reed enger

The iPad is changing the web, but it won’t tuck you into bed at night.

admin — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 18:35:44 +0000

The Change

The iPad is changing the way we use the internet. Viewing the web is so far a solitary pursuit. Hunched toward the blue glow of a monitor or cell phone, we read and play alone. We talk to people through the device, and share experiences second-hand, like talking to someone about a book you both read. So what’s changing? The iPad is teaching the web to be social.

Why Functionality is a Bad Thing

The iPad is not very useful. It’s awkward to hold, hard to type on, and has no innate file system to create and store content. For any productive task, it’s better to have a laptop or smartphone. But laptops and phones are limited by their directionality and size to a single user, and the information they hold is often private. Have you ever loaned someone your phone without feeling the nervous twinge?

But the iPad is not private, and it’s not focused on a single user. Compromising photos won’t appear on an iPad, because it has no camera to tempt the intoxicated. Typing’s a challenge, so personal business is avoided. Even extended reading requires balance or a stiff grip. The iPad’s limitations make it impersonal, user-agnostic. And the iPad’s strengths make it ideal for group use. It’s the perfect size to toss on the kitchen table and let friends peruse youtube’s latest memetic foolishness, or Google the answer to a disputed conversation point.

The iPad is Multiuser, and Non-Functional. And that is how we are beginning to use the web.

Don’t get me wrong, business is moving online as fast as it can. And we still play games and read alone. For people with access to the iPad, because we must admin, it’ is a luxury item. With it we’ll use the web in recreational ways – and we’ll use it together. Pulling the internet into real-world conversation

Thin Apps:

User Interface:

Development Tips:

Carlson

admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:54:57 +0000

So for the past month I’ve been in the temporary employ of Carlson Marketing. Their creative team awash with projects, I was called in by Carl Schultze to design a swath of the Subaru intranet. It’s good work, and Carlson treats their freelancers well. I’ll be posting some finished images when the design is given the greenlight and sent to dev – a week or two I suspect.

It’s been a new experience for me, working at a larger organization. Perhaps the best part is the opportunity to work alongside excellent creative people. Carl has a superb aesthetic, and recommends brilliant, unusual pubs – and Andrew Norell our genius front-end developer happily provides insight into the intricacies of APIs and homebrewing.

Cliché

admin — Sun, 16 May 2010 18:57:43 +0000

distill

Creative people are supposed to hate clichés. After all, clichés are the unmodified regurgitation of generic thoughts, right? Rick Love and I have been spending too much time with clichés recently, and we’re starting to like them. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, The grass is greener on the other side, Good as gold. We deride them, but use them constantly. Cliché Vol 1. is intended to edify these workhorses of daily language.

ugly

Rick and I have illustrated clichés in many media, sculpture, video, online micro-sites. But the ideal medium should be something common. We settled on the paperback book. It became an exercise in intuition, to use the most common materials to compile an encyclopedia of clichés. We worked quickly, using only black & white, inexpensive printing, and Arial. It should have been ugly.

beauty

And is it a little ugly, in places. But it’s also beautiful in places. A fitting showcase of our daily use of clichés; sometimes trite, sometimes vulgar, and sometimes strangely poignant. Find out more about our work with clichés at rawwar.info

dribbble

admin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:59:34 +0000

Thanks to the generosity of Paddy Donnelly I now have a shiny new profile on the invite-only dribbble community. I’ll be keeping the internets updated with snippets from my daily design work – so check it out, and leave snarky comments if you have a profile. Hello Dribbble!

Ben Plattes, Polymath

admin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 19:51:26 +0000

Light, heat, direction

A multifunctional identity for artist, photographer, and polymath Ben Plattes. Icons to serve as a silent testament to diverse talent. And a custom industrial typeface never hurts. Because when Ben speaks, it’s worth taking note. benplattes.net

Binary Website

To reflect Ben’s dual professional roles as artist and photographer his minimalist website is bisected, each avenue catered to the aesthetic tastes of the discipline. Truisms adorn the header in Benjamin Bold, a square sans designed to be web imbedded via the @fontface css tag.

RAWWAR

admin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 19:00:01 +0000

Collaboration with artist Rick Love, visual system, show proposals, website, book design, viral microsites, interactive list of cliches. We make a lot of strange stuff.

High Kings Clothing

admin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:46:19 +0000

Kings among us.

An urban clothing boutique with an ambition towards the haute couture. A vocabulary of decadence defined the identity. Ornate crown, dense pattern, and a lookbook-style website.

Nobility gone swashbuckling.

Beginning with t-shirts and expanding into the finer details of silk handkerchiefs and cuff links, the High Kings identity attempts to cultivate a monochrome formality opposite geometric aggression.

We Are Thieves

admin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:42:37 +0000

A fledgling art and design collective

Created to find and feature excellent, undocumented student work in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Thieves need a den, a place for reflection, and conversation. Built during the Cargo Collective beta as a gallery site, wearethives.com was designed to expand to describe a full community, with bios, interviews, events, and connection board for cooperative projects.

Color and Pattern

We Are Thieves relies on a strict diet of 20% gray and white to let featured artwork and design stand on its own. But don’t worry, for highlights and visual punctuation we’ve selected some perky hues and illustrated a bit of baroque embellishment masking iconography.

Ashleigh Adams

admin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 15:12:43 +0000

audio/visual

Ashleigh is a German soprano opera singer. She needed an audio-visual portfolio to showcase her rare talent and finely-honed craft. The site displays a carefully crafted heirarchy of content, leading with a delicate wordmark highlighting name and profession, inline audio player, reinforced by a full-screen portrait gallery, and fold-away content bar with bio, CV, and contact info.

Melic: A Modern Blackletter

admin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 15:03:41 +0000

A confluence of typestyles

Blackletter type was the confluence of two forces: the botanical, and the crystalline. I attempted to modernize the forms to conform to modern styles of legibility.

Academic type

Funded by an academic research grant I framed blackletter geometry within the proportions inspired by Robert Slimbach’s Adobe Garamond. The concept, development, and final typeface were presented at the Minnesota Collegiate Honors Symposium. To view the process and download the latest version of Melic go to reedenger.com/melic.