Center for Urban Pedagogy’s new website is live! The new site brings together all the great programs, projects, workshops, and events that CUP regularly initiates, in a fun way – it reminds us of their office. In the gutters of each page are a changing series of playful icons extracted from those activities and linked to them. The website also features a store where the output from each collaboration may be purchased or downloaded – so buy some merchandise and help CUP continue to generate interesting, informative projects in the future! And, come join us at their launch party on Thursday Jan 19. Congrats, Brian! More on Flickr

After designing the Whitney Museum’s website in 2010, in 2011 we introduced a major new area for kids: Whitney For Kids. The new site turns the main Whitney website’s design grammar on its head, keeping some of the same structure and attitude but giving it a whole new look. Kids can explore all the same artists and artworks as adults can, but in their own design language, and dozens of artist and artwork pages have all new, richly engaging kid-specific content.

Kids can also do a lot more than adults. They can make their own pages on the Whitney’s website, using a kid-friendly version of the same content management system used by Whitney staff. They can take quizzes and polls, tag artworks, collect art, upload their own art, and browse the art of both Whitney artists and other kids. And they can change the background pattern of the whole website, for all to see, using a fun and educational tool.

The design has been described as “hallucinatory” and kids really seem to connect with it, using the site in many different ways. Some slowly explore all the art; others just want to make their own pages and add tags. Those approaches map to two major approaches of the site: Emphasize parallels and connections between kids and artists; and create a discursive space, like a crowd of kids in a museum who can all hear and see each other talking about and reacting to what’s around them. More text and images

Congratulations Mary!

Our new website for Greengrassi, the London art gallery, has just launched. Obviously it’s red. The site emphasizes images, acting as a visual archive that can repay in-depth exploration better than many gallery websites do. More images

With artist Julia Kim Smith, we’ve launched 100 Survivors, a collaborative photo and video project for women diagnosed with breast cancer. Through a Flickr group, participants contribute photos responding to 12 prompts, so the site exposes both commonalities and radical differences in women’s experiences and voices, and includes both familiar snapshots of everyday life and highly specific interests and observations. The site begins with a mutable diptych that appears as the last user left it, and you can also see the diptych’s history. Julia writes that the site “hopes to inform and inspire by looking beyond ‘awareness’ and ‘supporting the cause’ and focusing on the experiences of actual women with breast cancer.” Please share! Facebook
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We’ve launched a new online arts calendar for Yale. For the first time, this calendar brings arts events and performances from many institutions and departments across this large university, together onto one surface. Members of the public can find something that interests them, and students at the undergraduate and graduate level can use the calendar as a tool to stimulate collaboration across disciplines and to find inspiration.

This is our illustration for today’s Bloomberg News opinion piece on cellphone network censorship... Worth reading.

Congratulations to the Whitney on the groundbreaking for their new building today! We were excited to see this special one-day homepage on whitney.org – made in Economy without even telling us! We always love it when our clients make things we didn’t plan for using our tools.

Working on our new aquarium (have you checked back? they are growing nicely…) reminded us of this collaboration with Paul Elliman from a few years ago, a proposal for an identity for the Vincent Award.

Most of our work is processes that develop over time. There is the process of developing a design, but also the life of a design after the project “launches.” When we design a website or an exhibition, we want it to go places we didn’t imagine after we “release” it. Even though this is the most natural condition in the world, we’re fascinated by it, and we try to embed an acknowledgement of this condition into our working process, and into the software and designs we develop. We symbolized this with the sunset on the Whitney, the changing colors of Making Policy Public, and the most recently visited building photos on the Yale map, to name a few.

Check out our new contribution for Parallelograms, and be sure to check back periodically!

This new site helps organize information about the political imprisonment this week of artist Ai Weiwei. Built in collaboration with our friends at ArtAsiaPacific and elsewhere.

Please spread the word:  Tweet

Thanks Laurel!

Update: Lisson Gallery in London puts up a banner on its facade with a link to our site for more information, as Ai Weiwei’s work goes on display…

We’re really excited about the launch of ArtAsiaPacific’s new site, the online version of an English-language magazine that covers contemporary art from Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East. As a magazine, the site is optimized for reading on the iPad and iPhone as well as regular computers, including “next” and “previous” buttons that always take you to the next thing to read. To make the content more accessible to the same readers who might not be able to purchase the printed version, we made many articles available through the website in Arabic and Chinese. The site also features an online store, an area for web-specific projects commissioned by the magazine, a lively blog, and an interactive almanac. Since the launch, staff have already published two new issues through the new system (the fifth Economy site), and have been using the site in creative ways. More images

Organizations recommended by AAP for Japan relief donations

For about the past year, we’ve been working with the Whitney on a project to integrate their website with their membership system, Raiser’s Edge. This was a complex three-way project that involved collaboration with the developers of Raiser’s Edge and the creation of new behind-the-scenes web services, and it launched today. As a result, users of whitney.org can now manage their museum membership online, and see a reminder at the top of each webpage when their membership is about to expire. In calendars throughout the site, users see a “For you” badge on special events for their membership level (a feature that nicely complements the Curate Your Own Membership project and the “your collection” feature of the website), and even users who aren’t members of the museum can customize their calendars on the website to highlight events in categories that interest them. The Whitney can also now show any content on whitney.org conditionally to particular users, such as an announcement or solicitation targeted to users in a particular membership category. Congratulations Bridget and everyone who worked on this project so steadily!

The Whitney has just re-launched its Watch & Listen area, a redesign we’ve been immersed in for some time. Have a look around, the content is pretty addictive. Everything is inter-linked, tagged, and sharable, and podcasts and downloads are available. It works on your iPhone too. A neat feature is the ability to quickly make your own playlists. This feature is integrated with making other kinds of collections on the site (artworks, events, etc.). Thanks Brian!

At ArtAsiaPacific.

We launched a new site for the production company and design studio, Brand New School. We’re excited that it’s the fourth installation of our modular content management system, Economy – the first three being the Yale School of Art, the Environmental Performance Index, and the Whitney Museum. It’s fun to compare the 1 2 3 4.

A central metaphor for this new site is an infinite set of shelves that holds both finished projects and bits of inspirations and creative expressions that can be uploaded by all BNS employees. In addition, all visitors to the site can re-edit BNS reels and start their own reels, using the same easy-to-use tool we developed for BNS to share custom reels with their clients. Read more...

Earlier this year we redesigned the Environmental Performance Index for 2010. (We also did the 2008 site.) The EPI is a global measurement and ranking of the environmental quality and policies of most of the world’s nations. This new design tries to be accessible to an even wider audience, emphasizes interactive maps more, and lets you see many facets of a country’s performance at a glance. Learning from Fusedspace, the new design also features “trails”, allowing you to “walk” from one country another along many paths, comparing countries along the way. More images.

Ryan Gander’s new public sculpture is on view from today. This is our second project with Public Art Fund: website (lots of great material), invitation, sign, street banners, and magazine advertising. The identity and website work as a kind of disjointed fairy tale.

Do Ho Suh’s new science fiction project The Perfect Home opened last night at Storefront for Art and Architecture (and will be open until December 7). His project proposes a home situated on a floating trans-Pacific bridge, halfway between New York and Seoul. We designed a 9-minute video loop which shows 16 years of global ocean current movement, drawn from NOAA's OSCAR satellite remote sensing project; as well as Do Ho’s own flight patterns over the years. About 64 million data points are represented. The screen alternates among four different ways of displaying the data, including waving lines, breathing eggs, spinning discs, and 95 kinds of pop currency... High-res stills, low-res video, medium-res video

We just launched a cute new interface for the Whitney’s new Curate Your Own Membership feature. You can mix and match different benefits to create a custom annual membership for yourself. The Whitney is apparently the first major museum to do this, and it’s in keeping with a number of other bespoke features on the website, some live already and some coming soon. The idea also reinforces the rich variety of programming and experiences available at the Whitney, something our web design has also always tried to emphasize. In this new interface, you color a badge as you design your membership.

Identity, printed matter, signage, and website for the Public Art Fund’s new outdoor exhibition, Statuesque. The exhibit focuses on contemporary figurative sculpture by Huma Bhabha, Thomas Houseago and others. Our identity stacks all the content on top of a base made of Albertus, a typeface from the 1930s inspired by raised bronze lettering in public inscriptions. We made it even more 3D. It’s installed in City Hall Park, right around the corner from our office; the work is great if you want to visit.

A book about MOS Office’s modular Element House. It’s inspired by the architects’ film, The Romance of Systems, which is a slow, panning loop across the length of a seemingly endless instance of the house, built on a turntable at MOS. We made a kind of comic book in five nested parts, from the abstract and romantic film (the outermost signature) to the concrete built house (the innermost signature). The cover’s green pattern is a view of the house’s shingle pattern. More spreads.

The Whitney Museum’s new website, which has been a big part of our practice for the past year, is live to the public now. So you know where it is, the website is black at night and white in the day, and it has its own sunrise and sunset New York time. To build it, more than 64,000 page versions were created in our new CMS, Economy, by 63 different authors.

We’re especially proud of the collection area, which is easy to use and shows images big. You can make your own collection (which you can share with other people), stream and download really great video and audio, and much more. Check out the search results and the “New content” RSS feeds, they’re fun. We’ll be writing more about this project soon… Programming: with GrayBits. More images.

With Lana Cavar, we designed this interior and exterior signage system for ZPC (Zagrebački Plesni Centar), a new dance theater in Zagreb (architects: 3LHD). The exterior signs had to help people find the theater, inside a courtyard, from the street; a huge Z draws that line, then joins with a P in the courtyard, and a C that winds its way into the building. Inside, underlines on a single datum create a giant rhythm through the building by forming an irregularly dashed line. We thought dance is about discontinuity as much as continuity. More photos.

We’ll be on a panel called “Disappear” moderated by David Pogue on Wednesday May 20. It’s the 25th annual AIGA “Fresh Dialogue” event. This year the theme is design and ubiquitous computing. We’re going to talk about lessons for design from Midnight Madness and maybe some other things. Should be interesting – we’ll post more info when we get it. Ironically, this event has been cancelled.

Dan will be a part of an interdisciplinary design charette called Energy Infrastructures, part of the exhibition The Global Polis. Discussion of of the workshop results will be open to the public on Friday May 15 from 3-4pm, would be cool if you stop by! And, the exhibition opening is that night from 6-8pm. The location is the Center For Architecture. The exhibition was originally designed by Project Projects for Stroom Gallery in the Hague. Postcard.

We’re growing a little. Lana Cavar, our collaborator on the AIGA exhibition, will be working with us on some future projects. Lana was a founder of Cavarpayer, an important part of the Zagreb design scene. We all met when she was Dan’s student in 2006. She is a good friend and someone with whom we work easily in several media and share many sensibilities.

We’re working together now on signage for ZPC, a new theater for contemporary dance in Zagreb. (Images soon.)

The graduating show of the Yale graphic design students is opening on Friday May 15, and there’s a reception that night. Nice website!

On another note, Dan’s classes at Yale, Networks & Transactions 2 (this past fall, including a new project to design chess sets) and Networks & Transactions 1 (just finished, including a new CMS project), both went really well this year. The students in NT1 seemed to operate on a pretty high level this year, so NT2 is going to need some reengineering for next year…

Nice readymade alphabets by students in Tamara’s Typography 1 class at Parsons.

The other day we squeezed a dozen or so students from ArtEZ/Arnhem and the I&IMD program into the office- greetings! We enjoyed the conversation and catching up with the program since we last talked to you two years ago.

Libby Safford was our intern last semester and she is great. She worked on the editing interface for the Yale School of Art website version 2, on competitive research for the Whitney Museum website and on the sophisticated search results page for that project. (By the way, interested in an internship with us? Get in touch…)

Brana Vasilic (graybits) is a friend and our programmer for the Whitney project. We helped convince him to leave his job programming MRI scanners to do this, and it seems to be working out. If you’re looking for a programmer, contact him.

All Points is a proposal for a small set of unofficial wayfinding and orientation points physically embedded in New York’s urban fabric, each about the size of a person’s hand. Each small display will be based on the same networked computing platform, set of content genres, and special stochastic pixel matrix. But as well as bearing location- and time-specific content and vectors, the shape of each display will be custom fabricated to fit or patch a unique local condition – a form appropriate to a mutable city of patches, reuse, and myriad pedestrian practices, and an argument that locative computing need not itself be mobile in order to engage mobility.

We’re now redesigning Whitney Museum’s website. August has been the “discovery” phase of the project. We’ve been meeting with each department and working group at the Whitney, for about an hour each – more than 40 meetings this month. Our goal this month is to understand what the Whitney is, what it does, and how it works, from many internal perspectives as well as at the boundaries with the Whitney’s publics. And also, of course, to ask what the new website should do. This has been a fascinating process. For example, membership, education, marketing, and curatorial departments have very different, but equally compelling, perspectives on what it means to be a visitor to the Whitney – a set of perspectives we hope to weave together in the new whitney.org. We’ve really enjoyed meeting everyone and immersing ourselves in this place. It’s a special institution, and we’ve often found ourselves identifying with many of its aspects and aspirations.

We entered the project with just a couple stated goals: Make the website editable by everyone at the Whitney, so its content can grow organically and unexpectedly, rather than tend toward obsolescence; and reorganize the website so its content is shaped around visitors’ interests, rather than around the shadows of a series of internal structures and initiatives at the Whitney. We plan to determine all other goals, including visual ones, only starting in September.

Two proposals: Interruption and Weathervane

In our second collaboration with Geoff Han, we designed & launched a new identity and website for Solid Objectives, the architecture partnership of Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu. This website’s goal is an almost physical density or fullness, organized. It is a blog built on WordPress. Each category of post has its own layout, all using the same grid; so that there is a relationship between form and program that evolves as you explore the site. More...

Next Wednesday June 11 at the Apple Store in Soho, we’ll give a talk about our practice, what we’re up to and where we want to go next as part of the AIGA’s “Design Remixed” series. Come join us! Challenge: Ask us a good question at the end.

Update: It was fun to talk to you! Thanks to everyone who came. By the way here are the questions you asked, as I recall.

We finally have a little studio! Right in the thick of things. We’ll be moving in next week.

Update: We are moved in and really enjoy being here. It’s sunny. We had our first meeting in the space the other day, with Rosten and Valeria. Danielle has rented our spare desk for some days this summer. Give us a call and stop by if you’re in Chinatown or the L.E.S.

Making Policy Public is a neat initiative of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. We just designed & launched the new website for it.

If you are a designer, you have from now until June 16 to apply to be paired up with one of four advocacy groups. If you’re selected, you’ll work with that group to design an informational poster about either predatory lending & credit, detention and deportation, street vending, or barriers faced by previously incarcerated job-seekers. There is a $1000 stipend. I hope some of you guys apply! More images...

Dan is going from full-time to part-time at Yale and moving from CT back to New York. With plenty of excitement and of course some sadness. Next year I’ll teach Networks & Transactions 2 in the fall, and Networks & Transactions 1 in the spring. Photo: Mary V?

Did you know we have a YouTube page? If you want to see more bits of our work in motion. And a Flickr page too, with more images. We try to add videos and photos to those places respectively, and then talk about it here.

Trying to up the nerd ante, Dan will be talking about networks & transactions in the next installment of the Nerd Nite series in Boston. 9pm, Saturday May 3, at the Midway Cafe. The 8pm talk is about Old Testament justice and sounds awesome. More info. (See also: The Secret Life of Machines.)

Update: Tough crowd! There were hecklers!

This year’s exhibition of the work of the graduating Yale MFA graphic design students – most of whom have been or are students of Dan’s – will be open from May 10-14 in New Haven. The opening is Saturday May 10 at 7pm, come say hello! Here’s their website for you to bookmark.

Here’s another good bookmark: An archive of the past few years’ GD show websites is now online. The 2007 site remains quite active.

The Environmental Performance Index (link is to the 2008 site, see also our new 2010 design and data) is a global measurement and ranking of the environmental quality and policies of most of the world’s nations. This year’s index was released in Davos in January. We worked with its creators (the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University) to make a more accessible and public online manifestation of the index and its components. More...

With Lana Cavar, we designed this year’s AIGA “365” show, which displays AIGA’s picks of the best graphic design of the year. We dropped the work off in the middle of the gallery, along with a pinup board, a bookcase, and a couple trolleys, and waited to see what would happen to it… The show is open through February. AIGA has provided comfortable couches and free wifi for the duration, and Mark and Lia the receptionists finally get to play their iPods. So stop by if you want to kill some time. Thanks Lisa, Dariusz, Gabriela, Ric. More pictures.

We’re in a design show in Shenzhen, China (“X Exhibition“). The other American designer featured was Eric Adolfsen. If you want to download some really big files, the reels we showed there are here.

We launched a website for Mary Ping, the New York-based fashion designer. It starts from the bottom, which is where we put her tag, and you scroll up from there. The whole website is just the one page with all her collections on it, which felt like the dense rack of clothes we found in her studio. In collaboration with Geoff Han. More images.

• The Environmental Performance Index is a global measurement of the environmental quality and policies of most of the world’s nations. This year’s index will be released in Davos in January. We’re working with its creators at Yale and Columbia to make a more accessible and public online manifestation of the index and its components. We want to provide access to its subjective, uncertain, and manifold aspects, as well as to the causal relationships that must be understood in order to improve environmental policies. Mike Gallagher is now working with us on this project.

• We’re both busily teaching. Tamara is teaching a Typography 1 class at Parsons; pages for Dan’s classes at Yale this semester: Networks & Transactions 2, Advanced Graphic Design, Thesis group, Second-year Core.

We just launched a new website for Artcity a festival of contemporary art in Calgary. Our design is a hack on top of Google Maps. It was easy to make because it uses Google’s code for all aspects of the interface. Thanks to Adam and Prem at Project Projects. More...

(Update: Since the festival’s over now, the link is to a mirror of the 2007 site.)

If you notice anything strange in the city this Saturday night, the tenth and last edition of Midnight Madness, the all-night, urban puzzle-solving test of endurance is afoot! (“Midnight Madness X: Backed Into a Corner”.)

Dan is in the September issue of Modern Painters magazine with a review of the new Street View feature of Google Maps. The article (full text) is about Street View’s qualities as an image. The same issue also has text by Claire Bishop and others about ad hoc art schools, so it’s worth checking out & not too hard to find.

We made a set of posters to warm up the PS1 Warm Up party. Thanks Israel K! Free weather.