My SXSW panel, High Class and Low Class Web Design, is over now, and I can now share a little bit of about how I and a few others think it went.

Some bloggers who attended the panel have already published their own notes and reviews, too, so if you want to skip what I think and just read some outside opinions, please do so.

• Sam Felder (very thorough raw notes)
  
• Fast Company/Brian Reich (good comment/discussion here)
• Scot Hacker (raw notes plus interesting commenters)
• David Panarelli (nonplussed)
  
• Laura Creekmore (nice real-time commentary)
  
• Liz Henry (very thoughtful insights)
  
• Mani Sheriar (some personal insights)
• Gordon Luk (unique and interesting perspective)
• Brett Roegiers
• Kathleen Waugh
• Matthew Magain
• Scott Fiddelke (very long raw notes)
• Sara Smith
• (more as I find them…)

And if you attended the panel yourself, I’d love to hear your thoughts, both about the panel and the subject itself, in the comment area.

MORE…

• Leave a Note (11)

Just thought I’d post a couple world maps to compare with my own drawing.

First, let’s see what the big shots say over at Rand McNally:

Not bad. Almost as accurate as mine.

Let’s see how I compare to the 17th century cartographer Nicolas Visscher:

I think I kicked his ass.

• Leave a Note (1)

I’m getting some traffic today from kottke, so I figured I’d actually show y’all what the heck it is he’s talking about when he wrote:

The first time I saw a world map drawn from memory was at Christopher Fahey’s apartment. I forget how long it took him to draw, but it was remarkably accurate and fairly large (a few feet across).

So there it is. This is a photo I took just tonight of the map, hanging on the wall of the aforementioned apartment. It’s about four by six feet, entirely in pencil, and I made it over the course of about two weeks in 1993 during my senior year at Cooper Union. During those two weeks, I studiously avoided looking at maps on posters or in newspapers, to ensure that each time I resumed working on the map I would not have artificially pumped myself full of fresh map knowledge. The result is a map not just using my memory, but also using the added elements of (a) time and (b) the basic techniques of drawing.

UPDATE: Some answers to questions, and some added insights: MORE…

• Leave a Note (37)

I saw Dreamgirls this weekend — it was great!

I’ve been to my fair share of movies where the audience broke out into enthusiastic and spontaneous applause before, but they’ve almost always applauded some kind of triumphant action scene, never clapping and cheering for an individual performer. Which is to say that they are applauding the film itself, not the humans in it.

That is, until this weekend. Jennifer Hudson got at least three full rounds of applause from my Brooklyn audience, whose boisterous cheering for the performance (and singing along occasionally) almost seemed to suggest that Ms. Hudson was actually up there on stage in front of us to hear our appreciation.

For most of my “young adult” life (that is, my teens and twenties) I despised musicals. I thought they were phony and vapid — why in the world would a pair of New York street gangs suddenly form up into chorus lines and sing in the middle of the alley? Why would a group of sailors on shore leave suddenly burst into song and synchronized tapdancing on restaurant tables? It was silly to me, not worthy of the serious taste I liked to think I had.

And yet countless critical “top ten” lists include Singin’ in the Rain. This always baffled me. How can this be?

Well, over the years I’ve started to notice that I think I actually do like a lot of musicals. I may in fact, have liked a lot of musicals all along — but only certain kinds: I’ve realized that I pretty much only like musicals about musicals, or at least musicals about people who sing and dance and perform. MORE…

• Leave a Note (0)

On election night last week, we were channel surfing and comparing the coverage by the various networks. We ended up for a spell at Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert exchanged snappy banter with each other in a kind of parody of network news coverage.

Surprisingly, there was a part of me that found it a little tiresome, and I thought to myself “Why don’t these guys just talk like normal people and tell us about the election results, instead of all this rehearsed repartee?”. They were acting out scripted set-peices and skits, or riffing on the results by digging into a selection of pre-planned gags and jokes.

Of course, this is Comedy Central, so the scripted quality of the “reportage” is to be expected. Still, despite our deep appreciation for CC’s two “anchors”, we grew impatient and craved the hard news coverage that only a real network can offer. So we resumed by surfing on over to Oppositeland: Fox News.

I immediately noticed that the narrative and theatrical quality and structure of Fox’s coverage was really no different from Comedy Central’s. Each pundit was talking to the other pundits as if the other person didn’t already know what they were going to say, and yet it was clear that everyone knew exactly what everyone else was going to say. Their conversations were fake in every way — not quite scripted, exactly, but so incredibly contrived as to be basically a kind of vaudeville act. MORE…

• Leave a Note (7)