the things we think but do not say

It often seems that the things that we once thought of as a luxury, soon become a necessity. It’s a trend that comes up often in the book, “The world is flat” by Thomas L Friedman, but it became a new reality when I got faced with my latest cable tv bill.

My girlfriend and I watch TV pretty much for the sole purpose of watching “Six Feet Under” with Comcast “On Demand” as it’s just about the bext TV there is. In fact it’s so good, I think it’s no longer TV but some new form of storytelling that develops over five entire seasons. But I digress. We just never bothered to watch regular TV anymore. Very occasionally, I might come home and want to just let me mind go into a semi-concious holding pattern of channel flipping, but I realised that I would rather just mess around with t shirt designs or make dinner, or browse Gizmodo. Or anything.

And while I truly belive that installing Tivo would have made my TV watching experience richer by working on my schedule, I also believe that the hours spent actually watching TV would just increase. It seems logical that the better TV got, the more TV I’d watch. But that’s just it, I don’t want to want TV any more than I do. In fact, I’m quite partial to the idea that TV is just plain bad for your health.

So when my Comcast bill arrived, I took an honest look and realised that if I had to choose TV over internet access, internet access wins. Hands down. No question.

And it struck me how pervausive and embedded the idea of having always on, wireless, highspeed connection is to me. In fact, it’s to be it’s stopped being an option. It’s now a utility. Like electricity, gas and water.

So, yeah, when England plays in the World Cup, I now have to go a mate’s house to the pub to watch it. The other problem now is feeling steadily more disconnected to po(o)p culture. How on Earth will I know who’s doing who in Hollywood, without E! News?

hub logo

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

I probably sent out the largest bcc’d email I’ve ever written today. It was a ‘press release’ for HUB and I can now tell you all with great satisfaction, that this project is finally out.

Very simply, HUB is an idea for t shirts that’s been knocking around in my head for years. Take a pair of three letter airport codes of any trip and put them onto a t shirt. Then place the same two codes in reverse order on the back for the return. That’s it. You’ve got yourself a Round trip t shirt. Pretty simple huh? And pretty easy to rip off too. I just hope that it can get enough recognition and establish itself before it gets copied to death. If it’s a hit, then great. If it’s a dud, then at least I’ll know that I did my best to make it real.

Right now, HUB is only offering ‘routes’ as shirts from my home town, Chicago. And it’s a way for me to bring some well deserved attention to Chicago. I think that New York has enough fan boys.

Thanks for everyone that helped in the last few weeks of beta testing. And a huge, huge thanks to Derek Snape who made the site all in Flash, including the dope shopping cart database. He is a very clever man.

So please proceed in an orderly fashion to our departures terminal. From this Chicago based flight crew, thanks for flying HUB.

I wanted to let you all know about two movies that have come out recently that have both used motion graphics and informational graphics to great effect. Both are better known for their main content; “An Inconvenient Truth” Al Gore’s movie about global warming and “Thank You For Smoking”, a movie about a Big Tobacco lobbyist.

“An Inconvenient Truth” is as engaging and compelling as the reviews say it is. For a film/documentary/infomerical that is heavy with statistical information, it told its story very well. The movie is thoroughly peppered with graphs, charts, and diagrams that were clearly designed to be functional, and understandable but more importantly were made a part of the storytelling itself.

When a chart displaying the deep correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature is shown, rather than just simply flatly showing the data, the data is allowed to reveal itself, becoming an ascending jagged mountain range animating from left to right. And for added effect the line continues dramatically skyward when Gore predicts what will happen in fifty years. Simple effective storytelling techniques used for seemingly dry statistical data, used with powerful results. Incidentally, the presentation isn’t using MS Powerpoint but rather Apple’s Keynote.

The other movie that released a few months back was ‘Thank You For Smoking” and instead of informational graphics, the movie’s opening credits featured some amazing motion graphics.

Thank You For Smoking is centred around a Big Tobacco Washington DC lobbyist, Nick Naylor. His incredible ability to be morally flexible makes him a very likeable (if inherently despicable) character. But before you see any of the movie per se, the film’s opening titles left me awe struck. They were just fantastic. Created by Shadowplay Studio, the several minute long sequence so perfectly captures the graphic design elements that make up distinctive cigarette packaging. While I’ve never really paid that much attention to cigarette packaging before, every segment is bang on. From the typefaces selected and colour arrangments I realised that cigarette packaging have such a distintive visual language of their own. Enough even that if you pay enough attention to the references that span decades, you can recreate it faithfully.

The whole title sequence is available here.

My Colnago weighs a ton

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

Last Friday I went to my second Critical Mass in Chicago and it was perfect. In contrast to my last time at the end of last summer, there were no aggrovated drivers, no aggrovated bikers and no fracas with the police. Everyone was nice as pie. So imagine if you will, thousands of cyclists all meeting in Daley Plaza waiting expectantly for the pent up energy to be released. And then with no warning, the ‘organisers’ get the group mobilised and we start. And this time instead of the route through the city to Lincoln Square, we went south, meandering back and forth all the way down to 35th St and Damen. Our destination was Huck Finn’s Donuts.

One driver at Huck Finns really wanted to get her donut on but was patently blocked by several hundred bikes and cyclists. After a fifteen minute exchange with the group and a police intervention did she give up her battle for a French Crullers.

Photos from this Critical Mass are here.