Dressed In Value is a design workshop in Louisville, Kentucky. Learn more.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Photo by Peter Augustin/Dwell Magazine

When major streets “have been pedestrianized,” it can be written about them that they leave the city “cleaner, quieter, and filled with moments of ripe human narrative,” as Marc Kristal wrote about Bordeaux, France in the latest issue of Dwell.

Friday, March 27, 2009

I hate to keep hammering at this, but concerning blogging, John Gruber says it quite perfectly:

There is an easy formula for doing it wrong: publish attention-getting bullshit and pull stunts to generate mindless traffic. The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry — which exists as the sort of pimply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO industry — is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient.

Friday, March 27, 2009

I just wanted to let everyone know that I have made some more visual changes to the website. More importantly, though, I want to let everyone know where the content of my writing is and will be going from now on.

It might be obvious, but in case it’s not, I will be writing more and more about things concerning the city of Louisville, Kentucky. I will also be writing about things concerning design. Graphic design, web design, typography, architecture, city design, etc. It is design that I am interested in, not merely one facet or corner of it. Things concerning local economy (which I’ve already touched on a bit) and some things about cycling advocacy might come up as well.

This is just a forewarning. I don’t want to mislead or disappoint anyone. If I’m not writing about what I’m genuinely interested in and passionate about, the energy I put into writing and the quality of it will suffer, and you along with it.

You may have noticed, I’ve started to publish quotes I’ve come across. I’ll be sharing more of those, and organizing them as time goes on. As the amount …

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Now that Metro Louisville has the budget and is responsible for maintenance of state roads within the county, if we can find an alternative to grassy roadway medians we could save $800,000 a year to put toward developing more important things like complete and safe streets for cyclists and pedestrians.

Friday, March 20, 2009

I want to remember this:

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

(Via John Gruber.)

Thursday, March 19, 2009

In response to Merlin Mann on SXSW:

Camaraderie doesn’t develop very well through LCD screens, and there is very little in this world that is better or more important.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Gill Holland rethinks Louisville’s bridges project on a realistic and human scale:

Downtowns should be for people, not overpasses and highways. I don’t want to look out my window and see a four-story highway overpass in downtown obscuring and towering over the church steeples.

(Via 8664.)

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Monday, March 09, 2009

Mandy Brown on advertising and reading on the web:

Any economy which charges ever less for ever more intrusive ads will eventually be successful not in creating wealth but in driving the readers away, until the only ones left to heed the ads are all the other ads […]

It’s ironic, isn’t it? We don’t want to pay for stuff, so we promise to submit to advertising — but we find the advertisements annoying, so we tune them out like parents tune out screaming children, or else we find ways to block the advertisements altogether.

This issue fits into larger societal questions I have. What do we value? What do we consider valuable? What are we willing to trade or compromise for the things we value?

There’s what we can call the Walmart Way, in which value means less expensive, affordable, cheap, or low quality. The driving force determining what we’re willing to trade real money for is a rarely possible combination of best quality and lowest price. This is shameful.

Concerning what content we devour on the web, we’ve proved to ourselves that there’s not much we value enough to actually pay for at all. We expect …

Sunday, March 08, 2009

Milton Glaser once said, “For me, drawing has been the most fundamental way of engaging the world. I’m convinced that it is only through drawing that I actually look at things carefully, and the act of drawing makes me conscious of what I’m looking at. If I wasn’t drawing, I sense that I would not be seeing.”

This both inspires me and concerns me. I want to draw. I want to look, to see, engage, understand and know — but I’m not good at drawing, and I spend no time practicing. Sometimes I tell my wife, who is an art teacher, that I’d like for her to teach me how to draw. I imagine some day I’ll actually begin working seriously on this shortcoming. Meanwhile, I really want to read this book:

The Milton Glaser quote above is from Steven Heller’s Just Enough is More, a short film about the designer Milton Glaser. (The direct link on the page doesn’t work, but you can find the video through the iTunes link in the yellow box.)