MIT recently launched a tech investment initiative called The Engine. I’m really digging this site, from the concept itself, to the URL, to the Swiss typography, to the subtle background animations, to the background graphics/illustrations when you hover over an investment area. Someone in a Designer News thread pointed out that the illustrator is Vasjen Katro whose Instagram account is wonderful.

In that same thread Mike Wilson replied to someone’s suggestion that The Engine website is part of the Brutalist trend:

The 'Brutalism' thing in a nutshell:

1. Designers coming out of art schools like ECAL, Gerrit Reitveld, etc. in the mid-2000s start bringing some of their experimental work into the small print magazine movement (mostly in Europe at this point) after print starts getting less scrutinised in favor of digital. See: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/the-new-ugly/
2. Hits NYC from Europe (to be fair people in scenes like RISD were always woke) when guys in publishing like Richard Turley bring the aesthetic into the mainstream on publications on Bloomberg Businessweek
3. More traditional (not product focused) design agencies/studios bring the aesthetic to the web after the fall of skeumorphism and the rise of web type
4. SF Tech bros who hang out on Dribbble finally take notice when these sites get posted on SiteInspire, steal the term "brutalism" to describe it since it doesn't look like a stripe landing page.
5. ‘Brutalism' becomes a catch-all term for any website that contains an aesthetic nod to a design movement that didn't happen on Dribbble
6. Myself and others find this amusing and post snarky/snob-ish finger-wagging comments on DN

While, yes, snarky, I do appreciate the brief history. The first I saw this style was in 2004 from David Reinfurt (whose work I mentioned in an earlier post.) of O-R-G and later Dexter Sinister. He designed the book for an exhibition within the Eero Saarinen-designed Terminal 5 at JFK. I designed and built the exhibition’s website, which is still online 13 years later, though it does require Flash. So it goes…

In 2004, I thought nothing of adding auto-playing audio to a website and so sprinkled sound snippets of airplanes idling and taking off, and a short tribute to Brian Eno at the end of the loop.

I recently submitted a re-design for Oak Knoll's Antiquarian Catalogue. Oak Knoll is "the world's largest inventory of books about books and bibliography," with a hefty share of titles concerning typography and book design.

I used Robert Slimbach's Minion Pro Condensed with its
proportional ("Old Style") figures, widely spaced small caps for book titles, and a very readable italic for book descriptions:

The page proportion is a standard 2:3 (a perfect fifth, according to Robert Bringhurst's "Page Proportions As Musical Intervals") and I designed a harmonic text block proportion of 3:5 (Bringhurst's major sixth) with margin proportions 1:2 (the octave):

Not a winning design, but an enjoyable exercise and a chance to dig deeply into a treasure-filled catalogue for bibliophiles.

On an unseasonably warm lunchbreak, I strolled to the New York Public Library to see the Lenox Gutenberg Bible that they have on display through August 2006. It sits in a glass case opened to the first page of Luke. I was struck first by the beautiful proportions of the page, according to Pablo Rosell-González [PDF] in:

Ternary canon: 2:3 page proportions where the height of the typographic box
is equal to the width of the page, the left margin is half the right margin
and the top margin is half the bottom margin.

These proportions came to be known as Gutenberg Canon. The ink is a deep, rich black, surprising to see after 550 years. The letterforms are crisp, easy to read, and certainly printed-looking---contrasting nicely with the examples in The Splendor of the Word: Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts exhibit happening concurrently at the NYPL.

The British Library has digitized versions of both copies of their Gutenbergs---one printed on paper, one on vellum. This is the British Library's vellum version of the page that is open at the NYPL. The large initial illuminated letters look quite different in the NYPL copy, with the "Q" filled in with a pleasing upwards-moving pattern and red-inked designs spilling out into the margin.

What sounds right? Where can i fit in, but with plenty of room to grow and change? Who will accept my multiple aptitudes and varied, constantly changing interests? Are they constantly changing?

I like sound and music. THis is a given. Rhythms and drones and melodies and juxtapostions; sweet silence.

I like to work with computers. And I am reasonably good at it. I can learn software and concepts rather quickly. I have a working knowlede of PhotoShop, InDesign, Illustrator, Quark, HTML, PHP and CSS. I can make my way around XML and C, video and sound editing programs and basic spreadsheets.

I like color in its subtelties and contrasts. I recognize the aesthetics of shapes and textures. Things can be pleasing.

I believe in sustainability and efficiency. Can the world be made better by design?

I could learn a HELL of a lot more about the history of design -- what works/worked and what doesn't/didn't. Color Theory. Shape Theory?

Out of this I get a good feeling about the design of public space. Making things/objects that can help people, that can make lives/life better. I am not as turned on by media. It is a cluttered landscape. THE CLUTTERED MEDIASCAPE. But findign the pleasing space an doffereing it to people. What IS pleasing? What is pleasing music?

More to come

Douglas Bowman's Stopdesign | Staying organized

sections in my CSS files that are almost always present:

+ page structure
+ links
+ header
+ footer
+ lists, etc.

Those sections are always demarcated by commented text and lines created by dashes. This way, I almost always know where a certain rule should go, or where to find one when I want to edit or troubleshoot.

order of properties within each declaration block.

+ Backgrounds always go first
+ position or float information
+ width/height measurements
+ margin/padding/border
+ text formatting and color.

Not every one of those properties is always present, but that%u2019s the general order I usually try to follow. I%u2019m usually not even conscious I%u2019m doing it by now.

On Design

Paul Rand by Steven Heller

Paul Rand changed everything. And then he changed it again. Heller's book
outlines his single-minded devotion to "good work" and examines all the
major projects. A love-letter. Of course= we're assuming you already
have Rand's From Lascaux to Brooklyn and A Designers's Art on your shelves.

The Russian Avant Garde Book

A smart and attractive anthology of the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich and others, we've found this book to be a powerful design stimulant. By MoMA Print and Illustrated Books Curator, Deborha Wye.

Marks of Excellence

The history, beauty and logic of trademarks always inspires. Per Mollerup's big black book follows me home and then back to work, over
and over. It's probably time to get a second copy.

The Typographic Grid

Hans Rudolf Bosshard's beautiful book takes the essentials of organizing type and presents them clearly and conversationally.

FontBook: Digital Typeface Compendium

The yellow one.

The Work of Edward Tufte

Envisioning Information,
Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative and

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Good advice, solid reasoning and spectacularly beautiful bookmaking. Sigh.

Grid Systems in Graphic Design

An understanding of
Josef Muller-Brockmann's Opus is not optional.

Pantone Color Guides

Never, ever on the shelf. Always on someone's desk, most of the time open. Nuff said. Also very helpful, The Process Color Manual.

On Writing

Style: Toward Clarity and Grace

Two really important things.

On Writing Well

If you're a journalist, a businessperson, or the occasional author of
letters, memos, blog entries, and emails, William K. Zinsser's On Writing Well is a book
you should reread every year. The essential work on clear and
interesting non-fiction writing.

The Chicago Manual of Style

The Bible for preparing and editing manuscripts for publication. The 15th edition is now available.

Roget's International Thesaurus

Seasoned newspaper men and elementary English teachers might call it a crutch. But when you get right down to it,
a thesaurus is a reference tool like any other: it can be used effectively or poorly. This is
the one we turn to when we're looking to pin the perfect shade of meaning on the paper.

Elements of Style

If your education was worth anything, you were assigned
Strunk and White's Elements of Style for a class. If you're anything like us, you've misplaced and repurchased it a number of times since.

Webster Third New International Dictionary

Someday we'll own the complete OED. Until then,

this unabridged monster will do just fine.

On Code

HTTP: The Definitive Guide

Comprehensive and surprisingly easy to read.
David Gourley and Brian Totty's volume contains the answers to all those questions about how the web works you shouldn't need to ask.

The PHP Bible

God there are a lot of ugly, thick books in this section of the bookstore, and
this might be the ugliest
of them all. But Tim Converse and Joyce Park have written the clearest
and easiest to navigate primer on PHP. Runner-up in the
ugly-but-effective category goes to
Core PHP Programming by Leon Atkinson.

Cascading Style Sheets

Eric Meyer's
Definitive CSS Guide
is the O'Reilly book with the salmon on the cover. No-nonsense
tutorials with a well-worn index. There are recently a lot of other
titles in this category. You may ignore them without worry. This is it.

Designing With Web Standards

We could have redone our site using CSS without ever looking at
this lovely orange book.
We could have developed our own workarounds and reinvented the proper
structure for a style-sheet. We probably could have even deciphered the
frustrating inconsistencies of "The Box Model" on our own. Thank God we
didn't have to.

Managing and Using MySQL

Kingfisher on the cover. Clear, precise explanations inside.