A transmission from the deep south.
For every new feature we add, we take an old one out. A lot of big sites don’t do that, and it’s a problem. Twitter started as a beautifully simple product, but it’s now going the same route as Facebook. The drive to innovate can overencumber and destroy a product.
— Good advice from Tumblr co-founder David Karp, in a frank and wide-ranging interview with Inc.’s Liz Welch.
The Art of the Title Sequence has a detailed interview with ex-Digital Kitchen creative director Eric Anderson, on the genesis of the Dexter opening title sequence. The article includes an early rough cut of the sequence with a different soundtrack; Anderson says he was initially reticent about the Rolfe Kent score provided by the producers, but came around to its humour and loose charm after five or six hours in the edit suite. “They made it better than I was going to.”
It’s thirty days of night and four feet of snow … it can’t just take place in a place where it’s a little rainy and your internet’s out.
— David Fincher on the notion of setting his adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Seattle instead of Sweden. From Making Of’s 45-minute interview with the director which mainly covers the process of shooting The Social Network.
Illustrator and typographer Jessica Hische is in Auckland to speak at Semi-Permanent. She talked to 95bFM’s Charlotte Ryan about how and why she practises her craft.
Trailer for Wellington actor/director Taika Waititi’s new feature Boy, inspired by the characters from his Oscar-nominated short Two Cars, One Night. His Q+A appearance (in three parts) following the film’s Sundance screening is delightful.
David Simon, creator of television’s The Wire, photographed by Philip Andrews on the New Orleans set of his new HBO series Tremé, for Jesse Pearson’s lengthy interview in Vice magazine. The topic of conversation darts from the screenwriting process and studio involvement, to American healthcare reforms, to the origins of Omar and his fourth-floor jump, to the failure of prohibition, and so on.
Simon spends time discussing how and why a sixth season of The Wire focusing on the immigration issue — it would have played between seasons three and four, leaving the media critique as parting shot — turned out not to be achievable, and why he feels the show’s first season was its weakest. Here’s the introduction:
David Simon is responsible for one of the greatest feats of storytelling of the past century, and that’s the entire five-season run of the television series The Wire. If that sounds like hyperbole to you, then you haven’t watched the show yet. It is the most intricate web of character, motivation, insight, action, repercussion, and emotion that’s ever been on TV, and it rivals the grand novels of the late 19th century, when novels actually, regularly, had scope. More hyperbole, but there you go.
Contains plot spoilers of course, but if you haven’t watched it, do yourself a favour this festive season. (via Wilson Miner)
Dan Wagstaff interviews Fantagraphics Books art director Jacob Covey. I love his cover for Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes (1936-1941); perhaps inspiration for my next Tumblr theme.
I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
— Cormac McCarthy during a lengthy interview with The Wall Street Journal’s John Jurgensen. (via John Gruber)
Typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler and co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author programme at the School of Visual Arts, Steven Heller, talk to “Please Explain“‘s Leonard Lopate on the topic of how typefaces are created and why typography is important to communication and design. (via Yves Peters)
Written and designed by Matthew Buchanan. Colophon. Please give credit. Email
