Courtney Bolton
About
Courtney Bolton is a designer, web strategist, & creative director living in New York, NY.
MAIL cboe@courtneybolton
AIM courtneybolton1
TEL 917-822-1600
courtney bolton blog is a digital sandbox of sorts. it's becoming an experiment with making meaning; and media; inside emergent technologies. it could span topics music, finance, art, design, writing, &tc...
Elsewheres
flickrlast.fm
wishlist
dopplr
4square
youTube
netflix
bookshelf
yelp
ongoing:
mobile beat
audio.files
My friend Ella Nemcova’s company - The Regal Vegan - is New York City’s only organic gourmet and totally vegan food delivery service: “The soul of this company is to provide something even more tangible to the people: tons and tons of other nutrients. Each morsel is a delicious delivery vehicle of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, proteins, and the whole grains that we just can’t seem to get enough of. These fantastic, naturally occurring nutrients are just what the body ordered, and they’ve been pulled together for you to make getting healthy a pleasure. We invite you to honor this beautiful body you’re in.”
Captain Obvious: May be demoted to Commander Contrarian, a commander who disagrees. Of course It Makes Sense In Context. Captain Obvious is also known as: As You Know, This Just In, Shaped Like Itself. (via Television Tropes & Idioms)
Flash_back. (via Gaping Void)
..."Do Stuff.
“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious; not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” -Susan Sontag
New Work: 3 at Saks Fifth Avenue. Michael Bierut’s identity for the new designer floor at Saks. (via Pentagram)
Death Valley Star Trails, by Nikhil Shahi. The Royal Observatory has announced the winners of its Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest. (via nmm.ac.uk)
Qnch: A Data Description Language for Tabular Data. A lot of data is tabular in nature, and is efficiently encoded in text files. While such files are easy to produce and read, they bring with them several challenges when used in visualization tools and other programs that have to understand some of the data’s properties. Examples include categorical data, special values in numerical columns (which are common in Census data), and information about the data like its producer.
…at Harvard Business Review, John Baldoni writes: “Inspiration, as McKinsey describes it, falls under “leadership… so that leaders inspire others and shape their actions.” The word inspiration may confuse, even overwhelm, most managers because they may feel they need to orate like Winston Churchill or lead like Colin Powell. No, inspiration is rooted in personal example. Managers can inspire by putting employees in position to succeed and then by helping them get the work done right in a timely fashion. More importantly, good managers connect with their employees individually to support, coach, and challenge them to succeed. That all adds up to creating a more inspired workplace. Direction, as the McKinsey survey sees it, is “capacity to articulate where company is heading… and to align people properly.” Few managers I know would disagree with that concept, but many will think it is senior management’s job, not theirs. It’s too bad, because alignment (getting people to pull together for the same goals) actually happens on the front lines. It is up to managers to ensure that people understand what is expected of them and how they must execute. That requires good direction.
In a world where Google processes over 3 billion searches daily, clients need to radically rethink how they approach their marketing. In the expansive world, consumers are far more deliberate and considered about how they purchase things — as all those Google searches demonstrate. It’s not enough to start with reductive TV ideas and force them across all channels. It’s also not enough for a major brand in 2008 to allocate a measly $200,000 to the Web. These are both recipes for disaster.
As the old adage goes, telling is selling, and more telling is taking place today than at any time in history. Make sure your brand is part of the conversation.
On the Banality of Evil,
The theoretician talks about “normalization.” This is illusionary. All these in one way or another lead to deniability. The point of further research will be how conscious is this denial? Is it delusional? Opinions exist on the subject. Levinas for example doesn’t consider it unconscious. In a symposium on forgiveness in Paris he said: “It’s difficult to forgive some Germans , it’s difficult to forgive Heidegger.” Hannah Arendt—herself the victim of Holocaust—has defended Heidegger. She also had a relationship with him. Was Heidegger conscious of what he was doing? Was it routine? or Was he indifferent to all of it, or was it denial?
…”noted that the head of MlT’s main military research lab in the 1960s argued that ‘their concern was development, not use, of technology.’ Just as in the death camps, in weapons labs and production facilities, resources are allocated on the basis of effective participation in the larger system, workers derive support from interactions with others in the mutual effort, and complicity is obscured by the routineness of the work, interdependence, and distance from the results.
Peattie also pointed out how, given the unparalleled disaster that would follow nuclear war, ‘resort is made to rendering the system playfully, via models and games.’ There is also a vocabulary developed to help render the unthinkable palatable: ‘incidents,’m ‘vulnerability indexes,’ ‘weapons impacts,’ and ‘resource availability.’ She doesn’t mention it, but our old friend ‘collateral damage,’ used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, came out of the nukespeak tradition.” (via Sherryx)
Architecture titles published by Birkhäuser Basel. Interesting skim if you like spaces, architecture, design critique (-highly academic).
starlight. (via courtneyBolton)
