"We promise it will have the most beautiful presentation of legal stats you have ever seen!"
— From Immigration Equality about the new annual update. Go take I look, it’s my design.
Comment spam, climate change edition
Rule29, a creative agency in my hometown of Geneva, Illinois, enters the fray about whether massive snow in the mid-Atlantic mean that “global warming isn’t real.” It’s an odd argument that seems to be percolating. My response:
Or a case of bad branding? The trouble is “global warming” — which all evidence by any peer-reviewed scientist indicates is happening at an alarming rate — sounds like everything (all seasons) should be getting warmer. And while they are. It also means that there will be extreme weather, horrible storms that dump massive amounts of snow on areas unused to it.
“Global climate change” is a term that aligns more with our experience of living in a warmer planet better. (And by “our” I mean those in North America, ask drought and heat plagued Southern Hemisphere about the heat thing. Australia may be uninhabitable the situation is getting so dire there — they are running out of water and suffering under massive wildfires.)
The issue is not whether global warming or global climate change is real, but how are we going to deal with the extreme weather, the pressures it puts on fragile international networks of people: more war, starvation, island nations and coastal cities lost to rising sea levels, and yes massive snow storms.
But we can spend time arguing about word choice too. As long as we make some hard choices about our consumption patterns and how our ecological choices reverberate around the globe.
Pruned has an entire series of under spaces, reconfigured, re-imagined, repurposed spaces under viaducts of which this example from Milwaukee is just the latest.
New York City has a lot of these dead spaces that are too often used as parking, (and often not even that) that slice through formerly connected neighborhoods.
(I’m thinking specifically of areas under the BQE or the elevated trains in Queens or the Metro North line through Harlem.)
The examples at Pruned offer how these spaces might be returned to the community as gathering and linking spots instead of just blight.
via Pruned
Temporary sculpture (Bronx, NY)
Sculpture is still graffiti-free in Bronx neighborhood where tagging is common
I noticed the print ads for in amNewYork yesterday for The Pump, a new healthy NYC mini-chain restaurant. Here they’ve stretched their advertising dollars by creating what amounts to ad, but releasing it as a YouTube video. Smart.
Design solutions for the MTA
Students in SVA’s Interaction Design MFA program took a stab at design challenges within the system. Several of the projects I felt created problems where there weren’t any in order to come up with something clever.
However the ReDirect project by student Russ Maschmeyer found an obviously problematic information design question and created a very elegant solution.
Of his project he comments:
“Service changes are bad. Very, very bad. They often involve doubling, sometimes tripling the time it takes you to get where you’re going. To add insult to injury, the accompanying service change signage is such a riddle of dates, times, and re-directions that it often requires multiple readings to glean even a basic understanding of the change. For any transit system experiencing redirects, there are four key messages that need to be conveyed: alert the riders to a change, provide a quick overview of that change, course correct any wayward travelers, and finally, guide riders through the hallways to the proper platforms. If done right, no one should have to stop to study a sign, but study them we do. Currently, the MTA employs a single, densely packed sheet of 8.5x11” paper to convey an entire set of messaging. This is a problem worth solving.
Amen to all that. Simple, clear, and fixed something badly in need of fixing.
A bad color corrected scan of a beautiful post for a day of celebration for then new Dept of Transportation.
