In Print

Early writings and appearances on dead trees.

“New York Web site designer Irwin Chen, 23, wants to understand the formal structures of language and music so that he can fashion new media that, like the simplest books and songs, ‘create a universe.’”

—Karrie Jacobs, “Electronic Youth”
I.D. Magazine, May/June 1996

“Feed offers the best argument yet for on-line publishing by serving up a constantly updated mix of irreverent news and pointed commentary, accompanied by plenty of hypertext links to the rest of the Web.”

— John Markoff and Tim Race, “Wizards, Wonders and Wonks”
The New York Times Magazine, September 28, 1997

The extent to which human social interaction can be reduced to a set of equations is just one revelation of The Sims...And soon, with the possibility of creating “voodoo” families with customized skins and downloadable custom-built furniture, real life for some may begin to look a lot like The Sims.
— Irwin Chen, Review of The Sims
I.D. Magazine, March/April 2000

How much of our imaginative power are we giving away when we rely on off-the-shelf programs to design? Are these applications freeing designers from the burden of coding and recoding a set of common tools? Taken to its logical extreme, the question then becomes: Should designers be programmers? Should programmers be designers?
— Irwin Chen, “The Code Creators”
eDesign, June 2002

We expect authors to write the words we will form into pages, and we expect those words to be chosen and arranged to create a specific effect. The author is saying something (or trying to); the typographer enhances or intensifies that effort (or doesn’t). But words themselves have a way of revealing or belying the author’s intention. Suppose the process was run in reverse? Could the unraveling of printed pages uncover hidden desires?

— Irwin Chen, “Wired Dictionary: Lexiconography”
Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users, 2013