Blog

July 20, 2011

No Pasaran! The 75th Anniversary of the start of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, a pivotal period in world history that encapsulated two struggles: the fight against Francisco Franco's fascist military coup, and the struggle to build a new, fairer, more just society.

July 15, 2011

You're invited to the next AIGA conference! Unless you look like an immigrant.

Why AIGA, an association so whipped up with energy in encouraging socially- and ecologically-responsible design, would pick Phoenix, Arizona as the site of its next national conference is beyond me.

June 4, 2011

IAVA's new logo: as failed as the wars their members have returned from

It’s clear from the start that this is an aggressive logo — much more aggressive than its predecessor. But what it gains in sharp, pointy edges it loses in professionalism and dignity.

March 15, 2011

Noam Chomsky Wants You to Shred the State

I've recently come upon a fair amount of free time on my hands, and one of the advantages of that is the ability to actually implement any random idea I have.

February 24, 2011

Mother Jones' new inequality charts are more than just pretty

These charts are in the best tradition of public interest design: turning otherwise inaccessible or hard to understand data into compelling and informative narratives.

February 9, 2011

Re-examining the non-profit homepage slider

Over the past 2-3 years, the homepage slider (or "carousel") has become a ubiquitous feature on institutional websites. While the design convention of the slider has been around much longer, two key developments made it a veritable must-have for many NGO sites.

December 20, 2010

The (Subversive) Nutcracker

The creation of the nutcracker we know and love was as political as it was functional.

September 29, 2010

Malcolm Gladwell's Soft Authoritarianism

Gladwell's latest paean to hierarchy falls apart under its own weight.

September 22, 2010

The Art World as a Form of Politics - David Graeber

David Graeber: The entire apparatus of the art world could be said to exist to come up with an answer to one single question: what is art? Or, to be more precise, to come up with some answer other than the obvious one, which is "whatever we can convince very rich people to buy."

June 11, 2010

A Diaspora from Facebook, or from Reality?

By removing the intermediary servers of the old centralized social networking services, we're given the ability to better control, view, and filter the streams of data we and our friends send out. But is this a qualitative psychosocial improvement, or have we simply made our alienation from reality more "participatory?"

Patrick St. John

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