digital Projects

Editor’s note: The following essay was completed prior to Rick Poynor’s review, “Read All That? You Must be Kidding Me?” of January 2012 when Graphic Design: Now in Production was completing its run at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The second venue for the exhibition, hosted by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, opens tomorrow on Governor's Island in New York City.

“Graphic design is dead. Long live graphic design”
— A note on emerging cultural relevancy for graphic design

Little Libraries in the Urban Margins

A few years ago libraries were flying high. I wrote a book about the so-called "third wave" library-building boom of the '90s and early aughts, a boom made possible in part by the dot.com bubble. Today, nearly a decade later, our cities and their libraries find themselves in a very different situation. While libraries are welcoming record numbers of visitors and breaking circulation records, library budgets are facing drastic cuts, some of those flashy new buildings are often shuttered, and cities are resorting to the privatization or outsourcing of library services. Meanwhile, many services that patrons once relied on libraries to provide — specifically the provision and preservation of information in multiple formats — are now accessible elsewhere, including in our living rooms, and even in the palms of our hands.

Libraries are about much more, of course; they exist not simply to store and provide access to information. Advocates argue that libraries continue to serve crucial civic and social functions, and their tenacious faith is reinforced by a flurry of recent street-level library activity. The last few years have seen the emergence of myriad mini, pop-up, guerilla and ad-hoc libraries, which are part of the phenomenon that Mimi Zeiger, in her Interventionist’s Toolkit series for this journal, calls “provisional, opportunistic, ubiquitous, and odd tactics in guerilla and DIY practice and urbanism” — to which I might add, librarianship. Nowadays we have libraries in phone booths and mailboxes, in public parks and train stations, in vacant storefronts and parking lots. Often these are spaces of experimentation, where new models of library service and public engagement can be test-piloted, or where core values can be reassessed and reinvigorated. They are also often an effort to reclaim — for the commons, for the sake of enlightenment (or does this term now carry too much baggage to be used without scare quotes?) — a small corner of public space in cities that have lately become hyper-commercialized, cities that might no longer reflect the civic aspirations of a diverse public. As DePauw University librarian Mandy Henk puts it, “They ... show the power of self-organization and what people can build working together, outside of traditional institutions. Building and using them is a form community empowerment.” [1]