Recent iPhone Paintings

Connecticut Road

An assortment of recent iPhone paintings (using the Brushes app) to kick off the weekend ...



Muji Bag


Grace Building


Doppio


Decaf
(this was in Starbucks)


W. 73rd St.


Change Purse

Tyrants in a Tent

In early May, a mere four days after Bin Laden’s death was announced, I attended the Housing Works 'Design on a Dime' fundraiser at Metropolitan Pavilion. It was only upon arriving at the Mideast-themed booth of designer Michael Bagley, that I took out my camera. On the tented wall were portraits of America’s favorite tyrannical trio. How perfect to see the “poster boys” of treachery and terror--Saddam, Muammar, and Osama--rendered as actual Warholized pop posters.

Qaddafi’s youngest son had been killed the previous week, and the world was watching and wondering: Would an exile be successfully brokered, or would Libya’s maniacal ruler “fight to his last drop of blood,” as he had vowed?

Don't Read This While Driving!

1940s
(via flickr Christian Montone)

Driver’s manuals are probably the only official booklet a teenager will gladly study. For along with a successful parallel parking job, passing a written exam is required for a driver’s license. The manuals, of course, are available online now, with some states even charging for a printed version. Here’s a selection, most from a time before “texting” was a word.

Illinois, 1958


Illinois, 1965


Illinois, 1969


New York, 1962


U.S. Army, 1942


Code Rousseau, France, 1972


Australia, 1950s


General Motors, 1953


Virginia, 2002-2003


Florida, 1950s

Top, Iowa and Arizona. Bottom New York, 1959,60,61.


Missouri, early 1960s


Oklahoma, 2010


Rules of the Road, 2003
(Interactive driver's ed course)

All Time Covers

No, there isn't a hyphen missing between “All” and “Time.” This image really is every cover of Time magazine, from the first issue in 1923 through the summer of 2009, 4535 covers in total. I uploaded the file at it's large size, so you can click to see the image bigger.

See more of the Mapping Time project by Jeremy Douglass and Lev Manovich of Software Studies Initiative, here.

Via La boite verte

ALL ME: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert

Chain Gang (All Me), 2004
What appears, at first, to be a jumble of white dashes on black, turns out to be prisoners on a chain gang. Blizzards of white dots are vast expanses of cotton, waiting to be picked for pennies a pound. This is the visual language of 67-year old African American artist, Winfred Rembert. His paintings--actually, hides of leather, carved, tooled and dyed--create a graphic diary illustrating life in the segregated rural south.

“ALL ME: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert,” a feature length documentary directed and produced by Vivian Ducat, premiers this week at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

Chain Gang - The Ditch, 2005
As Rembert’s experiences unfold on screen, we learn that the paintings are completely autobiographical. That includes the chain gang, on which he worked, while serving a prison sentence. He started in the cotton fields as a young child, when he picked alongside “Mama,” the great aunt who raised him.

Rembert’s visual story telling is especially astute when he depicts scenes of everyday activities in the environs of his native Cuthbert, Georgia. Pictures of pool halls and juke joints usually include portraits of specific characters.

On Mama's Cotton Sack, 2002
The artist’s remembrances are riveting in their detail as he recalls the racism he suffered (including a near lynching) the poverty in which he was raised, and his civil rights activism.

Fascinating too, is Rembert's personal journey as an artist. As a kid he made his own toys from whatever materials he could find. Though he picked up leather tooling in prison during the 1970s, it wasn’t until the mid 1990s that Rembert started to translate his memories into images. With shows at Yale University Art Gallery, and Adleson Gallery in New York, his work has gained momentum with collectors.

“ALL ME” will also be shown at festivals in Chicago, Hot Springs and Albany, Georgia. Visit the film’s website for more info and all the details.

Chain Gang Picking Cotton, 2004

Family Picking Cotton, 2003

Saturday Shopping Day, 2000

The Wood Boy, 2007

Jeff's Pool Room, 2003

Smilin' Ben Shorter, 2009

Sugar Cane (Patsy's Mother), 2008

The Baptism, 2003

I got to meet the artist after a
screening of the film during the summer.
Photo: Joan Morgan

Signed by Design?

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, 1962
Here are some particularly well-signed album covers. (Hey, how do you sign a download?) Some even had me wondering, if they weren’t, in fact, designed to be signed?

The Beatles, Help!, 1965


Harry Belafonte, Belafonte, 1956


Fleetwood Mac, Rumors, 1977
Designed to be signed?



Stephen Stills, Stills, 1975


Aerosmith, Draw the Line, 1977


Tony Bennett, I Wanna Be Around, 1963


Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run, 1975


Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, 1973

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy, 1980

Images are from auction sites and Joe Merchant's flickr site of close to 500 signed LPs.

Steve & Me

I cannot count myself among those lucky enough to have worked with, interviewed, met, or even to have seen Steve Jobs. The chart, above, is the closest I ever got to the man who changed forever how we think of design.

1n 2002, Fortune magazine’s Andy Serwer wrote a piece about Dell and it’s mounting domination of the PC market. To accompany the story was to be a fairly standard chart showing shifts in market share of the top ten U.S. PC makers.

I plotted the data in various chart formats. The fever chart was very dramatic. It showed Dell zooming from sixth position in 1994 to the number one position five years later. But the bar chart was impressive too. That showed how enormous a chunk of the market Dell owned, selling a quarter of all PCs, up from less than 5% in 1994. The problem was that the fever chart showed movement, but didn’t communicate the size of Dell’s share, while the bar chart showed size, but didn’t visualize Dell outpacing the competition.

Instead of choosing one, or showing both, I decided to try combining the fever and the bar chart. It might not seem like a big deal now, but at the time, what has become know as the “ribbon chart,” was a huge hit. I got lots of letters asking me what software I used, and the magazine got letters to the editor for once about a chart, which didn’t have to do with an error or other misrepresentation.

A few weeks later, I got a voicemail from our writer on the West Coast who covered the technology industry. Steve Jobs wanted to use the chart in a presentation and could I provide a PDF?

A couple of things struck me. One was how validating it is to have God (Gawker's claim not withstanding) ask to use your chart in a presentation. The other was that the CEO interested in using the graphic was certainly not using it to self-congratulate. By late 2001, Apple’s market share had slipped from third to sixth place—exactly where Dell had been when our chart began in 1994, and with the same 4.2% share. I guess the chart made Jobs see red (the color used was coincidental), and an opportunity to somehow “motivate” his audience.

And motivate, he did …

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

For all those who keep meaning to watch the video of the commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005, here is the text of his wise words.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

From the Stanford University News. You can view the video there as well.