Penelope Green of The New York Times stopped by the wake for I.D., and reports with a story titled “Recalling I.D., a Beacon in Design.” I’ve got a quote:

As the evening wound down, Jesse Ashlock, the magazine’s last editor, a job he held for seven months, remarked that this was his fifth layoff in a decade. (Mr. Ashlock is all of 32 years old.) For the next decade, he said: “My goal is to not break things, but make them. You don’t want to be called the Undertaker unless you’re in the World Wrestling Federation.”

Read the whole thing here.

Here is an interview I did with a site called The Malcolm not long before the fall of I.D. Discussed: I.D., print media, heroes, the apprentice system, Neil Young, and much more. Read it here.

Everywhere I look, someone’s making a list. I guess it must be the end of the decade or something. When I was a teenager I loved opining on what my desert-island discs would be, and when I got older, I relished end-of-year list-making, mostly of albums and sometimes of films. Then I got older still, and making lists started to seem lazy and facile, and also, I saw High Fidelity.

But everyone else is doing it, and now I want to get in on the fun. So I started thinking: What music made in the last decade did I listen to the most during the last decade? What was I most obsessed with, and what did I come back to the most often? It’s a slightly random list because it’s totally uncritical; it’s just a record of what I seem to recall spending the most time with, for whatever reason. (Obviously the list excludes all the amazing non-’00s music I wore out in the ‘00s, so no New Order, Townes Van Zandt, Talking Heads, Karen Dalton, Loudon Wainwright, King Tubby, Beach Boys, Neutral Milk Hotel, Cat Power’s Moon Pix etc.) In the spirit of list-making, I did a top 20. My number 1 is a bit of a cheat, because it’s a posthumous release of music made in the late ‘80s, but man, did I spend a lot of time with it. The rest is a random jumble.

My I.D. Farewell Note:

Dear Friends,

If you’re receiving this note, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard the news last week that I.D. magazine will cease publication after 55 years. As announced last week, the Annual Design Review will continue in online form—and entries for this year’s competition are still being accepted—but the January/February issue will be the magazine’s last. To all those I’ve worked with during my four-year association with the magazine, and especially over my last eight months as editor, it’s been an honor and a privilege.

It wasn’t until taking the top job last spring that I came to realize how problematic some found I.D.’s brand identity, and to learn that battles had been waged over its mission for years. Was it a consumer magazine or a trade, and what did those damn letters really stand for? Of course, they stood for “international design,” but some still yearned for the days, decades ago, when they meant “industrial design”; others mistook I.D. for Interior Design, and the rise of interactive design added yet another I.D. to the mix.

It’s been said that those varying interpretations kept the magazine from being sustainable in a fractured marketplace, and maybe there’s some truth to that. To me, however, the multiple meanings were complementary, not competitive, and they attested to the way the brand had grown along with the design world over the years. They spoke, to use another i word, to the growing interdisciplinarity of the design disciplines, and the increasingly integral role of design in our lives and collective consciousness.

Lately, the i word I’d been thinking about most with regard to I.D. was “individual.” Whatever has changed over the years, I.D. has always been a one-of-a-kind platform for exploring the personalities and processes of individual designers, the needs and desires of the individual human beings designers serve, and the ways in which the common language and logic of design can bring disparate individuals together. In an era of “design thinking” and “human-centered design,” the loss of such a platform leaves a real void. As a contributor remarked to me over the weekend, there are certain stories that just aren’t going to be told anymore. I.D. wasn’t a redundant title in a crowded vertical market, it was truly unique, and though we can blog and tumbl and tweet ourselves silly, I think we all know what’s being lost.

Anyway, as for this individual, I can report only that I expect to continue working in this vein, and leave it to the immortal Buckminster Fuller to do the rest of my talking for me: “How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”

I’d like to thank William Bostwick, Jeff Docherty, Dragos Lemnei, Suzanne Mitchell, Maayan Pearl, and all of I.D.’s sensational contributors for going on this ride with me. I want also to salute the great Ralph Caplan and the many brilliant talents who shaped this storied publication—especially Julie Lasky and Chee Pearlman, who each did so much to build the stature of the magazine and have both been so immensely kind to me over these past eight months. For a moment I stood on the shoulders of giants, and the view was amazing.

All my best,
Jesse Ashlock

It’s fair to say that I’m a member of the press. But every time I’ve been a subject of the press, it’s been an uncomfortable and weirdly dissociative experience. I think this is largely because I’ve never felt like any press I’ve done has matched my image of myself, or at least the image I’d like to project. In part, this is the result of my habit of working for ill-fated companies. I once did a very weird TV segment at 30 Rock for an NBC affiliate about Epitonic.com, which by then was a shell of a website that I was maintaining in my spare time. I also did a similarly weird one about RES Media Group, even though it had effectively ceased to exist a few months earlier, because we were still hoping to pull off an eleventh-hour rescue. Soon after, I did another one about a new venture that had the plug pulled on it only six weeks later. My lifestyle moments have been even worse. I was in a New York magazine “real people” fashion spread accompanied by a pathetic little bio that was mostly about the air mattress I was using for a bed (I’d recently broken up with my live-in girlfriend); more recently, I took part in a New York Times bike story in which I just sounded like an asshole.

I think that, for me, the decision to consent to an interview request is usually motivated by a mixture of narcissism, a genuine desire to be helpful, and an impulse to build brands—both my own and those of companies I’ve worked for. I agreed to be interviewed for this MSNBC.com story that was everywhere early last week primarily because of that desire to be helpful. At first I hesitated, but I thought the article’s topic—about how concerns about crazy fees are leading patients to refuse emergency-room treatment—was important, and I wanted to be of service. When it came out, however—with me as the lede and the kicker—I immediately had second thoughts about whether this was really a topic I should have associated myself with. Within hours, a vanity search of my name was mostly turning up versions of the article and commentary on it. Looking at myself through the eyes of Google, I wasn’t the Jesse Ashlock I think I am, I was some dude who got hit by a car while riding his bike and turned down medical service because he was worried it would be too expensive. On MSNBC.com, my story was sandwiched between “Face Transplant Patient: ‘I’m Not a Monster’” and “Trump to Miss California: ‘You’re Not Fired.’” As I browsed through the hundreds of Newsvine comments on the story—some of which described me as a moron or questioned my lifestyle choices, though the vast majority were sympathetic—I wondered what business I had being the face, even for a brief moment, of this extremely charged subject of access to affordable health care. For one thing, it’s something I am decidedly not an expert on, and I hate being associated with anything I don’t feel well-versed in, regardless of the circumstances. And for another, when I started reading other people’s completely insane stories about situations and expenses that were so much more extreme than mine, my own experience began to feel trivial by comparison. Not that any of this stopped me from agreeing to do an “update” for an AM radio talk show the day after the story came out. And of course I did know that all of this would soon pass—as indeed, for the most part, it already has.

But the episode got me started thinking about this much-discussed notion that we’ve gotten overly comfortable with putting our personal information out into the online universe, which of course Google is plotting to use to take over the world. I know that the idea of broadcasting myself via various social networks, Flickr, Twitter, this website, etc, has never given me much pause because of a sense, however illusory, that I control that information. Even if it is in fact ultimately going to help some giant corporation turn me into a pawn or worse, it’s my choice. I’m constructing my own media, shaping the image I want to project to the world. I’m doing it, it’s not happening to me. By contrast, the sensation of serving as a tool to someone else’s ends, however righteous, makes me feel out of control. I’m sure there are a lot of different lessons you can draw from this, but for me, the most important is this one: Always treat your sources with as much sensitivity and respect as you possibly can. They’re putting themselves on the line for you.

Having said that, I should add that I have no complaints about the way I was treated by the MSNBC.com reporter. If anything, I’m grateful to be reminded of how it feels to be on the other side of the story.