Count down

Often at conferences I hear people say 'We have [X number] of seconds to grab people's attention before they walk on to the next picture / label / interactive".

The number of seconds that seems to be most frequently cited is 6. Or maybe 8. My memory is a bit shonky. But surely it's not 27.2, which is the mean number of seconds according to this study.

I thought of this figure today when reading this article about the genericitisation* book cover design, in which bookseller Jonathan Ruppin asserts that "on average, book buyers spend just 0.8 seconds looking at a jacket ". Yikes.

The article, which discusses the growing power large retailers have over book cover design, details several interesting examples of changes made to cover designs in response to requests from chain stores. It called to mind an article from a few weeks ago, about the rather odd things that happen when book covers are redesigned for international markets (my pet peeve - the gorgeous, restrained English version of Alex Ross's The rest is noise, and the meh American version).


*Genericitisation - the process of things of becoming samey. Similar to 'gentrification'. You heard it here first.

Easy on the eyes

One of the questions I love to ask in interviews is "What's your favourite website and why?".

It's a slightly less daunting question than "What's your favourite book" because somehow, websites don't divide into high and low (or "so bad it's good") categories.

When people are talking about their favourite sites, I'm listening to what they're saying about the freshness of the writers' voices, or the perfection of the information architecture, or how the search seems to have better results than any other site they use, or the way the design makes them feel.

When I think about this question myself though, I often get a little stumped. I spend much of my time on Twitter (where I get flicked out to specific pages on websites, but rarely move further through them) or immersed in my feedreader, where the content is stripped of all design and UX consideration, and is just about the information and the voice.

So asking the question of others made me ask it of myself. Here's where I got to.

The Guardian website (before they changed the homepage, creating four-column, uncategorised mayhem - why, Guardian, why?) always makes me feel like a saner and more intelligent human being. Their arts & books coverage is great, I'm forever being tempted into Comment Is Free, and the information architecture sets my mind at ease.

ArtsJournal is consistently the fifth thing I review in the morning (5th, you ask? The list looks like this: Twitter, work email, personal email, feedreader). It's not about the design (in fact, I always flick to the diehard view) it's about the curation. It's like every day someone smarter and more worldly than I is pointing me in the right direction.

Thinking for a Living gives me that clenched-chest feeling of love. I don't care that it's actually a little hard to navigate, I just think it's beautiful. Especially this. I also subscribe to this awesome feed.

Hoefler and Frere-Jones. Inside every web and every art person I know, there seems to be a little font-head trying to get out. Sure, I like H&FJ's fonts just fine, but to be honest, if you put them in a line-up, I dunno if I'd be able to pick them out. What I love though is the way they talk about type. And the grey.

This week's crush ....

.... is Joseph Sullivan's blog 'The Book Design Review'. To quote a friend - it is the house of awesome. Check out, for example, this post bringing together a slew of recent editions of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ("most of them pretty horrible").



You can also follow Sullivan on Twitter: http://twitter.com/theBDR

Hat tip to the Te Papa blog for the link

Four interesting things I have read today

Jen Graves: 'In Art News' Jen Graves of The Stranger (Seattle) takes apart an article bemoaning the departure of the Seattle Times' art critic Sheila Farr. The original article, by Emily White, is one of the now-becoming-familiar condemnations of the lack of respect amongst newspapers for experienced art reviewers. Graves argues:

To proclaim a national day of mourning for the loss of a notably disengaged critic at a deeply disengaged newspaper—the Times checked out of the cultural conversation of Seattle and the nation long ago, if it was ever part of it in this young city (when is the last time you saw a Times culture writer in the midst of a national dialogue?)—is to miss a far more important problem than whether this city has three full-time critics or two.

Penguin Blog: Fav '08 cover designs Members of the Penguin Art Department discuss their favourite book cover designs of the past year in this beautifully illustrated blog post.




The Book Cover Archive Not just a beautiful site to explore, but obviously a well-kept and well-mannered one; a list of proposed and achieved enhancements is listed at the bottom of all the pages, along with links to similar sites.

Nina Simon's message to museums re:Twitter I've been meaning to talk about this here, but have decided to work blog it instead. Many people say that there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter - heck out the lengthy comments thread for some opposing views. My free piece of advice for museums and galleries: if you're (still) thinking about starting a blog, you should now also be thinking about how that blog interlinks with (or could be replaced by) Twitter.

And one thing I've only scanned, because it's (a) depressing and (b) seemingly the same article that I've being reading everywhere for the last two months - where's a nice big diamond skull meme when you need it?

Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is

UPDATE:

For those of you looking for the Colin McCahon painting, it's in the Christchurch Art Gallery collection, you can read about it here (warning, PDF) or listen to a podcast here.

...................................................

Best of 3 is taking a break: I'll be back next Thursday / Friday.

In the meantime, the Walker Art Center's design staff are blogging - check them out the behind the scenes on projects such as Kara Walker (complete with prudish American booksellers).

And to yesterday's anonymous commenter: noted, but not nice ....

I think I'm in love

I've written before about how much I enjoy Peter Peryer's blog. Now, courtesy of Tyler Green's contribution of his top 10 art blogs for the Walker's year in review posting, a new favourite ... Alec Soth.

Soth is a photographer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I'm not about to venture an opinion on his work yet, having not spent enough time sifting around on his site. However, having read a few of his posts, I can see this is going to become a regular read, for the same reason I visit Peryer's blog - to be able to see photography (and the world) through someone else's passionate eyes.

Beginning December 17, Soth declared it 'snow week' on his blog, waiting for the arrival of a white Christmas. For the next few days he discussed the work of photographers who have worked with snow, in various ways. I particularly liked this post, about photography, science, poetry and the work of David Goldes, a photographer who for Soth brings together this things. That's a photo by Goldes at the top of this post.

Another post I really enjoyed was Soth talking about being asked for permission to reproduce his work on the covers of books. He points to a website, Covering Photography, made for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design, and makes some interesting observations about covers, author photos and the New Yorker.

Image: David Goldes, Rain on flour, from Alex Soth's blog.