Last week I found an article in the New York Times announcing that GOURMET is back as Gourmet Live! I loved that magazine and was heartbroken when Conde Nast pulled the plug last October. This is the first example I’ve come across of the iPad prompting a magazine relaunch. The magazine, that according to the publisher, is no longer a magazine will launch in the fall of 2010. I for one am more than curious to see whether they will have the fortitude to pull off something that uses the medium  rather than dumping existing approaches to content and layout onto a new platform. Fingers crossed.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a very brief story about map makers who, in a quest to replicate the details of the original perfectly, created a gargantuan map the same size of the country they were illustrating. I’m always struck by how difficult it is to show an image of a website one a website. Should I make it small enough to show at once and loose the details in the typography? Should I crop in to a detail and loose the overall impression? Here’s my newest contribution to the problem: excitingly tilted in a a constructivist 2.0 kind of way. Terrible, isn’t it.

Oh, by the way, take a look at the new website we designed and built for Kliment-Halsband Architects. We did the first one four years ago and they came back to us to rejuvenate. That felt good. Portraits of the partners were shot by the amazing Francois Dischinger.

We are working on a project for a company that measures resource usage in buildings and then implements improvements in order to make the building more sustainable. As part of this project we did a lot of research into the visual language that is being used by competitors. I found it striking how related the vocabulary is. Regardless of the brand behind the communication, the language was illustrative and relied on bold color, diagrams and icons more so than photography. Maybe it’s because we don’t know what the future will look like yet?