I wish I could get away with charging my clients a fee for every time they say "Minority Report" to me. I’m a commercial artist in L.A., and 90% of commercial art is shutting up and giving the client what they want. That means I spend a lot of time trying to repackage Steven Spielberg’s vision of the future: floating graphical windows with video hovering in them, typography flickering and animating in response to actors’ actions, interfaces appearing and disappearing when fingers reach out to poke them. In short, building a virtual iPad interface, hovering in front of the actor using it. In [...]

Why Can't Johnny Read… Attractive Newspapers? The Society for News Design has named their five most handsome newspapers (and they truly are good-looking). Look at this cool thing from Denmark's Politiken!

If you love the goyishe holidays but are burdened by the crushing guilt of Hebraicism, here's a solution: the Christmas tree made out of Stars of David. Now everyone can enjoy!

It's an understandable thing that Manhattan is being recast as a shiny, silver-and-glass futureworld in these first thirty years of the Bloomberg era. Still, the antiquated vintage looks from many disparate decades that seem to be overtaking everything from restaurants to license plates to mustaches isn't really helping anything, such as our City's sense of self. Don't get me wrong, I like many of the establishments in the Frankie's Spuntino empire! And I got sick of feeling like I was in the Jetson's every time I walked past Astor Place, too. But when the zeitgeist gets a-rolling like this, people need to chill out. With all the [...]

Feel bad. @Stanley_Basset is getting his nuts nipped today. He is already grumpy on account of no breakfast.

— Michelle Ogundehin (@MOgundehin) May 24, 2012

The enormous and sweeping Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill was presented to Parliament last week and is making its way through England's extremely foreign government. (They do things weird over there!) The bill is a whole lot of things: it establishes the "UK Green Investment Bank" (which sounds toothless). And it has lots of implications for employers—including one sentence in the bill will limit whistleblowing to cases that benefit "the public interest." But one group at least is celebrating, [...]

The late Steve Jobs is known to have been very keen on "taste." Microsoft has absolutely no taste, he said, going on to explain that by this he meant that "they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product." Great products, he said, were a "triumph of taste." The exquisite taste of Jobs himself has long been a matter of doctrine in the tech world. Kevin Kelly's remarks after his death expressed the general sentiment: "Steve Jobs was a CEO of beauty. In his interviews and especially in private, Jobs often spoke about Art. Taste. Soul. Life. And he sincerely meant [...]

If you are in the neighborhood it you should probably stop by Union Square to check out Sukkah City. A sukkah, for the unfamiliar, is "an ephemeral, elemental shelter, erected for one week each fall, in which it is customary to share meals, entertain, sleep, and rejoice," and Sukkah City is: an international design competition to re-imagine this ancient phenomenon, develop new methods of material practice and parametric design, and propose radical possibilities for traditional design constraints in a contemporary urban site. Twelve finalists were selected by a panel of celebrated architects, designers, and critics to be constructed in a visionary village in Union Square Park from September 19-20, [...]

Oh, some iterations here today on the site itself. As we said early on, we are not going to get too attached to our digital face. It will change and we will experiment ceaselessly. Some things will please some; others will please The Others. (There are still two episodes of Lost sitting on my Tivo! When will I find the time?) This website itself, as you have probably gathered, is an experiment. So, fellow scientists, send all complaints, suggestions and beefs (along with your browser and OS info!) to notes at the awl. (Also, the office of David Cho would like to thank Rebecca Wiener for her invaluable assistance.)

Friends of the High Line put up its "initial design concepts" for the final, northern-most leg of the world's skinniest park. Responses seem outlandishly exuberant. The way they're handling the coming Rail Yard developments—the High Line wraps around the yards, at 11th Avenue—is best described as "minimally." The High Line's "interim walkway" will be just a thin path, while everything settles down around the neighborhood. That's smart, and probably needful, but it'll be a hot, crowded mess. Anyway: pretty renderings! As always.

Profound congratulations to Slate for finally stabbing to death its creaky, ancient, and very angry CMS. Called "Gutenberg," it was nearly as old as its namesake. The first rule of Media Club is: never build your own CMS. Someone will build it for you. Speaking of! Now someone is going to build me a Chrome extension to do for New Slate what "Ochs" does for the Times' site.

Twitter's creative director is working towards a Twitter redesign? Perhaps timed to Chirp, which is a full-on conference by Twitter, about Twitter, featuring the founders of Twitter! (A funny thing about the conference? The "student rate" tickets of $50 are entirely sold out, but the identical non-student tickets, at $469, are not sold out.) Anyway, the reviews on this snippet of the redesign are in: "Awesome! Convinces me of using the Twitter site to post new tweets. Great work!"