New subway grates in New York City, designed by Rogers Marvel Architects, serve both as public art and to prevent flooding. "As a flood-control device, the structure creates a protective collar, or sleeve, around ventilating grates that are typically set flush to sidewalk level. The idea is not to completely waterproof the platforms and tra
cks below, but to mitigate a devastating cascade of water, silt, mud and debris." The upside: Manhattan fashionistas won't get their heels stuck in the sidewalk-level crates. The downside: The new sculptures will definitely impede sidewalk traffic flow, taking up a good portion of the sidewalk. The new sculpture also is strangely similar to Andrea Blum's Plateau piece on 40th Street. Plateau "was made of perforated steel, concrete and light which formed interlocking pavilions, tables, and seating to identify locations for private and social interaction. It was envisioned as a three-dimension
al puzzle designed to respond to the individual and collective needs of a diverse public" (Andrea Blum's website). Both show interesting solutions to the sculptural issue of form vs. function.
An interactive feature in the New York Times of Yankee Stadium on it's last night is described as a "panorama composed of a series of photographs taken over a short period of time." Is this the work of Photoshop, stitching the overlapping photos together?
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/09/21/sports/baseball/20080921_YANKEES_PANO2.html?th&emc=th
The home of the Bronx Bombers and 26 world championships that Ruth built that dates back to 1923 held its final game earlier this week. The last game was a celebration of baseball
, the renowned stadium, the franchise, and its fans. And what 
else? A logo, always painted so perfectly on the grass that not even the Pope's feet may touch. An interlocking "NY," according to the Yankees website, was first used on the uniforms of the New York Highlanders in 1909. The design was created in 1877 by Louis B. Tiffany "for a medal to be given by the New York City Police Department to Officer John McDowell, the first NYC policeman shot in the line of duty. Perhaps because one of the club's owners, Bill Devery, was a former NYC police chief, the design was adopted by the Highlanders." When the Yankees move to their new stadium next season, Yankee fans can find comfort both in seeing their same team and the same logo painted fresh on the lawn, even in a vastly different setting. A comparison of the two stadiums: http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/nyy/ballpark/new_stadium_comparison.jsp
This morning, I woke up early like other true design fanatics to watch the live launch of Adobe Creative Suite CS4. Adobe featured 1-hour streaming video from 9-10am introducing all the new tricks of the software. Here's a recap of some of the most relevant features in the design applications. If you've gotten into the habit of going far beyond the measurements of your artboard in Illustrator, have no fear--the "pages" aspect of InDesign has now been integrated into Illustrator through multiple artboards. You can create them at multiple sizes and place them wherever you want in your document. They can even overlap, and you can import individual artboards into InDesign books or even save individual artboards for web. There is a new way to paint, called the "Blob Brush" that creates outline-filled objects instead of paths with brushstrokes applied to them. The new outline-filled objects are easy to erase and are a quick-and-easy way to illustrate. Lastly, the appearance palette is now definitely going to be a more frequently used and is finally a more functional palette. You will be able to change all the properties of an object or multiple objects at the same time. In InDesign, you can set specific parameters and then an error window will pop up if you go against them. In Photoshop, you can squish an image with it being aware of the content of the image; for example, it won't squish people but rather the useless pixels of space between people. You can also now use a series of 2D images and stitch them together and create a 3D image from them. You can even place a 2D image into the 3D image. Crazy. It should be interesting to see how long it takes for CS4 to disseminate into the design world. Obviously it's a big investment for studios, but Adobe promises its update will save time and make designers work more efficiently in the future.
See these links for videos with more new features of CS4:
Illustrator: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1554v1699
InDesign: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1556v1689
Photoshop: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1556v1686
Example of Illustrator's artboards:
cks below, but to mitigate a devastating cascade of water, silt, mud and debris." The upside: Manhattan fashionistas won't get their heels stuck in the sidewalk-level crates. The downside: The new sculptures will definitely impede sidewalk traffic flow, taking up a good portion of the sidewalk. The new sculpture also is strangely similar to Andrea Blum's Plateau piece on 40th Street. Plateau "was made of perforated steel, concrete and light which formed interlocking pavilions, tables, and seating to identify locations for private and social interaction. It was envisioned as a three-dimension
al puzzle designed to respond to the individual and collective needs of a diverse public" (Andrea Blum's website). Both show interesting solutions to the sculptural issue of form vs. function.
