Friday Five: Feb 5, 2016

1. Policing The Future

Another longform surprise from The Verge, this time on the weird and usually scary future of “predictive policing.” In short: predictive policing is using filed police report data to create a “crime grid” overlay map on a city, using past crimes to infer and predict when and where future crimes might happen. Think Minority Report with a lot more racial profiling and a lot less Tom Cruise. To top it all off, one of the cities testing predictive policing pilot programs (which, by the way, are really really expensive) is Ferguson. Yeah, that Ferguson.

2. Why Modern Movie Posters Are So Dreadful

Before I studied and worked in advertising and design, I studied film. Way back in high school, messing around with little Mini-DV cameras and shoddy audio set ups, me and some friends made a lot of terrible short films that I’m pretty sure I’ve fully erased from the Internet… but I digress. The Guardian does a great job of briefly inspecting what happened to the likes of posters for Rosemary’s Baby or Anatomy of a Murder and how we got to the predictable, if not formulaic, movie posters that we see now.

3. The Problems With Food Media That Nobody Wants To Talk About

With surprising poignancy, First We Feast tackles the current food media landscape. A landscape, to note, that is incredibly insular, incredibly white, and blurs the definition of what “journalism” in the term “food journalism” is. As many of my friends on noted on Twitter, you could easily swap out the word “food” and it’s associated terms for many other niche reporting markets like “Fashion” or “Music” and the points made still hold true. So, perhaps take the time to read through the piece and lens it as the problems with media overall that nobody wants to talk about.

4. The History Of Japan

It’s not what you expect. A nine minute ADHD recap of the entire history of Japan. Informative, if not purely entertaining.

5. Your Identity is Arriving Now

Uber rebranded and has a new identity. It was created by their internal design team. If you want to learn more and skip the commentary, or just need some context around the project, read this piece entitled ‘The Inside Story of Uber’s Radical Rebranding’ from Wired. If you want to hear it from the horse’s mouth, read (and please don’t skip the videos because they’re insane) Uber’s own press release in which they try and sound less like a monster/potential Skynet/we’re really not monsters we swear kind of company. Here’s my take: the new identity is not good. It’s not cohesive, the logo (as many of noted) looks like an asshole, and has nothing to do with the company or the use of the app. At a time when there are multiple court cases, legislative battles, and strikes or protests against them, Uber chose to try and put on a fresh face. Being the internet, many people saw through this very quickly. Either way, we’re stuck with this ugly new Uber now and the internet design community is going to continue to ridicule it until something else to make fun of comes along. Won’t be long now…