We’re now redesigning Whitney Museum’s website. The new site will launch at the end of February 2009. August has been the “discovery” phase of the project. We’ve been meeting with each department and working group at the Whitney, for about an hour each – more than 40 meetings this month. Our goal this month is to understand what the Whitney is, what it does, and how it works, from many internal perspectives as well as at the boundaries with the Whitney’s publics. And also, of course, to ask what the new website should do. This has been a fascinating process. For example, membership, education, marketing, and curatorial departments have very different, but equally compelling, perspectives on what it means to be a visitor to the Whitney – a set of perspectives we hope to weave together in the new whitney.org. We’ve really enjoyed meeting everyone and immersing ourselves in this place. It’s a special institution, and we’ve often found ourselves identifying with many of its aspects and aspirations.

We entered the project with just a couple stated goals: Make the website editable by everyone at the Whitney, so its content can grow organically and unexpectedly, rather than tend toward obsolescence; and reorganize the website so its content is shaped around visitors’ interests, rather than around the shadows of a series of internal structures and initiatives at the Whitney. We plan to determine all other goals, including visual ones, only starting in September.

In our second collaboration with Geoff Han, we designed & launched a new identity and website for Solid Objectives, the architecture partnership of Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu. This website’s goal is an almost physical density or fullness, organized. It is a blog built on WordPress. Each category of post has its own layout, all using the same grid; so that there is a relationship between form and program that evolves as you explore the site.

Next Wednesday June 11 at the Apple Store in Soho, we’ll give a talk about our practice, what we’re up to and where we want to go next as part of the AIGA’s “Design Remixed” series. Come join us! Challenge: Ask us a good question at the end.

Update: It was fun to talk to you! Thanks to everyone who came. By the way here are the questions you asked, as I recall.

We finally have a little studio! Right in the thick of things. We’ll be moving in next week.

Update: We are moved in and really enjoy being here. It’s sunny. We had our first meeting in the space the other day, with Rosten and Valeria. Danielle has rented our spare desk for some days this summer. Give us a call and stop by if you’re in Chinatown or the L.E.S.

Making Policy Public is a neat initiative of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. We just designed & launched the new website for it.

If you are a designer, you have from now until June 16 to apply to be paired up with one of four advocacy groups. If you’re selected, you’ll work with that group to design an informational poster about either predatory lending & credit, detention and deportation, street vending, or barriers faced by previously incarcerated job-seekers. There is a $1000 stipend. I hope some of you guys apply!

Dan is going from full-time to part-time at Yale and moving from CT back to New York. With plenty of excitement and of course some sadness. Next year he’ll teach Networks & Transactions 2 in the fall, and Networks & Transactions 1 in the spring. Photo: Mary V?

Did you know we have a YouTube page? If you want to see more bits of our work in motion. And a Flickr page too, with more images. We try to add videos and photos to those places respectively, and then talk about it here.

Trying to up the nerd ante, Dan will be talking about networks & transactions in the next installment of the Nerd Nite series in Boston. 9pm, Saturday May 3, at the Midway Cafe. The 8pm talk is about Old Testament justice and sounds awesome. More info. (See also: The Secret Life of Machines.)

Update: Tough crowd! There were hecklers!

This year’s exhibition of the work of the graduating Yale MFA graphic design students – most of whom have been or are students of Dan’s – will be open from May 10-14 in New Haven. The opening is Saturday May 10 at 7pm, come say hello! Here’s their website for you to bookmark.

Here’s another good bookmark: An archive of the past few years’ GD show websites is now online. The 2007 site remains quite active.

With Lana Cavar, we designed this year’s AIGA “365” show, which displays AIGA’s picks of the best graphic design of the year. We dropped the work off in the middle of the gallery, along with a pinup board, a bookcase, and a couple trolleys, and waited to see what would happen to it… The show is open through February. AIGA has provided comfortable couches and free wifi for the duration, and Mark and Lia the receptionists finally get to play their iPods. So stop by if you want to kill some time. Thanks Lisa, Dariusz, Gabriela, Ric. More pictures.

We’re in a design show in Shenzhen, China (“X Exhibition“). The other American designer featured was Eric Adolfsen. If you want to download some really big files, the reels we showed there are here.

We launched a website for Mary Ping, the New York-based fashion designer. It starts from the bottom, which is where we put her tag, and you scroll up from there. The whole website is just the one page with all her collections on it, which felt like the dense rack of clothes we found in her studio. In collaboration with Geoff Han.

• The Environmental Performance Index is a global measurement of the environmental quality and policies of most of the world’s nations. This year’s index will be released in Davos in January. We’re working with its creators at Yale and Columbia to make a more accessible and public online manifestation of the index and its components. We want to provide access to its subjective, uncertain, and manifold aspects, as well as to the causal relationships that must be understood in order to improve environmental policies. Mike Gallagher is now working with us on this project.

• We’re both busily teaching. Tamara is teaching a Typography 1 class at Parsons; pages for Dan’s classes at Yale this semester: Networks & Transactions 2, Advanced Graphic Design, Thesis group, Second-year Core.

We just launched a new website for Artcity a festival of contemporary art in Calgary. Our design is a hack on top of Google Maps. It was easy to make because it uses Google’s code for all aspects of the interface. With Adam and Prem at Project Projects.

(Update: Since the festival’s over now, the organization has put a more generic website at their main URL, with a link to the one we designed.)

If you notice anything strange in the city this Saturday night, the tenth and last edition of Midnight Madness, the all-night, urban puzzle-solving test of endurance is afoot! (“Midnight Madness X: Backed Into a Corner”.)

Dan is in the September issue of Modern Painters magazine with a review of the new Street View feature of Google Maps. The article (full text) is about Street View’s qualities as an image. The same issue also has text by Claire Bishop and others about ad hoc art schools, so it’s worth checking out & not too hard to find.

We made a set of posters to warm up the PS1 Warm Up party. Thanks Israel K! Free weather.

This picture is from the Yale graphic design 2007 MFA show; Dan taught the class. The premise of the show was:

• Every student selects their own sites within the gallery for each project they want to show.
• Every site must somehow be right for that site’s project: the site must activate the project, or the project must help you see that location in the gallery in a new way.
• If necessary, adapt projects to work better with their locations.
• Be opportunistic, and in case an opportunity doesn’t present, at least be economical.

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Linked by Air dabbles in the demoscene/makes a realtime responsive 3D environment/ok, disco light show. The volumes are deciding on their own how to respond to the music a DJ plays. Cast onto a big holographic scrim at the Architectural League of New York’s Beaux Arts Ball, in the Three Legged Dog theater.

The website we designed and built for the Yale School of Art, and our digital mirrors for Prada, have each just received AIGA “365” awards.

We’ve launched an online map of the Yale University campus. You can locate 322 buildings by browsing or searching among hundreds of campus organizations and departments. Even cooler, you can reach 428 Yale websites by finding them in buildings. The map is a way to explore the Yale web as well as the Yale campus.

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We designed and programmed eleven different interactive mirrors to decorate Prada’s Soho store. They’re in the store now if you visit. As a vendor to 2x4. Closer look: we posted an HD version of the movie (MP4, 290mb).

We designed the plastic bag for Michael Meredith’s IVY system of coat hooks. They were on sale in the shop at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York, as a part of the National Design Triennial.

Linked by Air has launched a new website for Yale University’s School of Art. It’s a new kind of modular wiki templated and programmed by us and operated by the students, staff and faculty of the school.

This exhibition, at Stroom Gallery in The Hague, showed the results of an international competition seeking new ideas about the combination of technology and public space. We decided to show all 307 competition entries. To make this possible we invented display methods and pursued a two-fold approach to space, structuring the content as both a “database” and a “cityscape.” With Min and Sulki Choi. Thanks Huub, Ron, Jo, & Jouke! More…

This is the admissions poster we made for Yale right after Dan started teaching there.