lament for my late page

I loved my old home page and I was sorry to have to give it up a few years ago for something spare and linky/listy. I concede that the sparer style works better but I miss the narrative clutter, a non-design enthralled by hyperlinking right there in the flow of words. That little "latest news" link in the top left blinked for about a year when that was the newest thing. Fortunately I knew that blinking links were bad news pretty quickly and reverted to plain old plain old as soon as the excitement faded. The old page dates back to 1994 and it looked more or less as you see above from 1994 until 2007 or '08! I maintain a link to it and I imagine that most of the links still work. Prior to the site on top of which this old page sat I had a wonderful gopher. This was of course before the graphical browser (Mosaic was the first, I think--before Netscape) and it was stiff and hierarchical but effective in conveying information and giving users a tour, in effect, of the material you wanted to present. I loved the chaos of hyperlinking once it was possible through this thing called "the world wide web" and, let me repeat, I felt that the hyperlinky text was the way to go. Eventually another kind of design became the standard. Now--what with drupal and blogs and blog-style user-enabled sites--we're back to a more cluttered surface, but still nothing like this single-look languagy flat surface.

the design economy will be democratic

the capacity of patterns

My former student Paul Andersen has now created a design studio in Denver called "IndieArchitecture." It's a design and research group that takes on a variety of projects—-from designing buildings to writing books to curating contemporary art exhibitions. As an alternative to mainstream, mass produced, and corporately funded architecture, the office embraces its small market status, is associated with collegiate backpack intellectualism, and consistently seeks new ways of disseminating architectural and urban ideas. Paul, the director, has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Cornell University, and is a guest curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. "Conceptually," says Paul, "we maintain an ongoing interest in patterns—visual patterns, but also behavioral, structural, organizational and other types of patterns. Patterns have a unique capacity for integrating a wide range of materials, functions, forms, environmental systems, and even cultural trends in a coherent and technically precise project. They bridge worlds of knowledge and matter, art and science, and for us, research and practice." [web site]

iconic

Frank Cieciorka, the man who designed the fist emblem for the New Left, died on Monday. He was an early opponent of American involvement in Vietnam, opposed the Johnson intervenion in the Dominican Republic, went to Mississippi during Freedom Summer in '64, became a field secretary for SNCC.

When he returned north after Freedom Summer he made a first woodcut of the now-famous fist, modeling it (of course) on previous 20th-century leftist fists. Only later did he realize that the design was being adopted everywhere and by seemingly everyone. His version of the first for the 1967 Stop the Draft Week was the one that really became iconic.

From the New York Times obit: Mr. Cieciorka had seen the clenched-fist salute when he participated in a Socialist rally in San Francisco. When he returned from Mississippi, “the fist was a natural for the first woodcut in a series of cheap prints,” he noted in an interview with Lincoln Cushing, a political art archivist and historian. “It wasn’t until we made it into a button and tossed thousands of them into crowds at rallies and demonstrations that it really became popular,” he continued.

Later he did watercolors and painted rural California landscapes.