It will probably come as a revelation that Genie is a superhero. You wouldn’t have known this because she usually works incognito. But the media being what it is, that was never going to last. It started about two weeks ago. What can I say. The talented Misters Piascik and Cohen are filling a need in the market. Pets are Superheroes. The only question is, when will you ask them to unleash yours? Let’s not forget that there is a world to save, people.

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Now that she can venture further afield, Genie and I pass this building on our evening walks. Perhaps dusk light is to ogling buildings as beer goggles are to ogling people. But there’s a lot to love about this building at any time of the day. It’s a place where they make a living out of making physical objects, for one. And the place is covered in these excellent signs as well.

American Metal Crafters sign. Enhance it!

“American Metal Crafters • Metal Boxes • First Aid Cab. • Specialties.” Doesn’t matter what you need. They can make it, see? (“And the book itself is but a tissue of signs.”) Ah, yes. There’s so much signification going on in these signs. So much strength, simplicity and value. A semiotician’s dream.

Shipping and receiving. Enhance it!

Hey web designer, that’s not a drop shadow, this… You get the idea. To think of the effort that we collectively put into making things feel this way—textures in visual design, physicality in interface design, pre-worn jeans, mud on the SUV (huh?). Here it is all effortless, functional, un-reflexive. From a point in space and time when such things came naturally. And we are never going back.

So, I trust I’ve won you over. Great effin’ building.

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• Next stop: modernity

One has created version 4.0 of the not-so-venerable “Greywater” WordPress theme. New layout, new feeds from external sites, FF Meta, more hubris, white background, search is back… and I even removed the border on the header image (thanks Lyds)!

Need to figure out what to do about images in the new default column width. For CSS nerds the layout is my own, largely untested version of “liquid-elastic”—it shrinks or expands to fill the screen up (or down) to a point. Works okay on Safari (Mac, iPhone), Firefox and Camino. No idea yet how it looks on PCs. I will go ahead and assume that it’s pretty much a disaster on Internet Explorer right now. Plenty to fix and fuss with, ad nauseam, over the coming weeks…

Oh, and um… happy new year!

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As we plunge further into crises, of economics, democracy, environment and war, and the future appears less and less about infinite progress, I’m increasingly struck by the ways that we used to imagine the world of today would actually turn out.

View from the Twentieth Century

Take Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, page through some science textbooks from the 1950s, walk the passenger tunnels at Union Station in New Haven (pictured here), circle Eero Saarinen’s Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges, or Paul Rudolph’s brutalist Art and Architecture building on Yale campus, explore Wesleyan’s CFA complex in Middletown, or stroll past the entrance to this hotel on St. Kilda Road in Melbourne.

We used to project where we were headed with Modernity in the way we built the city environment. There’s a dream of a better future, on a different scale, that seeps in as you spend time with these objects, images and places. There is a sense of optimism and the hope of a more cooperative sociality. I’m not sure that we do this anymore.

Entering the station building

A different future

In these ways we used to be more modern. In other ways, it was always a dream, an aspiration that was never achieved. Was it supposed to be? Maybe not. Looking ahead one thing seems certain: the Twentieth Century’s imaginings of Tomorrow will never come to pass, and the future is going to turn out to be a lot different than anyone predicted.

On the other hand, I don’t know from architecture. Never studied it. Of course, when has such a limitation ever prevented me from expressing a strong opinion? Perhaps you disagree…

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Seen on Main Street earlier in the week. It’s the Mini Cooper S with John Cooper Works GP tuning kit (supercharger, wheels, brakes, suspension, bits of red). They have a Flickr group all of their own. Naturally, the front brake calipers are rouge. I mean, how could you not? Would be a dereliction of duty.

Post thumb by Paul Mullett.

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New work from the artist known as Blu, begun on November 11 (Armistice Day) and completed the day after.

More greatness from Chris Piascik. This is from a comic strip called BANG! that Chris made a while back and has just uploaded to Internet for your enjoyment. I love Chris’s creatures. These illustrations range from stories to doodles to posters and iconic t-shirt designs. Here’s another example, just for Hallowe’en, though this is from back in June, or this one from early October. Check it out.

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Whosoever first thought of making the calipers red surely got a big bonus that year. It’s a great example of “Drapering.” That is, making a distinguishing feature of a common one: every car with disc brakes has calipers, but colour them red and your car has some serious stoppers. (Disclaimer one: I just saw A Serious Man (2009)^† whence I stole this title. Disclaimer two: I don’t actually consider the Boxter a serious car — this is a serious Web Site on the actual Internet — but I bet the owner does.) See also…

† Yes, of course you should see it.

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Want.

Update: heart skips a beat — Mugen is going to mod the CR-Z. I may just want to drive this car to the end of days.

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Issue 3 is coming soon, it says. Should be interesting. I so love the design of Fray.com.

If you want actually inclusive design, change the job

The jobs of the director and professor of inclusive design must be to change the system from within. Far from sentencing designers to 30 years of boredom, doing so will actually equip them to teach student designers to create accessible objects as a matter of course. In practice they won’t: It won’t be their cup of tea, they’ll do it just to pass a course, they’ll forget about it while on the job, their bosses will ixnay it because “it costs extra” (even if it doesn’t).

But if you want accessible objects, every design prof at the institution has to teach students how to create them, not just two people who come along after the damage is done and try to deprogram the student body (which, incidentally, I have experience doing).…

I’m not what you thought you were looking for

But I am what you need.

If he gets an interview (likely), it will be on his terms and if he gets the job (less likely) then he will have a mandate to really shake things up.

Good luck, Joe.

Version change time! I’m pretentiously calling this theme “Greywater 3.7,” but even more pretentiously “codenaming” it “Make Your Own!” For some reason this kind of buffoonery never gets old.

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One wonders: is Mac OS X’s icon for an installer package supposed to look like an Energon Cube?

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I hear that people in third world countries have never even heard of Ikea, Verdana or an existence not punctuated daily by death.

Best comment on this so far.

It’s the little things that make me want Camino to succeed. There’s an attention to detail that even the Safari team can’t match sometimes. This is my new favourite: when you’re browsing with no location toolbar, just type ⌘ + L and you get a location bar drop-down sheet that disappears when you type into it and hit Return. (By contrast, Safari’s behaviour under the same conditions is that ⌘ + L knocks you out of hidden location toolbar mode, so if you want things the way they were you need to re-hide that toolbar once Safari has fetched the new page.) With Camino, the main things that you can do with the location toolbar you can do with keyboard commands and nice touches like this one. It’s the minimalist’s browser. F.y.i., I’m using version 2.0b3.

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• Helvetica!
• Orange!
• New!

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Although this story about technology contains opinion it is being posted in design as an example of the bad kind. I would have quietly coughed up five American dollars for an hour on the Internet, except for…

1. the “preroll” ad for a Blackberry
2. the popup ad for a Blackberry
3. the user agreement, specifically this:
   

   Usernames and passwords are Boingo’s property and Boingo reserves the right to alter or replace them at any time in its sole discretion. You shall cease to use and delete the password from any of your records upon expiry or termination of your registration for whatever reason.

4. the need to create a user account requiring said username and password, a valid e-mail address and my phone number

Yeah… nah. My time was better spent snarking.

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The patterns and illustrations in Pet Shop Boys’ “Love, etc.” are beautiful—shades of “Take on Me” with a wry glance at Monty Python. The animation feels like an orchestra conductor waving one of those sticks around. In a good way. Strong pop song, with a bit of grit under the hood. The Boys have still got it.

Via Michael.

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New Röyksopp is on the way with collaborations galore, including the incomparable Karin Dreijer. Check out the beautiful throwback music video for “Happy Up Here,” replete with blinking nostalgia bombs.^† More Melody A.M. than The Understanding, this first taste.

† Via Dan Benjamin

They røck so härd.