Herb Lubalin was my teacher, mentor, and boss. He was virtually mute, ambidextrous, and amazingly talented.

Early Herb Lubalin Design Studio Sign

I rescued this brass sign from the trash when I worked there back in the 1980s. Read his brief biography here. My favorite memory is driving around with him in his fantastic Volvo P1800 ES, a tour de force of automotive design. Herb definitely had style. This sign definitely is the work of Tom Carnase, and you can see a resemblance to the New York Magazine logo he modified years later.

Spring arrived in New York and a lazy walk down to Chinatown and Little Italy yielded a trove of type treasures.

Moe's Meat Market, Nolita, NYC

I’m glad that the Moe’s Meat Market sign is still hanging, even though you can only buy rather uninspired art within.

Bess, NYC

Bess N.Y.C., in the shadow of the Puck Building, sells all sorts of provocative clothing and artifacts.

Tacombi, Elizabeth Street, NYC

Tacombi is a faux Mexican vintage sign inside the wonderfully hip Fonda Nolita on Elizabeth Street. They really nailed the spirit of roadside taco stand typography.

Peking Duck, Lafayette Street, NYC

Peking Duck is screen printed on glass in Agency Gothic, designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1932. It appears on the window at the Lafayette Street restaurant Chinatown.

Chinatown Sign

I really am fond of the untrained lettering artist who finds novel ways to draw common letterforms. I’m not sure why they put the bar across the top of the “N” but it works just fine. Perhaps it is a funny joke in Chinese?

Apple had done it again. They created software for the creation of iBooks that’s easy to use and produces excellent results. We tried it out the day it was released and found it to be an excellent alternative to the more complex Adobe products. It’s designed for the textbook market, but obviously it can generate iPad-friendly projects of any type.

The iBooks Author interface is simple and intuitive

Download our first test here:

deckerdesign.ibooks

Instructions: Download the file (a .zip file) then uncompress it. To view the book on your iPad, make sure you have the latest free iBooks 2 app and iOS 5, and do the following:

Drag the book file (with the extension .ibooks) to the iTunes window and sync the book to your iPad. For more information, see iTunes Help.

Graphic design was transformed by Steve Jobs/Apple. We owe him a huge debt. In 1989 Postscript allowed desktop computers and printers to accurately render colors, designs, images, and most importantly, typography. This innovation led to a paradigm shift in the creation of marketing materials, videos, and interactive media.

My first professional setup was a Mac IIcx, an Apple Laserwriter, a Radius 19 inch monitor that weighed about 200 lbs., a 14.4 mbps modem. I paid $25,000 which included a service contract an a few other bells and whistles—and I was happy to pay it. We transmitted our ads and page layouts to a service bureau in New Jersey by dedicated modem, and received monochromatic Linotronic output pages the next day by messenger. It reduced our typesetting costs by 10 fold overnight.

When Aron Design creates a website we are intensely aware of cognitive overload—the brains inability to process the chaos of the typical website presentation.

Avoid cognitive overload with well designed pages that promote comprehension and increase effectiveness.

Our methodology:

1. Large, easy-to-read font with plenty of linefeed spacing
2. Lots of white space and generous margins
3. Avoid embedded hyperlinks in body text
4. Avoid distracting animated gifs adjacent to body text
5. Provide video transcripts for video content
6. Make photos large and always include captions
7. Keep pages single-topic—no need to conserve page count on the Web
8. Edit text as much as possible—then cut it in half

What follows is an excerpt from The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.

Back in the 1980s, when schools began investing heavily in computers, there was much enthusiasm about the apparent advantages of digital documents over paper ones. Many educators were convinced that introducing hyperlinks into text displayed on monitors would be a boon to learning. Hypertext would strengthen critical thinking, the argument went, by enabling students to switch easily between different viewpoints.

By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm was turning to skepticism. Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension.

A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse.

Psychologists refer to the information flowing into our working memory as our cognitive load. When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to process and store it, we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with other memories. We can’t translate the new material into conceptual knowledge. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains weak.

The Internet is an interruption system …we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online. Plus, the Internet has a hundred ways of distracting us from our onscreen reading. Most email applications check automatically for new messages every five or 10 minutes, and people routinely click the Check for New Mail button even more frequently. Office workers often glance at their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour. Since each glance breaks our concentration and burdens our working memory, the cognitive penalty can be severe.

It’s likely that Web browsing also strengthens brain functions related to fast-paced problem-solving, particularly when it requires spotting patterns in a welter of data. A British study of the way women search for medical information online indicated that an experienced Internet user can, at least in some cases, assess the trustworthiness and probable value of a Web page in a matter of seconds. The more we practice surfing and scanning, the more adept our brain becomes at those tasks.

The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.

Adapted from The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, copyright © 2010 Nicholas Carr to be published by W.W. Norton and Company

I was reading the book You Are Not a Gadget by the computer scientist Jaron Lanier and came across this passage: “…there is no evidence that quantity becomes quality in matters of human expression or achievement. What matters instead, I believe, is a sense of focus, a mind in effective concentration, and an adventurous individual imagination that is distinct from the crowd.”

Marketing is a crowded field and as marketers, we strive to have your voice heard above the deafening roar. At Aron Design, we practice the craft of design, writing, and photography with only one goal in mind: connecting with a consumer by telling engaging and persuasive, custom-tailored stories. You need to find that unique selling proposition that consumers will connect with above all others and broadcast it with confidence across a wide spectrum of media. Telling compelling, one-of-a-kind stories is the key.

You Are Not a Gadget is a manifesto that objects to crowd behavior and media mashups in favor of individual expression, especially on the Web. Highly recommended.

I recently finished reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail. I recommend it. He managed to recreate—in incredibly believable detail—the timeline, personalities, and backroom politics behind Lehman Brothers’ demise and the resulting financial market devastation. I was close to the situation in my own way because my employer at the time, Ross Culbert & Lavery, was the design firm that produced Lehman’s annual report and we did marketing and design work for many of the players mentioned in the book. These current and former RC&L clients are mentioned prominently: Lehman Brothers, Citibank, AIG, Evercore, Simpson Thacher, Debevoise, PwC, Och-Ziff, Wiley Rein Fielding, Barclays, Boies Schiller Flexner, Ameriprise… the list goes on.

I especially like the passage when Warren Buffett is trying to decide if he should invest in Lehman. He’s described vividly as paging through our annual report and writing notes in the margin of the book to keep track of his thoughts. Well, he may have liked the annual report design, but he did not like their numbers and passed up the investment opportunity.

The rest is history.