John Maeda Sketches

 
By Mark Kaufman
This morning I finally got around to thumbing through Key, the real estate magazine from this past Sunday’s New York Times. What took me so long? The fantasy of looking at mansions, luxury condos and homes that I cannot afford is wearing a little thin these days, but putting that aside, there was an interesting feature on the contents page. The editors added a bunch of sketches from John Maeda, the artist, author and Associate Director of Research at the M.I.T Media Lab. Mr. Maeda designed the cover for this issue, and it’s fascinating to get a glimpse of the thought processes behind the final work. Some interesting ideas were sketched out, and the notations are equally intriguing. In this case it’s interesting on a couple of levels:
1. To see the trust that the art director and editors have for Mr. Maeda, because at the thumbnails in the feature are very, very loose.
2. To see the humility of someone so enormously intelligent and talented. On a couple of the concepts he flat out states “Someone else could do this better.” I got to meet John at an AIGA Seattle conference I was involved in a couple of years back, and he actually does seem that nice.

Check out slide show available here because my photo isn’t great.