Peter Mendelsund chats with Chip Kidd about his office for the redesigned From The Desk Of:
I’ve always been a ‘nester’, I think most designers are. The difference now between my office and my bedroom as a child is the dearth of KISS posters (I mean NOW, not then).
(Frankly I’m surprised the universe didn’t collapse from all that awesomeness contained in a single room)
And on a related note, Mendelsund is one of many designers who work is included in AIGA’s recently announced 50 Books / 50 Covers list (although several covers appear to be attributed to their art directors rather than the designers themselves, no?).
Math-Lit – Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai and the forthcoming Lightning Rods, interviewed at BookForum:
Chance often plays a big part in fiction, but it is generally not chance as this is mathematically understood, which tends to be counter-intuitive. A while back I discovered Edward Tufte’s brilliant books on information design, The Visual Presentation of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and so on. I read Gerd Gigerenzer’s Reckoning with Risk, about why we have trouble calculating probabilities using percentages, even when it’s a matter of life and death (a doctor working out the likelihood that someone is genuinely HIV-positive, based on a positive test result); I read Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods on the history of risk; I read Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, on the way sabermetrics had transformed professional baseball. It seemed to me that one could use Tufte’s methods to incorporate this tremendously interesting subject into fiction.
The cover design for Lightning Rods is by Steven Attardo for Rodrigo Corral Design.
And finally…
The legendary George Lois talks about his covers for Esquire with Gym Class Magazine. There’s no shortage ego, but I love this anecdote about playing a soft ball game against The New Yorker:
So I go over there with my glove and my sneakers, and I could not believe it. I looked at the team. The third baseman was Gay Talese. The second baseman was Gore Vidal. It was not a team of athletes. I said: ‘Oh my god, they’re all literary geeks.’ He said: ‘No, no, we’re going to have fun.’
Now I’m serious about playing softball or basketball. I don’t screw around, I play with great ballplayers, I’m a good athlete. I said: ‘Harold, this side is terrible.’ He said: ‘No no!’
We went over and played THE NEW YORKER, and I think we lost 18–3, and the only reason we got three runs is because I hit three homers. I don’t remember being there for any other reason.
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