Ryan McManus

Senior Art Director :: New York office

Ryan was born in Hicksville, New York to parents Cynthia and Gary McManus. He grew up on Long Island. His father was a computer programmer, his mother an art teacher.

One of Ryan’s grandfather’s was an engineer on ENIAC. The other was vice president of Doubleday Publishing. (You see where this is going)

Ryan went to university at Arizona State, where he majored in Industrial Design. He graduated in 2000.

Ryan has lived in the following states: New York, Illinois, Arizona, Massachusetts, Texas. He has a hard time with the question “Where are you from?”

Ryan was one of the co-founders of Release1.

Ryan also founded Youth of Tomorrow, a brand design and strategy cooperative out of Austin, TX.

Ryan has designed all sorts of things that inhabit the real world. Most famously was the Scooba™, a robotic floormop from the makers of Roomba. He’s also designed stuff like cell phones, vegan bones, ECGs and holiday cards.

Ryan finds designing things for the real world and the invented, digital world not that different, really.

Ryan can be found on the Internet.

Ryan can also be found rooting for the Boston Red Sox.

The Raft

“[Jobs] built a perfect machine in Apple, his best machine – but the thing that sunk in as I read his biography is that that craft was designed for a single operator.”
Some thoughts on a post-Jobs Apple over at my Tumblr.

Firefox wants to Webify you.

Our friends at Mozilla asked us to help them ring in the launch of Firefox 6 by celebrating the unique nature of the Internet and our relationship to it. The Internet is pretty amazing–though it’s the same everywhere in the world (well, mostly – sorry China), every person experiences it in their own personal way. What might be a routine day on the Internet for me would be totally different for a woman 10 years younger from Akron, Ohio who loves surfing.
Each of us have our own very unique web, which is the concept behind Webify Me. The site guides you through a 20 question “Internet persona” quiz (sort of like you’d find in Sassy Magazine in 1992) to divine just what kind of Internetter you are. Upon completing the quiz, the site automatically assembles and lays out a collage of totems; personal objects to represent all of the unique facets of your Web. Click on any totem to find out what it represents and symbolizes.
Your collage is then saved to a gallery on the site where users browse other people’s Webified selves, and you can also save your collage to your desktop, tweet it or post it to your Facebook wall to show off.
We’ve always loved the revealing nature of what’s in your bag photos; all these seemingly innocuous objects laid out on a table, combining to reveal a lot about their owners. We wanted to make a site that would use this metaphor in a digital way, but still feel very physical.
The process of building a site like this took us on a sort of wild scavenger hunt, combing different cities for the 250+ objects that would come to represent each user’s collection. We then had to label, catalog and carefully photograph each item to create a database of totems for our machine to pull from (not to mention about a dozen possible background surfaces).
We then had to map out a quiz which would create a collage that was both unique and relevant to the user. That meant having questions with answers which were weighted towards types of behavior, not just mapped to single objects. We also added in variables like location, browser type and other fun easter eggs to ensure a truly unique experience that would provide a snapshot of each visitor’s personal Web.
We’re very excited to launch this project with Mozilla – so go find out what your Web looks like. You’re unique and beautiful, and we love you.

Ryan Adams Hates Your Freedom!

Ryan Adams hates your freedoms. And I love him for it.

LP Roulette

Like most good ideas, LP Roulette came about over lunch.
Benjamin Palmer, Pfeffer and I were talking: What is it that record stores offer that the Internet doesn’t? What aspect of discovery have we lost?
The thing we came up with, besides local community, is browsing by album art. Those of us old enough to remember used to sometimes just browse racks and racks of LPs or Longboxes and when we stumbled upon some bad-ass looking album art, our interest was piqued. Often, that’s all you had to go on – if the clerk didn’t know or have an opinion, you were on your own. No checking Pitchfork on your iPhone.

And often, when you did roll the dice, man, it was BAD. Bad bad. But sometimes, juuuust sometimes, it was AWESOME. Dinosaur Jr.’s “Green Mind”., Galdalf, Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend”.
(I STILL have a 14 year old crush on that girl)
So we set out, over lunch, to fix that. To bring back that thrill. We give you, Internet, LPRoulette.com.
LP Roulette picks an album at random from Amazon’s stacks. You get the cover, the name of the record and the band name. That’s it. No ratings, no preview, no social tools. Look good? Buy it instantly. Not your cup of tea? Try the next record in the bin.
Pure, unadulterated music discovery. Happy Hunting!

No Ad: NY

Yes! It’s true – we helped build NO AD: NY with Morgan Spurlock and the good people at Aviary. It’s a collective project to edit out all the ads in Times Square, to imagine what the mort densely advertised place on Earth would be like if the ads suddenly vanished. We’re stoked to be part of it.
But we need your help! Go on, edit a frame, pitch in. And tell your friends?

Formal Friday: California Dreamin'

Came to California today to live the Formal Friday dream!

4 Years.

As of around sometime last week, probably in the middle of the night, I have lived back in NYC and worked for this company for 4 years. I think that makes it the longest professional commitment of my entire life. In fact, my work here represents over 12% of my entire lifespan. Sobering!
It also marks my 20th year as a New Yorker, in one form or another.
4 years ago, I got on a plane and flew into a completely unknown future. I came to New York on New York’s terms – the empty-pocketed, full-o-dreams story this city loves to tell and re-tell. The “star is born” type of story. Annie, and all that.
I arrived here without a job, or a portfolio, or a place to live. I had about enough money for a flight back to Texas if I left within a week. Past that, there was no turning back. I showed up at TBG without knowing what the word “comp” meant, or what a “deck” was. I had spent the previous 14 months working as a cashier at Whole Foods while telling companies what they should do in my nascent consultancy, Youth of Tomorrow. I had almost zero plan on what I was going to do here.
But I could draw, that’s the truth. And The Barbarian Group needed some help. So I took a 2 week freelance gig here, putting pants on candy. A week into it, I got an offer.
There’s a phrase for how I came to work here: painting the target around the arrow. When I was offered the job, it wasn’t because I fit into a neat little job description that happened to be open. I wasn’t an ideal candidate. But what I had was a sort of unique combination of skill sets, experience, perspective and opinion (actually, LOTS of opinion) that Benjamin and Keith and Rick thought would be valuable for the future of this company1.
And I was, truth be told, an chance for TBG. I was a gamble – an investment that probably wouldn’t pan out. But maybe it would break even2.
4 years on, I can’t describe my time here in NYC as anything but a total success. It hasn’t always been easy, and there have been some difficult spots for sure, but I sit here now, 4 years older, knowing that getting on the plane was the right thing to do. It remains the scariest, hardest, bravest, and saddest moment. But it was the right thing.
There’s some old saying that I think about a lot: leap, and the net will appear. I’ve never been real good at that. But every time I’ve trusted enough to try, it’s worked out. Who knows what the next leap will bring?

Here’s a bonus – our office on Broadway about 6 months after I started.

1 A little Wallacian footnote here: When I started, TBG NYC was about 15 people. The office still had a shower and a bed in it from when Rick would stay here before he had an apartment here or lived here. Now, when i look around, I don’t even know everyone’s name (though I’m trying). It’s amazing how much bigger and more dynamic this company has become.

2 There’s a lesson to be learned here, young entrepreneurs and startups – but I’m going to let you figure out what it is.

iPhone 4 Bumpers - The Shocking Flaw

Like many of you, I viewed the release of the iPhone 4 as just slightly more anticipated than the second coming of Christ. I was fortunate enough to be granted a pre-order, and, wanting to protect the greatest technological achievement mankind has yet reached, I gladly shelled out $30 dollars for the official iPhone Bumper.
The day it arrived, I couldn’t be more excited. I hungrily slid my shining, hard device into its sleek black prophylactic, and the world at that moment was at peace.
Sadly, HEARTBREAKINGLY, it was not a lasting peace. Through thorough research and investigative journalism, I have discovered a fatal flaw in the very design of the iPhone 4 Bumper, one that serves to undermine not only the use of the device, but communication itself.
THE RUB
The problem is, in a word, friction. While the rubberized front and back of the iPhone 4 Bumpers may protect the device in fall situations, and keep it it from sliding on a desk, this very friction keeps the device from easily SLIDING IN AND OUT OF JEANS POCKETS. While standing, the device is difficult to retrieve – while sitting on a crowded G train, nearly impossible.
You see, the typical Apple user can be easily defined by this venn diagram:
This means that while we love our technology, we also somehow believe we are rock stars, and should wear jeans of a corresponding tightness. Through casual research I’ve discovered that on average an Apple users jeans are 33% tighter than a PC user, and a shocking 90% tighter than a Linux user. Apple fans are also hamstrung by a lack of cargo pockets on their pants that these other users enjoy. The problem is bad with a pair of Earnest Sewns, and becomes increasingly critical when I switch to, say, my Levis 501 XX Shrink to Fit 1947 Selvedge Cone Denim.
This inexcusable design flaw on Apple’s part has caused me and my friends to miss several important calls, cost us countless minutes of possible Plants vs. Zombies playing time, and forced us to listen to a Vampire Weekend song when we really wanted to skip to the new Panda Bear track.
How can this be? How can Apple, the largest and most powerful corporation in the free world, release such an untested, fatally flawed product to market? Wouldn’t they have thoroughly tested these bumpers in various jeans pockets?
And then I remembered: The Keynote. Jobs. Jobs’ Jeans! They’re BAGGY!
Well, not baggy, but you know..loose-fitting and sorta dad-like. The kind of jeans with AMPLE pockets. The horror struck me immediately: Steve was unaware that millions of us tight-jeansed Apple faithful would be nearly unable to use the iPhone 4 Bumper because HE HIMSELF WOULD NOT HAVE THIS PROBLEM (I can’t speak to the types of jeans Jony Ive wears, since they only show him from the waist up in those videos).
I emailed Steve to alert him to this coming apocalypse, which I accurately described as “probably worse than the Holocaust”. His response?
Not a big deal. Buy some looser pants.
I replied:
Steve. IT DOES NOT WORK! Geezzz I hope this this is not really you. Are we on a different MHz? I have yet to see an iPhone 4 Bumper work in Williamsburg when you put it in a pair of APCs. It is not “isolated”. I was a big fan. But I am done.
His response?
Don’t worry. Be Happy!!! :D
Typical billionaire smugness. So I contacted AppleCare to see what the official solution would be. I was told that a fix is “on the way” in the form of a software update.
This is not enough. Apple owes us more than this. In fact, they owe us everything. They were supposed to be creating the second coming of the JesusPhone, and instead delivered it wrapped up in a rubbery LIE. This product is the worst piece of shit since the last MGMT album, and if not FIXED immediately, will lead to Apple’s destruction, California sliding into the ocean, and the collapse of western society. I do not believe I can overstate how fucking pissed I am.
So I’ve started a petition: Sign below in the comments if you believe Apple should be giving us free Bumpers for our Bumpers. We need to stand as one.
Class-Action lawsuit forthcoming.