There are four separate 3'x4' panels that represent Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx. When they're combined, you've got one gorgeous piece of wall art.

I wouldn't try and take it on a road trip though. [Dude Craft via Neatorama]

With the December issue of Esquire, all you do is fire up your computer, turn on the webcam, turn to the part of the magazine with those strange little black-and-white box-looking things, in ads or whatever, and point it at the webcam, and you will witness, right there on your screen, an uninteresting video. Says the WSJ:

A fashion spread about dressing in layers, for example, shows actor Jeremy Renner shedding a coat and sweater as the weather turns from rainy to sunny. Turning the magazine triggers a snow flurry, and Mr. Renner puts on more clothes and throws snowballs. Esquire says there are several minutes of video footage in the magazine

The ability to watch a moving-picture on your computer? The future is now. George Lois would be proud.

Hah, no, we're not. No, instead NYM is just exposing this kid—who goes by "Maximilian" of course—to the ridicule and vitriol of people like us, who decorated their own dorm room with empty whiskey bottles and cigarette ash.

This kid, though! He is going places! Really terrible places!

Maxamilian, voted "preppiest in class" at Choate, "has a sincere love for Stubbs & Wootton slipper shoes and melon-colored pants."

Look at everything about this paragraph!

When other 15-year-olds were going to lacrosse camp, Sinsteden worked for David Easton, a neoclassical decorator in the Albert Hadley/Bunny Williams school. After his first year of college, he interned for Moss and still works for her one day a week. "I finish her sentences," he says. "And she reads my mind."

No, New York. That is not what "other 15-year-olds" were doing. Other 15-year-olds were playing Xbox and texting lewd photos of themselves to one another and getting high and maybe working at the ice cream stand at the park. Also, Maxy, anyone can read your mind. Your mind is a 30-year-old novelty book. Look, we're reading your mind right now: "I'm a tool."

Still, we cannot fault his one gesture toward the sacred duty of a guy not to be THAT fucking guy:

It's not unusual to find twenty friends crammed into Sinsteden's room, enjoying the contents of his well-stocked bar.

Ah, college. Anyone with liquor or drugs is tolerable for a night!

Make sure to check out the slideshow! It features this immortal phrase: "The tie-backs are repurposed ascots."

The rigid philosophy of testing every little aspect of a Web page's appearance — Mayer's team once tested 41 different shades of blue to determine which generated the optimal number of clicks — has driven away top design talent tired of the endless testing. But perhaps the problem is that Mayer's restive designers just aren't as smart as she is! Here's her explanation:

Every design starts with an instinct: It should look like this, or it should look like that. You can actually test it with data. The humbling thing about that is sometimes the data proves you wrong. So for every change I propose, you know, three out of four, four out of five the data will support the change.

It doesn't matter if Google's ugly — the data is on Mayer's side, see?

Wait a second: Mayer famously dismissed a Googler's application for a job transfer because they'd gotten a single C. "Good students are good at all things," she said at a meeting witnessed by a reporter. But Mayer has just admitted that she gets a C, a B-minus at best, at Web design. She recently touted a design featuring unpopular insurance giant AIG. By her own rules, shouldn't she be fired in favor of someone less tone-deaf on design?

Here's a segment from her appearance:

Since assuming leadership of the consumer web team, I started attending the legendary weekly UI review meeting. I did this both as a representative of the web group, and also to help keep my team on track with what Marissa and her team expected of us. By this point in my career I had worked with her many, many times, and I had been attending the review regularly for a couple of months. She had even shaken my hand once to thank me for launching a particularly big and difficult campaign.
One of the last times I sat in that meeting, as we were dispersing, she looked right at me and asked her assistant to "cut down on the number of guests - there are too many random people here." I knew then that despite all the work I had done for her team, she didn't recognize me at all. I had earned no influence. I stopped going to the reviews after that.
A few weeks later, after thinking about my experiences and opportunities there, I decided to resign.

Halsall then calls for a change in Google's "creative leadership" — a veiled way of asking for Mayer's head on a platter.

Her tale comes after Doug Bowman, Google's top designer, criticized Google's obsession with numbers in making design decisions, a strategy advanced by Mayer. Another former designer, Kevin Fox, now at a startup called FriendFeed, doesn't wholly agree with Bowman — but notes that Google's design group has "had a glass ceiling from the very beginning." That, too, seems like a veiled reference to Mayer's iron grip on the look and feel of Google's consumer Web products. It doesn't take a degree in visual design to notice a pattern here.

Bowman joined Google three years ago — too late, he now says. The company's engineers-first culture was firmly in place, meaning every decision had to be proven through exhaustive testing, rather than a reliance on a clear vision of Google's design. And in a backhanded slam at Google VP Marissa Mayer, the head of "user experience," he notes that top management in charge of design had not background in the field:

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.


Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

Exciting design problems, like those at Twitter? A source tells us that's where he's going, but Bowman hasn't confirmed that yet. (He promises to disclose his new employer in a followup blog post.)

Bowman adds that he "can't fault Google for this reliance on data," but "won't miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data." It's a microcosm of what's going wrong at Google: The rigorous culture of making every decision quantitative, every process algorithmic, results in a coldly efficient experience, with no room for the human quirkiness that makes sites like Flickr so appealing. It's hard to argue with Google's financial results. But who wants to work inside the bowels of a perfectly tuned machine? If Google runs by the numbers, it hardly needs humans. And that's why people like Bowman are leaving.

(Photo by gorriti)

We've no idea how or for how long Needleman (middle, above) has known celebrity decorator Michael Smith (far left), but she's been slobbering in her magazine since last April, when he expressed his desire to get his paws on the Lincoln Bedroom. Smith and Needleman have been conspiring together for years, according to this SECRET MEMO.

Well, now Michelle Obama has selected Smith as her official White House decorator, and Needleman continued crowing:

But Smith's work does have a look that's distinctive. His unique talent is marrying Old World pedigree with a clean Californian sensibility. Think about what a grand English country house might look like if it were owned by a beach-loving movie executive who grew up worshipping the studios, and you get the idea. His interiors combine a crisp, polished sense of glamour with a laid-back ease, comfort and lightness—you can practically feel the breeze when you look at pictures of his work. Smith brings his clients the class and history of Europe but in a well-ordered, uncluttered American package, and this has proven to be a golden formula. His clients are mostly politically active members of Hollywood royalty, with a fair smattering of media moguls and socialites. The rooms he designs for them are luxurious but livable, layered but not stuffed, patinated but not dusty, individual but not eccentric.

Needleman is, of course, married to Slate editor and political journo Jacob Weisberg, which almost explains her recording an odd story of getting drunk at a party and Smith calling her "Martha Mitchell."

And so today Needleman took her White House makeover fantasy to the pages of the New York Times op-ed section, in an odd column attacking, of all things, the Committee for the Preservation of the White House as some sort of attack of bad taste launched by Jackie Kennedy (and Pat Nixon?) from beyond the grave.

Now, of course, she paints Michelle Obama as a new Jackie O, who'll add crazy Mark Rothkos and 20th-century furniture to the Green Room. Of course the last First Lady to really have her way with the place was not Jackie O, but Nancy Reagan, with her famous $200k state china and complete renovations of the second and third floors of the White House and her Oscar de la Renta dresses. That is a comparison that is probably not so complimentary to Michelle Obama and Deborah Needleman's BFF Michael Smith, though, because everyone in America hated Nancy Reagan, except Peggy Noonan.

Anyway, sure, let Deborah's fave designer add some new curtains to the room where one of Abe Lincoln's kids died.

Pixel art has long had its adherents. But the use of favicons as symbols for websites in bookmarks and Web browser tabs has turned it into a mass medium. (Gawker's is a square red splotch, harking back to the original Gawker logo designed by Jason Kottke; Valleywag's a green "V".)

Google replaced an older "G" icon with a lowercase blue "g" last summer, to indifferent reaction. The new icon, an Art Deco-inspired outline of a "g" surrounded by Google's signature bright colors, is arguably better than Google's regular logo. But would it work as well if blown up full-size? That's part of the charm of designing with pixels, picking the shade of each bit carefully to play tricks on the eye and create a recognizable symbol.

Michael Pierce has a gallery of favicons, as does Digg designer Daniel Burka. Offer up your favorite micrologos in the comments.

All quotes from George Lois—the man who designed all of Esquire's greatest covers—about Esquire's recent, blinking, plastic "cover of the future." That's unfortunate, Esquire, you must be very disappointed at being PWND!!1! Watch the Lois interview with Ad Age here. He's cranky about other things too.

I'm skeptical, because since when are Gmail users looking for a portal to bookmark as their homepage? We heard Yahoo tried to get Facebook to design a widget for the new space on Yahoo's homepage, but that so far Mark Zuckerberg and company have refused. Kind of like how they refused Yahoo's $1 billion offer to buy the company two years ago, relegating Yahoo to redesigns that seem little more than deckchair shuffling on a sinking ship.

As Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer first pointed out, Facebook has removed its applications dropdown menu from the top of the screen and put it down in the bottom-left corner — you know, right where Windows keeps its "Start" button. Just like Windows, alerts pop up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

Microsoft Windows isn't deemed sexy by San Francisco's Web-designer crowd, who brag about having to launch VMware to test out Google Chrome. But, like Facebook, Microsoft has a user base in the nine digits. Zuckerberg shows he hasn't just taken Microsoft's money — he's picked up some of the software giant's mass-market, commonsense design.