I’ve long been fascinated with movie reviewer Jeff Craig of Sixty Second Preview, a man who seems to love bad movies. About “Swordfish,” he said, “One of the most breathlessly entertaining releases of the summer. You’ll be pinned to your seat by Swordfish.” “The Chamber” was “an explosive, gripping drama!” And “Free Willy III” was breathtaking.

So who is Jeff Craig and what is Sixty Second Preview? NPR tried to track him down but couldn’t.

The Kevin Pollack/Sheryl Lee Ralph vehicle, titled “Deterrence,” wasn’t one of the top ten of the year, it was one of the most important films of our time. Now, there’s a movie lover. So we naturally wanted to speak to him, but we couldn’t find “Sixty Second Preview” — not any trace of it anywhere we looked. We don’t even know what medium it is.

Roger Ebert also asked, “Has anyone ever actually seen Jeff Craig of ‘Sixty Second Previews’ at a movie? For that matter, does anyone know what ‘Sixty Second Previews’ is? I ask in all sincerity.”

Little Rock native Ron Breeding has an answer:

I once worked for a radio station that aired “Sixty Second Previews,” a daily modular program one minute in length. Jeff Craig is the host of the thing, but since the program comes on CD a month at a time, he apparently hasn’t actually seen most of the movies — thus “previews,” not “reviews.” Still, his gushing about an upcoming movie he hasn’t yet seen ends up being used as blurbs in movie ads.

The 10 most popular typeface families in American newspapers according to a study by Ascender Corporation:

1. Poynter

2. Franklin Gothic

3. Helvetica

4. Utopia

5. Times

6. Nimrod

7. Century Old Style

8. Interstate

9. Bureau Grotesque

10. Miller

Related: Newspaper Body Text [Design With Reason]

800 Very Unsquare Feet describes Free City Supershop, an unorthodox Malibu retail space, as “a new shopping experience equal in its fun and sense of surprise to that of Whole Foods or Apple.” Owner Nina Garduno’s mantra is “make things with the simplest elements with the highest of possibilities.” She differentiates the store from larger competitors by emphasizing attention to detail, authenticity, and faith.

According to Ms. Garduno, Free City is profitable. It took her eight days, working with a shoestring budget and a small team in her workshop in Hollywood, to create the store’s interior, which features redwood shelves and blowups of album covers. Like everything else about Free City, the design follows Ms. Garduno’s mantra to “make things with the simplest elements with the highest of possibilities.”...

“The big companies were taking the importance of fashion away, the craft, and making it about price,” she said…For something to be perceived as authentic, that value has to be communicated cleanly through every detail — from the quality of the wash, if it’s a T-shirt, to the integrity of the physical environment. This is the almost visceral sense you get when you enter Free City. Not to sound crunchy, but you feel the love.

“Well, go look at the Gap. They claim to not want to rip you off, but the fact is they do. And it’s not working for them — not even lifting my ideas, and with all of their money and art direction. They still don’t have faith. They don’t have faith in themselves, and it comes out instinctually in the product. I think people know the difference.”

More on tees and details
And speaking of tees and communicating quality through detail: Threadless, dissatisfied with existing options for blank tees, recently decided to start manufacturing its own.

These shirts are based on our experience as a tee shirt company, and the feedback we’ve gotten from our community since the beginning of Threadless. Imagine a tee that is less boxy than a Fruit of the Loom, but not as skinny as an American Apparel. Imagine a tee whose fabric is softer than American Apparel but not as thin.

Great example of paying attention to core detail (people may like the designs but if the shirts don’t fit right, it’s all moot) and knowing what your community wants (Fruit of the Loom = too boxy, American Apparel = too thin). Plus, there’s something Apple-esque here in the way Threadless didn’t just accept the limits of existing manufacturers and decided to find their own (better) solution.

Related:
7 reasons why Threadless rules [SvN]
The man behind Apple’s design magic [SvN]: “Apple’s efforts to discover new materials and production processes enables them to build things no one else can build.”

We have one slot open in The Deck for December. Give us a shout if you have a product or service that could benefit from being in front of a huge audience of creative, web and design professionals. We’ll make a special deal for a first-time advertiser.

De Honnecourt’s architectural sketches
13th century French architect Villard de Honnecourt is known for his sketchbook of drawings and writings on architecture compiled while he travelled in search of work as a master mason. His sketchbook collection is viewable at The University of Newcastle’s site. Some examples:

Related: Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt [Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon] and The Golden Ratio in graphic design [Bridgewater Review].

Renaissance typography
Web Design is 95% Typography offers the design shown below and says, “The argument that we do not have enough fonts at our disposition is as good as irrelevant: During the Italian renaissance the typographer had one font to work with, and yet this period produced some of the most beautiful typographical work.”

Minimalist Euclid
Oliver Byrne’s edition of Euclid: “An unusual and attractive edition of Euclid was published in 1847 in England, edited by an otherwise unknown mathematician named Oliver Byrne…What distinguishes Byrne’s edition is that he attempts to present Euclid’s proofs in terms of pictures, using as little text — and in particular as few labels — as possible.” Sample page below.

UnSpun is a new service from Amazon that puts workers from the Mechanical Turk and the UnSpun community at work finding the top, best, favorite things in any category. It’s also a Ruby on Rails application sitting on the Amazon.com domain.

To be afforded that privilege at Amazon, you have to run the gauntlet of Amazon security and scalability requirements. Certainly not a trivial thing to do, but the Amazon Web Services team did it and now their Rails application is live.

How’s that for fueling the rumor engine.

Last week we pushed an update to the Basecamp help section. The goal was two fold: 1) Make it easier and faster for people to find answers to questions they had and 2) Make it easier on us by reducing the need for people to contact us directly for help.

The old help section looked like this. A list of common general FAQs at the top, a few other help links below those, and then a long list of common FAQs for each section below.

Based on the type of support requests we were getting it became obvious people weren’t looking below that initial list. We had to do something better.

Warren Buffett: Clear thinking leads to clear words
U.S.News & World Report has a special feature on America’s Best Leaders. In it, Warren Buffett gives good quote [via GE]:

“Be a nice person…It’s so simple that it’s almost too obvious to notice. Look around at the people you like. Isn’t it a logical assumption that if you like traits in other people, then other people would like you if you developed those same traits?”

“You’re thinking that the investors, bankers, and regulators are the people you need to survive. Put them all aside, and give priority to talking to your people and your customers about what is wrong and what you have to do.”

“Our favorite holding period is forever.”

“Berkshire is my painting so it should look the way I want it to when it’s done.”

“You don’t need to play outside the lines. You can make a lot of money hitting the ball down the middle.”

Personals that poke fun
Taking the piss of yourself is a good way to disarm your audience, show you’re confident, and prove you can take a joke. Book Lovers Seek Lovers, Buttered or Plain talks about the personals column in the London Review of Books and how people there intentionally present themselves in a negative light.

The magazine’s lonely hearts have described themselves over the years as shallow, flatulent, obsessive, incontinent, hypertensive, hostile, older than 100, paranoid, pasty, plaid-festooned, sinister-looking, advantage-taking, amphetamine-fueled, and as residents of mental institutions. They have announced that they are suffering from liver disease, from drug addiction, from asthma, from compulsive gambling, from unclassified skin complaints and from reduced sperm counts. They have insulted prospective partners. As one ad starts, “I’ve divorced better men than you.”

Kate Fox, a cultural anthropologist and author of “Watching the English,” compared the London Review personals to an advertising campaign several years ago that showed people recoiling in revulsion from Marmite, the curiously popular gloppy-as-molasses yeast byproduct that functions as a sandwich spread, a snack or a base for soup (just add boiling water).

“An advertising campaign focusing exclusively on the disgust people feel for your product strikes a lot of people as perverse,” [Kate Fox, a cultural anthropologist] said in an interview. But when Britons exaggerate their faults, she said, they are really telegraphing their attributes. “It does speak of a certain arrogance, that you have the confidence and the sense of humor to say these things,” she said.

Jordanians protest Jason Santa Maria’s favicon in Amman, Jordan, today. (AP photo)

"Use only what you need"

Interesting ad campaign promoting water conservation in Denver.

Smart saw stops and retracts blade instantly upon contact with human flesh

“Every contact with a conductive material (i.e. a human body as opposed to wood) results in a drop of voltage which in turn results in an aluminum block being ‘shot’ into the teeth of the blade.” [tx NG]

Tom Suzuki, reknowned textbook designer

Interesting quote from obit: “He had that important editorial designer gift — he actually read what he was designing for. And the art department worked interactively with the editorial department and the authors and consultants in developing art and photo concepts.”

Federico Fellini on constraints

“I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.” [via CPU]

Wagashi, traditional Japanese confections evolve into art form

“The character pronounced ‘wa’ denotes things Japanese, while the characters for ‘gashi’, an alliteration of kashi, have come to mean confections. Wagashi represent the essence of Japanese culture, and continue to be vital force in Japanese life.” [tx LB]