MICHAEL SURTEES

NYCxDESIGN snuck up on me pretty quickly. I haven’t had much of an opportunity to get out to many events yet. Looking at the calendar there’s a ton of things that a design minded individual in NYC could take on for the next week. One exhibition that I had wanted to see for a while was AIGA Colorado’s Bordo Bello being held at the AIGA National Design Center Gallery. AIGA Colorado since 2008 has invited designers and artists to design skateboard decks with the proceeds going towards mentorship programming in AIGA chapters across the US. There was a lot to take in for a fan of skateboarding. Lots of unique approaches to graphics and the format of a board. I thought the ramps were a nice touch. For the fans of this type of expression, the show is on till July 3rd with extended hours this week (May 13–17: 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.). More info can be found at at www.bordobello.com and www.aiga.org/bordo-bello.

Gallery hours
Monday through Thursday: 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Friday: 11:00 a.m to 5:00 p.m.

Extended hours* for NYCxDESIGN Week
May 13–17: 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.

*Please note: The gallery will be closed for a private event from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on May 16.

Gallery location
AIGA National Design Center Gallery [map]
164 Fifth Avenue (between 21st and 22nd Streets)
New York, NY 10010
212 807 1990

I had my iPhone 4S for almost two years. It was decent enough though I had wanted a larger screen two years ago. Before buying the iPhone 4S I had bought a Droid Bionic. I liked the screen size but the camera was awful. So I returned it and upgraded my iPhone 3s for a 4s. Fast forward two years and I wanted a bigger screen again. The current iPhone 5 screen size was disappointing (along with how it felt light and cheap). While it is not exactly reliable to believe in Apple rumors, the consensus so far for the next iPhone is that the screen size will not increase with the next iteration. When I started looking at alternatives, the no brainier was the Samsung Galaxy S4. As I read reviews for it, a lot if people were comparing it to the HTC One. Up until that point I hadn’t even heard of the HTC One. The common theme from the reviews was that as good as the Galaxy S4 was, it felt cheap due to all the plastic. The HTC One felt much better.

Before deciding to change platforms (iOS to Android) I compared the top ten apps I used on my iPhone. Surprisingly 8 out of 10 were on both platforms. If they had data it was for the most part easy to connect to the cloud. I also banked on the fact that I would be using my iPad Mini a lot with my Android device so I wouldn’t miss much on the iOS side. I was planning to use my new phone as a hotspot for my wifi iPad mini so mobility was going to be easy.

After reading the reviews, comparing what apps I would be able to transfer it was time to look at the phones. Within two seconds of holding the Galaxy S4 and the HTC One it became clear which one I was going to get. I also opened each device up to see how the work flows. I think the biggest error in all the reviews of both devices was the operating system. Sure it’s important but most popular apps on the surface ignore the pre-designed software. For example email, I don’t really care how Samsung or HTC deal with it. I’m going to use the Gmail app.

If you’ve made it thus far with my review it’s kind of obvious that I bought the HTC One. I’ve used it for a couple weeks now so I thought it would be worth mentioning some of my workflows with this device. First off, I have no regrets with this phone. I really love using it. It’s not perfect but the benefits make up for any imperfections. This is basically the iPhone that Apple should have released a year ago. My best guesstimate is that in two years the might get to the ergonomics of this one.

The way that I’ve organized my apps mirrors my workflow for the most part.

Hotkeys
(on my dashboard outside of a folder)
• Pocket
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Gmail
• Snapseed
• Wunderlist

Reading
• Amazon Kindle
• NYT
• Score Center
• Feedly

Services
• Strava Cycling
• Seamless
• Yelp
• LinkedIn

Google
• Maps
• Chrome
• Calendar
• YouTube

Communication
• Messages
• Talk
• Phone

Cloud
• Dropbox
• Drive

Music
• Spotify
• TuneIn Radio
• SoundCloud

Weather
• Weatherbug
• The Weathernetwork

There’s a couple apps working in the background such as Flickr and Facebook. I rarely open them but use them to share content from other services that are above.

I basically wanted a bigger screen so I could read. I save a lot of content to Pocket thanks to the easy workflow from twitter and desktop. A majority of ebooks I read come from Kindle. The screen does a great job of letting me read. The text reads as sharp as any retina device I have. At this point I couldn’t ask for anything more when it comes to reading. Actually there’s one issue with reading, it really needs to be done in the shade. It’s pretty impossible in direct sunlight.

I shoot a lot of photos. I shot one every day as I walk to work. I also take a lot when I’m out and about. I find that I use Snapseed to shot and tweak the image. From there Ill share it on Flickr and Instagram. The process feels pretty smooth. As for the camera I think it’s ok. It’s not great but good enough that I can hide some of the sensor issues with Snapseed’s filters. If there’s one complaint with the photo flow, it’s how the images are saved to folders. It’s confusing going into the gallery feature as there seems to be no order in how the images are organized. While it is confusing its not a big deal since any photo worth having for me is saved on Flickr.

Along with reading and shooting images I listen to a lot of music. I use Spotify for the most part so my flow stays the same as with my iPhone. The added bonus is that the music sounds amazing whether I use headphone or not. The earbuds are great and the speakers on their own sound high end as they can for a tiny device. I also like how I can advance songs with a locked screen.

All of these workflows take battery power to pull off. I don’t know the amount of hours a charge can last in empirical terms. The test that I did do is keep it unplugged for a normal full day 8am – 12am. The charge kept with some battery power to spare. Keep in mind that the phone wasn’t on all day so results will vary on use.

My biggest issue has to do with notifications when my phone is locked. I hear the alert but nothing shows on my screen. It kills me that I have to turn on my phone every time to see what I got notified on. I really, really wish I could see them the same way iOS does.

How does it scroll? At times it does feel a bit clunky. The clunkiness differs from app to app so it’s hard to judge if its the operating system or how the app was optimized for Android. With that said its not that noticeable and doesn’t get in the way for using my apps.

So far I have no misgivings about changing from an iPhone to the HTC One. In a year ask me the same question and we’ll have to see how the phone holds up. It’s hard to guess at this point. But as something I will probably keep for two years I feel more confident betting on this than an upgraded iPhone that will be delivered later this fall.

If you love type and you’re in NYC this weekend and find yourself in Soho, perhaps make the trek to Tribeca to see some original type (and process) with Monotype’s Pencil to Pixel. You could probably just walk in but here’s the eventbrite listing http://penciltopixel.eventbrite.com/ The address is Tribeca Skyline Studio, 205 Hudson Street (12th floor). There’s a number of paper works that demonstrate the process of typefaces that wouldn’t be otherwise accessible to view. Last night I had the opportunity to view things just after they put up the show.

Update: I’ve updated the photos with captions thanks to Ketan Deshpande who was nice enough to contact James Fooks-Bale and Dan Rhatigan for the text.

Bruce Rogers originally designed Centaur for foundry setting, but later drew this somewhat altered version for the Monotype release in 1914

The 10-inch drawing for the “e” and “g” of Gill Sans from 1929 shows the accent marks and style variations added to the basic forms

Eric Gill’s 1928 pencil and ink drawings for Gill Sans Italic shows details later revised for the Monotype release

Chris Brand drew these amended glyphs for Albertina to fit the requirements of the Monophoto system (1963)

Original ink drawings by Eduardo Cotti for the Pastonchi family, designed with Francesco Pastonchi in 1927

Bruce Rogers originally designed Centaur for foundry setting, but later drew this somewhat altered version for the Monotype release in 1914

Details added to a 10-inch drawing of “d” and “c” for Times New Roman indicate related forms requested decades after the original release

Glass font for the Diatype machine, colloquially named the “duck-shooter” because of the trigger used to select and set each character

Film positives for Haas Unica show the dramatic “traps” designed to compensate for the spread of both light and ink during reproduction

Friskets (transparent film from which the image of a glyph was cut with a scalpel) for Neue Helvetica, cut at the Stempel foundry in 1983

“O” series by Mario Godlewski. Outlined “O’s” from various fonts were projected as digital light images, and were subsequently photographed at long exposure with a moving camera. The resulting images give a three-dimensional, extruded form only evident once the image is processed.

Design for the reader, not the device. Ensuring that content is readable, accessible and attractive regardless of the technology used has long been the role of typography.

For the past couple of months I’ve been co-teaching with Luke Miller at Generally Assembly. The class is UXD with the goal of those taking the class could be hired as junior ux’ers by the end of the 12 week course. I’ve really enjoyed working along the students and Luke. We’ve been covering a wide range of areas that will lead the students to have a pretty in-depth final project whether that be an app, website or some hybrid.

Last night before class I was talking with a student about a number of states that they should consider as they build out their system for navigation. As we discussed things it struck me that an easy way to consider things is 1. what are they doing before the action, 2. what are they doing while they are doing the action, and 3. what are they doing after the action? Extra points for considering those steps as a first time user, how things might evolve for second and third times, and finally considering some of the errors that a user might encounter and how their system will help guide the user as they make mistakes.

In some respects this seems pretty obvious but as users (and designers) work through systems the obvious tends to fade to the background as people start actually do their tasks. As we work through systems and the inevitable happens, getting stuck it is worth considering the flow above. It also helps as a handy checklist to compare against while testing and considering questions to see if the system will actually work for the user.

Having coffee with Sue Apfelbaum a couple weeks ago, she tipped me off about a series of articles that she was writing for the Red Bull Music Academy. For the next couple of weeks they will be publishing a daily series called Daily Note. The paper covers a broad range of music topics based around NYC for the most part. Sue’s contribution is looking behind the scenes of iconic music logo’s. It’s a great topic that I’m surprised that hasn’t been explored before. So far CBGB and Kiss’ logos have been mentioned. These logos are so ingrained in visual culture that it’s easy to take for granted that someone actually had to design the thing. You can view the PDF’s at www.redbullmusicacademy.com/dailynotenyc. I also believe you can find the paper version around NYC and possibly at the Ace Hotel.

It has been quite the time to be designing in parallel and in some instances ahead of the speed of Twitter. The events of the past weeks and months have been hard to describe in the context of designing systems. Between desktop, mobile and all the other ways to alert info through Dataminr has been an awesome experience for me. Working within the team that can pull it off has been amazing. The team here is incredibly smart and driven. Currently I’m starting to build the product design team. If the articles and quotes below seem interesting, Dataminr is looking for a junior product designer.

We’ve had a number of articles in the past couple of days. Here’s some of my favorite quotes.

FROM FastCoExist: TWITTER CAN PREDICT THE STOCK MARKET, IF YOU’RE READING THE RIGHT TWEETS News impacts financial markets, and that news is increasingly breaking on Twitter. Dataminr–a social analytics company with clients in finance, government and the larger corporate world–takes this dynamic one step further. They use Twitter to beat the news. “It’s the lack of someone who is a news commentator or a news source saying it,” says Dataminr founder and CEO Peter Bailey. “The point is the things that aren’t there.”

FROM WALL STREET JOURNAL: IN THE WIRED WORLD, FEEDS DRIVE TRADING But the machines weren’t fooled: Before the AP announced that the tweet was a hoax—its account had been hacked—Dataminr’s computers generated a fresh alert saying the news may not be legitimate.

FROM FORTUNE MAGAZINE: SHOULD BLOOMBERG BE AFRAID OF TWITTER? Dataminr says it was able to alert its clients to the hoax a full two minutes ahead of major news.

FROM FINANCIAL NEWS: TWITTER ‘HACK CRASH’ RAISES QUESTIONS OF MARKET INTEGRITY Dataminr, for example, sifts, analyses and interprets masses of Twitter information for signs of market-moving events which it then effectively ‘breaks’ before the mainstream media (the news of Osama bin Laden’s death being one such story). This process involves detecting abnormal signals and then analysing them combined with contextual data, both historical and concurrent.

FROM FORTUNE MAGAZINE: SHOULD BLOOMBERG BE AFRAID OF TWITTER? Yesterday the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 146 points within seconds after a hacked AP account falsely claimed the White House was under attack. While the market recovered quickly after the hoax was exposed, it showed just how many Wall Street traders were now relying on Twitter for trading information. Dataminr says it was able to alert its clients to the hoax a full two minutes ahead of major news.

Every couple months I try to take a step back to look back and review some of the common themes I’ve found myself shooting. Now that we are in April it made sense to see what has happend in 2013. A lot of the photos below were related to me shooting something every morning while I was walking to work. There wasn’t much surprise that a lot of those images were about typography or architecture–2 of my favorite topics. What was a bit surprising in the evening’s was the number of times oysters popped up when I was capturing food. Other favorite things that came up were V, Madison and tech in a consistent manner.

ARCHITECTURE

TYPE

ART

TECH

WINDOWS

OUTSIDE

FOOD & DRINKS

V

MADISON

It has been quite a week for anyone that has grown to use Google Reader as the news is sinking in the Google is killing their RSS reader. There’s been quite a bit of chatter about alternatives. After learning about not being able to use the service after July I started to consider how that would change my process. On Thursday I received an email from an associate editor at Mashable asking if I would be interested in doing a guest post about RSS. On Friday my post titled RSS Can’t Fill Google Reader Void went live on the interwebs.

Below are my quotes and images from the post.

The popular theory seems to be that people will move on to another RSS reader, and life will go on as usual. I’m not that optimistic.

Twitter is not the entire answer, but I do think there’s a great element to tapping into a system that is somewhat human.

Below is my review of Aften Screen for Typographica’s Our Favorite Typefaces of 2012. If you’re a fan of typefaces and want to see some beautiful cuts, I recommend visiting Typographica to get your type on.

Aften Screen cuts through the majority of bland screen-only fonts by being confident enough in what it chooses to display as much as in what it doesn’t show.

I spend a majority of my time reading on screen, whether it’s on a Retina display or a monitor with a lower resolution. What drew me immediately to wanting to read text in Aften Screen was how easy the typeface was on my eyes. Aften Screen doesn’t scream “look at me!”, but elegantly combines characters in a subtle and sophisticated manner.

Type testing with words like “city”, “upgrade”, and “renderings” shows how the extended ascenders and descenders fit nicely together and with other characters. By extension, reading with Aften Screen is a great study in flow. One simple example is the lowercase word “supreme”: As the eye surfs over the top of each letter, it seamlessly floats to the next.

Continuing with my type tests, I would drop in long paragraphs of type, short quotes, and the occasional favorite word. As I experimented with different sizes from extremely small to giant, uppercase to sentence case, I was inspired. I wanted to start using Aften Screen for unimagined projects. As a screen-only typeface, I could see how it could be used in many applications. I was really struck by how versatile it could be — from straightforward workhorse applications to long reads. I could see myself using one weight and size for an entire project without it feeling stale. On the flip side, I could also see it being used elegantly with a subtle range of weights and sizes.

Aften Screen is one of those unique typefaces that could be used daily without fear of being lost within too much eccentricity, while at the same time displaying some new aspect of its character in each application.

I came across the above diagram for the Gesture chair from YMFY. Basically it shows the different postures a typical person goes through in a workday with more than one device. I’m sort of surprised that I haven’t seen this type of exploration before. It’s really well done. The diagram has really captured a moment in time with the technology that a person has at their fingertips. As more motion based gestures evolve where a person doesn’t even touch a screen more postures may pop up. Below is how Steelcase is marketing the Gesture chair.

Design: Inspired by the Human Body

We didn’t start with a chair design. We started by looking at the unique movements and gestures of the body. Like the human body, Gesture is designed as a system of synchronized interfaces.

1) The Core Interface.

• The Gesture back and seat move as a synchronized system moving with each user to provide continuous and persistent support.
• The back cradles the user no matter the posture or device.

2) The Limb Interface:

• The Gesture arm moves like the human arm, which allows users to be supported in any position.
• Arms and shoulders remain supported when texting on a smartphone, typing on a keyboard or swiping a tablet.

3) The Seat Interface:

• The Gesture seat brings comfort all the way to the edges.
• It is flexible at the perimeter to allow users to sit in a range of postures without obstruction.

4) The User Interface:

• Gesture takes into account various body types and sitting preferences, quickly adjustable to meet the needs of each individual user.
• Users can adjust Gesture as easily as adjusting their posture.

The Art Director’s Club invited Sean Kenney to talk about his art and display some of his personal Lego pieces in a show titled Piece By Piece: The Artist Who Built His Own Dream Job. Walking around experiencing the Lego pieces at different scales is quite special. On one level there’s the image of the object that is just plain cool to look at. Then there’s the marvel of the architecture of how things were built. On a third level there’s the narrative of how the pieces tell the story of how he came to building his own dream job. If you are near the Art Director’s building in NYC, I highly recommend experiencing the story.

The exhibition will be on display through March 20, 2013, and is free and open to the public from March 8-20. Gallery hours 10am-6pm, Monday-Friday. 106 West 29th Street (between 6th and 7th Aves). New York, NY 10001

One of my goals when I wanted to move to NYC was to start a company. With Gesture Theory I was able to complete that unattainable goal that I dared to consider many years ago. Gesture Theory lasted two years and we worked on projects that I had previously not come close to working on.

It all started with a simple conversation a couple years ago with Roy. We had worked together for a couple years prior at Daylife. When he asked me to consider leaving Behavior to start something, the first feeling that struck me was the same gut reaction when I decided to leave everything in Canada to move here. It was basically “how could I not do it”? I would never be able to guess what might come down the road and I knew I would regret the decision if I didn’t go through with it.

Gesture Theory started in January 2011. By the end of the first year we had a decent studio space in Soho, building products for some well known and respected clients, and building both products for our selves at the same time. I wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world. There were challenges as there always is with running a business but there was something deeply satisfying knowing that things were on our shoulders to get the work done.

Learning from the first year 2012 exploded with business. I thought nothing could go wrong. I’ve learned now that when that type of emotion comes into play things could drastically change in an instant around a blind corner. That blind corner hit in the spring. Within a couple days I was informed that a new company was taking over the studio space and that Gesture Theory had thirty days to move. A couple days after that Roy let me know that he had accepted an offer from a colleague of his to move to SF to be in Y-Combinator and that he could no longer have an active roll in Gesture Theory. It was a kick to the gut that I never saw coming nor knew how to react to. If it hadn’t been for my former wife I don’t know how I would have survived those first couple of days.

The months after that seriously questioned why on earth I wanted to start a company. It didn’t matter what I did, things just went from bad to worse. What I went through and was feeling were things I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to go through. There was no option, I had to finish up projects so I could say goodbye to Gesture Theory. I wasn’t interested at the time continuing on by myself.

The summer was pretty bad but as fall was approaching things finally started to click. I ended up finding a great company that had more potential than I had ever seen before. Dataminr had access to Twitter’s firehose which in turn was focused on building products for the financial sector. The team was like no one else I had worked with. Really smart people that could be trusted. The UI needed a lot of work which excited me a lot. I could really help with building the next version.

I wanted to finally write this post about Gesture Theory as there’s a lot of stuff being released with Dataminr. Due to the competitive nature of the financial sector along with expanding into government and news I won’t be talking much about the upcoming products.

It was awful having to say goodbye but I would never had been able to create the experiences and learning lessons any other way. I still have a couple case studies that I want to write about the work at Gesture Theory. But for now I’m enjoying the time looking forward.

I’ll be kicking myself for a while for not taking any photos of the Basquiat show that I saw over the weekend at the Gagosian Gallery. Below are photos from the Gagosian website. Having only spent a short amount of time viewing the artwork in person, thinking back now I can recall so much with each layer he built on top of the other.

It has been a long time since I went for a walk down the West Side Highway. Taking advantage of the nice weather I found myself walking in Chelsea near the Meat Packing District. The route I took yesterday was one that I’ve taken many times before. What surprised me is that I’ve probably walked by the signs below many times but never noticed them until yesterday.