Art
Topic archive / 101 posts
Crafting Personal Alphabets: Calder Ruhl Hansen & C.C. Elian
This pair of presentations from Calder Ruhl Hansen and C.C. Elian examines the fascinating writing systems they’ve created at the intersection of typography, calligraphy, hieroglyphics, cryptography, and algorithmic art. Elian is known for Elian Script, which distills the Latin alphabet into simplified forms that can be combined into words in an endless variety of orientations, evoking the expressiveness of Eastern calligraphic traditions. Hansen’s works include an ingenious system of syllabic pictographs and a means of… See more →

Mary Heilmann: Waves, Roads and Hallucinations
A pretty surface-level look at abstract painter Mary Heilmann, generally more interested in how many cool artists she hung out with and galleries she worked with than in what motivated her actual work.

Between the Folds
Constraints are absolutely critical to my own creative process, and I’m more accepting than I used to be of process being part of (or maybe all of) what a creative work is about, as opposed to merely being a means to an end. So I can appreciate the bargain at the heart of origami: A sculptural form is created entirely from folding a single square of paper, with no other materials involved.
I do, however,… See more →
After a long day, as I made my dejected drift toward Suburban Station’s 18th Street exit, I saw a mural cheerfully proclaiming, “My art gives me a voice,” to which I was startled to find myself reflexively responding aloud, “Oh, that’s cool. Mine slowly fucking kills me.”
That Was 2024
My year in review
I was hopeful, if not naive enough to be confident, that enough people were sufficiently fed up with That Fucking Guy to keep him from returning to the White House. But he will, of course, be returning, and while this time his victory isn’t the shock to the system it was in 2016, his popular vote win, a hair shy of a mandate, still stings plenty. The Democratic Party’s subsequent soul-searching might be morbidly comical… See more →
That Was 2023
My year in review
I’ll begin by briefly weighing in on five of the most prominent pieces of the 2023 zeitgeist, at least from where I was sitting. Some cynical vibes ahead, so feel free to skip past this part if you’re not in the mood for negative energy:
- Taylor Swift: Gen Z’s version of Beatlemania is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, since I find Taylor Swift’s music to be entirely unremarkable, but that didn’t stop her… See more →
Martha Groome: Simple and Not
For awhile now, I’ve been speaking to a career coach who also happens to be a veteran art educator, and she’s been a great help as I shift my focus from design to art. One thing she’s been asking me from the beginning is why. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about what I want to do and what I appreciate in the work of others, but why is a more fundamental… See more →
Field Day: New York City
Featuring art from Tara Donovan, Odili Donald Odita, Edward Hopper, Guillermo del Toro, Alex Katz, and Nick Cave
As I mentioned in my 2022 year in review, I’ve developed a new habit over the past year as part of my creative practice—something I call a “field day.” Ideally at least twice a month or so, I’ll get out of the house for the day and absorb things in the outside world. It most often takes the form of visiting museums, galleries, and cinemas, but virtually any activity qualifies, as long as I’m out… See more →
That Was 2022
My year in review
Maude
Leah and I became dog parents early in 2022, adopting a 15-pound, two-year-old Jack Russell / Chihuahua mix. Knowing Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned, we named her Maude, after the Bea Arthur character, who in 1972 was the first sitcom character to have an abortion. Living with Maude has been a big adjustment, but after getting over the initial hump, I’m not sure how we ever lived without her. She loves belly… See more →
AI and Our Labor Addiction
The level of naivete, if not outright hubris, on display in a recent New York Times article about AI-generated art is gobsmacking:
The resulting image didn’t end up going into an ad, but Mr. Carmel predicts that generative A.I. will become part of every ad agency’s creative process. He doesn’t, however, think that using A.I. will meaningfully speed up the agencies’ work, or replace their art departments. He said many of the images generated by… See more →
That Was 2021
The highlights and lowlights of another pandemic year
Let me begin by saying I promise this post is mostly good vibes. Skip ahead if you like, but if you’ll momentarily indulge my pessimism: What a stupid time to be alive.
2021 was supposed to be the year the vaccine gave us our lives back, and while it did for some of us to some degree, its international distribution predictably favored wealthy nations, and the long-simmering anti-vax movement here in the wealthiest nation of… See more →
That Was 2020
It sure was.
I began last year’s “That Was 2019” post by expressing disappointment in my immune system’s poor performance that year, so let me begin this year’s wrap-up by praising that same immune system’s effectiveness in 2020. More than 1.8 million people died of COVID-19 in 2020, a disproportionately high 340,000 of them Americans, and I didn’t get so much as a head cold. I spent much of the year being grateful for my health and financial… See more →
A New Issue of an Old Zine
The future is uncertain. The present is awful. No better time to revisit the past.
The year is 2020. Summer is giving way to autumn. COVID-19 will have killed a million people by the year’s end, a fifth of them Americans. Unemployment is soaring. Millions have taken to the streets to protest police brutality and its disproportionate effect on Black people. The west coast is engulfed in the fiercest wildfires it’s ever seen. The sky is orange.
In the face of all this, the President of the United States denies… See more →
That Was 2019
The highlights of what I took in and put out
My immune system didn’t do me many favors in 2019. I was sick on five or six separate occasions in the first half of the year, including an obnoxious bout of bronchitis that lasted the entire month of February. Luckily that didn’t stop me from having an adventurous and fulfilling year, and for the first time in my four years at ProPublica, I used every single one of my vacation days.
Projects
My first three… See more →
That Was 2018
The highlights of what I took in and put out
A lot happened in 2018. The ruinous Trump administration continued doing its ruinous thing. I finally deleted my Facebook account. I had a stressful couple of months caused by something that rhymes with “head hugs,” which I would gladly trade the life of any loved one to avoid going through again. I visited the UK for the first time. I published 33 blog posts, including several well-received posts on design and development.
Projects
Let’s check in… See more →
Links: November 2018
Hello, dear reader!
November is gone, but its links remain.
I published a couple of nerdy blog posts in November: one about how I’m using my Letterboxd data to address my cinematic blindspots, and one about a common convention of editorial design that’s currently incompatible with CSS Grid.
Lots of interesting stuff in the links this month; for what it’s worth, my favorites are Earworm’s series of videos about jazz.
As usual, you can get many… See more →
Links: October 2018
Hello, dear reader!
October is gone, but its links remain.
I was mired in personal matters throughout October, so there wasn’t any activity on my site apart from the horror extravaganza that is Robtober, which was thankfully not disrupted. I finally finished a project that had been in the works for a few months: a custom-designed story with ProPublica Illinois about a family’s heartbreaking experience with an ill-conceived psychiatric clinical trial.
This round of links… See more →
Links: September 2018
Hello, dear reader!
September is gone, but its links remain.
It was a big month for me, as I finally finished the project I was preoccupied with for most of the summer: Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited, inspired by Sol LeWitt. I also wrote about why and how I did it.
This month’s newsletter is a few days late because I wanted to include Robtober 2018, my annual deep dive into horror films which always takes… See more →
Revisiting Incomplete Open Cubes
Behind the scenes of an obsessive art project
The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
—Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967
I felt the first rumblings of the obsession a little over a year ago. I’m a big fan of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, and on a pilgrimage to MASS MoCA’s sprawling retrospective exhibition of them, I glimpsed some curious cube structures by LeWitt scattered around the museum. A short while later, in a used bookstore in Philadelphia, I stumbled… See more →
A Trip to Brighton
Vacation notes
Leah and I recently returned from a great week in Brighton, England. The impetus for the trip was Ampersand, a one-day typography conference, but since neither Leah nor I had been to the UK before, it made sense to tack on another several days for a vacation.
We rented a decent Airbnb close to the beach near the indistinct border between Brighton and Hove. The first thing I did upon arriving at around 2 a.m.… See more →
Links: May 2018
Hello, dear reader!
May is gone, but its links remain.
The only thing I published on my site this month was a brief, snarky review of a 69-year-old movie (nice), but if all goes well in June, I’ll have a couple of substantial posts about creative projects (new and old) coming your way.
The links below include some meaty reporting on politics and a triptych of opinion pieces on our culture wars’ state of discourse.… See more →
Links: February 2018
Hello dear reader!
February is gone, but its links remain.
My site was pretty quiet in February, up until yesterday when I published the final post in a series about the process behind my redesign. This one is about color, and the recent revelations I’ve had about how to work with it.
This month’s links have the usual range of topics, with the highlight for me being a treasure trove of interviews and demos on… See more →
Links: January 2018
Hello, dear reader!
January is gone, but its links remain.
In my little corner of the internet, I posted a roundup of my favorite stuff from 2017 (including a look ahead at plans for 2018). As a subscriber, you may be especially interested in the stats I compiled about the 299 links I shared last year.
I released my first open source software project, Column Setter, a Sass tool for building custom responsive grids that… See more →
That Was 2017
The highlights of what I took in and put out
Projects
Since 2011, working with A Book Apart was my way of contributing to the design community while my own direction as a designer was uncertain. Over the course of 2016, as my new job at ProPublica restored my enthusiasm for design, I wanted to get back to working on my own projects and sharing what I learned in the process. Making time for that meant something had to give, so after producing the paperback/PDF… See more →
Links: December 2017
Happy New Year, dear reader!
December is gone, but its links remain.
I did some more film writing this month, most notably on The Disaster Artist and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and I also published a collection of all the shorter film reviews I wrote in 2017.
This month’s links are a good mix of the topical (net neutrality, sexism, the new tax bill), year-end reflections, inspiring art and design, and more. I hope… See more →
Links: November 2017
Hello, dear reader!
November is gone, but its links remain.
Most of my writing energy this month went toward a post about the typography and spatial relationships underpinning my site’s recent redesign. I also wrote a handful of film reviews, the most substantial of which outlines my disappointment with the ambitious Loving Vincent, an animated film made from thousands of oil paintings.
Unsurprisingly, a fair amount of this month’s links are devoted to thinking through… See more →
Links: August 2017
Why Hollywood Is Trying to Turn Everything Into Movies — Even Mindless Games Like ‘Fruit Ninja’
Vinson then realized that he was faced with a formidable predicament. There are no protagonists or antagonists in Fruit Ninja.
Goldner says the key to making movies from board games and toys is to “focus on understanding the universal truth about the brand.”
The film’s director and co-writer, Tony Leondis, told me that “The Emoji Movie” actually began with… See more →
Links: June 2017
Animated Subway Maps Compared to Their Actual Geography
These are a wonderfully concise look at design thinking.
How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science
Murray Energy — despite its enormous clout with Mr. Trump and his top environmental official — boasts a payroll with only 6,000 employees. The coal industry nationwide is responsible for about 160,000 jobs, with just 65,000 directly in mining, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.
By… See more →
Links: May 2017
Toronto’s New Flag
I’m a big fan of Kenzie Ryder’s concept.
Key to Improving Subway Service in New York? Modern Signals
Over the years, the authority has kept pushing back the timeline for replacing signals. In 1997, officials said that every line would be computerized by this year. By 2005, they had pushed the deadline to 2045, and now even that target seems unrealistic.
London has moved more quickly on signals because officials completed the work… See more →
Links: January 2017
Rob Weychert’s Year in Review
My personal movie-watching stats for 2016, provided by the always delightful Letterboxd.
Why Classic Rock Isn’t What It Used To Be
But do radio stations rely at all on the institutional knowledge of their DJs to decide what to play?
Nope. The role of the song-picking DJ is dead. “I know there are some stations and some companies where if you change a song it’s a fireable offense,” Wellman said,… See more →
Links: December 2016
What’s Your Ideal Community? The Answer Is Political
It’s conceivable that people who live in cities come to value more active government. Or they’re more receptive to investing in welfare because they pass the homeless every day. Or they appreciate immigration because their cab rides and lunch depend on immigrants. This argument is partly about the people we’re exposed to in cities (the poor, foreigners), and partly about the logistics of living there.
The suburbs… See more →
Links: February 2016
The NYPD Is Kicking People Out of Their Homes, Even If They Haven’t Committed a Crime
“It’s an action about a place. It’s not about people,” says the NYPD, as it evicts innocent people from their homes.
The Lives and Lies of a Professional Impostor
“I think he doesn’t know where the lies stop and the truth starts anymore.”
Everyone Hates Martin Shkreli. Everyone Is Missing the Point
Last fall, Derek Lowe, a chemist and… See more →
Obstruction by Design
We always talk about design getting out of the way, but does it ever make sense for design to get in the way?
I have an information retention problem. I absorb a lot of it, all of which is presumably stored somewhere, but not nearly as much of it remains available for unassisted recall as I would like. Not surprisingly, the stuff that is best remembered has been reinforced, usually through some kind of repeated application or extensive immersion. In other words, if something is retained in my long-term memory, I probably had to work for it. Fair… See more →
Outsourcing
The audience-generated promise of Beck’s Song Reader.
Last month, I expressed some concerns about remix culture and the questionable value of much of its output. Shortly thereafter, as if in response, the juggernaut of skewed pop music known as Beck revealed that his next album, Song Reader, will be released exclusively as sheet music.
The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart… See more →
Cultural Cannibalism
Concerns about remix culture’s critical mass.
Ours is an age of cultural cannibalism. We have rather suddenly gained very convenient access to nearly the whole of human history’s significant creative output, and we are remixing it with careless abandon. We have introduced The Beatles to Jay-Z, Jane Austen to George Romero, and Abraham Lincoln to Bram Stoker. If something gets a modicum of attention online, it can count on being Photoshopped, captioned, auto-tuned, GIF’ed, pickled, bronzed, or arranged for ukulele and… See more →
Art and Artifice
The why of art is more important than the how.
Art communicates. The core message might be as simple as “I like Slayer” or as complicated as “Let’s begin reversing centuries of female marginalization.” The work’s context and various expressive textures contribute narrative layers that enrich that core message. The more we identify with the message, its layers, and their convergence, the more we like the art, even if we can’t explain what those things are or how we connect with them.
In the who,… See more →
On Tyson’s Face, It’s Art. On Film, a Legal Issue.
Your daily reminder that intellectual property law is fucked.
Chris Burden’s latest project “a portrait of LA”
My inner ten-year-old’s brain just exploded.
Sebastian Errazuriz’s installation highlighting the...
O_O
FunkyWatch: August’s Most Depressing Funky Winkerbean Strips
There’s some pretty entertaining analysis in here.
RAINBOW IN YOUR HAND
Ingenious and beautiful.
Modern fossils
I can’t decide which one to get.
Nobrow Magazine
This would be impulse purchase #2 for today thanks to Drawn.
Puberteam
I love when Sutter does geometric stuff like this. I hope he keeps developing this style and plays more with line thickness and contrast.
Digest: The Americans [Reading]
Keep your eyes peeled for this exhibition when it hits the Met in the fall.
Consumption: October 2008
On the Web
- 2008 Spooky Sock Monkeys: Kim Cornell’s annual crop of petrifying primates is already almost sold out!
In the Stereo
- Van Morrison: Moondance
- The Jackson 5: The Ultimate Collection
- Necrophagist: Epitaph
- The Supremes: The Ultimate Collection
- Ra Ra Riot: The Rhumb Line
- Stiffs, Inc.: Nix Nought Nothing
On the Silver Screen
Xanadu





Among thousands of acres of land, a private airstrip, several species of exotic wildlife, and many millions of dollars worth of imported works of art, today belonged to Hearst Castle. I’m speaking, of course, of the incredible and excessive home that newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst built for himself over the course of more than twenty years in the early-mid twentieth century. As far as I know, it is the closest thing this country has… See more →
City of the Angels





Yesterday, as we sped along I-15 en route to LA, signs started pointing us toward a ghost town called Calico. Naïve tourists that we are, we were startled to find people working there and asking us to pay them six dollars for admission. A town with employees, an infrastructure, a web site, and its name painted in giant letters on the side of a mountain can’t rightly be described as ghostly, so we continued on… See more →
Consumption: January 2008
On the Web
- Opening the Windows Vista Box: Because it seriously can’t be done without a fucking tutorial.
- Brown Tape Art: Mark Khaisman creates some stunning images with translucent brown packing tape backlit on plexiglass.
- Bobby Fischer, Chess Master, Dies at 64: He may have been an asshole, but man could he play.
- Lasagna Cat: A wonderfully bizarre collection of videos putting Jim Davis in his place.
- The Amen Break: The history of the world’s… See more →
Consumption: November 2007
On the Web
- Fray Returns: The beloved site filled with true stories is reborn as a printed quarterly volume!
- Design Doing: A nice roundup and response to recent conversations regarding the relevance of web design within the greater spectrum of design.
- Charts and Graphs of Rap Song Lyrics: The title says it all. Fall-down funny stuff.
- Curriculum Vitae: The long-awaited followup to The Story of Eh, this fantastic new book of comics from Kevin Cornell… See more →