General Projects

Steve Jobs credits the design of the first Apple and all subsequent digital typography to a calligraphy course he took after dropping out of college. (Jump to 3:30)

I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great… it was beautiful in a way that science can’t capture… We designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography… If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it is likely that no personal computer would have them.

“The live show for Nosaj Thing, a collaboration with Julia Tsao.” You can see more detail of a few of the clips here.

Absolutely love this kind of work. Overwhelming minimalism. Nosaj must be a design connoisseur because his site has some wonderful aesthetic stuff on it.

Speaking of great vector/infographic/proce55ing/science-ish work, I didn’t realize until a few days ago that Feltron has a blog. I think I love everything he’s posted to date.

Beautiful song, beautiful installation video.

A fascinating take on today’s online experience and where it could potentially wind up going:

[The Web has become] an experience akin to wading through a junkyard. Ads on top, on the side, sliding down, peeling off, exploding. It’s an awful experience. It’s so awful, in fact, that I believe that people will pay good money to experience a different kind of Web.

I want the equivalent of an Admiral’s Club at the airport. I want to sip my wine and read the Wall Street Journal while the masses stumble over their bags trying to get through security.

I would assume that it is this kind of thinking which originally motivated the development of RSS products Feedly and Times.

I look forward to taking on a project where I can argue for this approach.

(Via Eric)

THE REVOLUTIONARY NO-WORK, NO-KNEAD METHOD

If there were ever a perfect analogy for our current start-up business climate, this is it.

Speaking of, glorified dictionary/social web aggregator (you know, so you can see tweets about “gilded” as you learn about what it means), Wordnik, seals 3.7M in additional funding. That’s on top of a previous 1M in funding, mind you.

This is handy: A primer on intellectual property.

I’ve been asked a number of times if I actually trademark any of my names/logos, etc, or if the “™” is just decorative. The answer is “no and no but yes”. Trademark can be established through regular and public use. Registering your trademark certainly helps, but isn’t required. For me, slapping a ™ on my work simply indicates my intent to protect my assets.

However, sometimes its just for show. (see: IOWA™, Mars Estates©, Super Analytics©, etc). I’m fascinated by the ability of a glyph to transform the viewer’s interpretation of the image. The Super Analytics funnel, for instance, goes from a pretty illustration to a savvy, mysterious company simply through inclusion of about 20×20px worth of pixels. The real potential for exploration comes from replacing the established ™ © ® with similar, nonsense glyphs. Visual association yields the same results without any of the actual, legal baggage (like here).

I will absolutely steal this copy line for something at some point. (”Most Books”, “Most Design”, “Most Socks”)

→ Swiss Miss launches a slick new To-Do web app, Teux Deux. The clever copy is reminiscent of the classic Birdhouse App introductory video. Hacker News starts a post about it and gets into a DOCTYPE discussion. Ah, nerds.

Note that it has 10,000 users after one day. I’m sure a lot of this is from people signing up and kicking the tires, but that’s still an impressive figure.

→ Mike Arrington posts a big confessional and rebuttal to the CrunchPad mess. The only thing I take away from all of this is that I never want to do business with either company, as they both come across as bush league. I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way.

It’s worth mentioning how little flack Fusion Garage is getting for their actions in relaunching the CrunchPad as JooJoo just days after they flopped on their deal. It just goes to show how little the tech press cares for Arrington.

Austin Howe, the award winning, industry-straddling copywriter behind a good handful of Sandstrom’s* stuff (have you ever noticed how much of their work is based on brilliant copy?), has a book. A great book.

On a purely superficial level, the design is wonderful. Minimal and conceptual. Each chapter tells you how long it will take to read and all the headlines are struck-through; taken with the title, this presentation reads as a challenge to any designer worth his salt. A poke at an industry-wide insecurity. I know it worked on me. You can thank Fredrik Averin for the design. I’d never heard of Averin before, which I feel pretty stupid about because he does wonderful work.

Content-wise, you could call it a kissing cousin of both Paul Arden’s motivational books and Bierut’s 79 Essays on Design. Short, motivational essays, usually based on an interesting anecdote or observation. The topics range from the practical (”More of you and Less of Them is Best For Them“) to the abstract (”OCD and Modernism“).

A short excerpt and a bit of a cliff-hanger to get you a feel for the content:

A thought has ben bugging me for a while. Actually, two thoughts have been bugging me for a while.

One, how is that so much of Paul Rand’s work still holds up and resonates today?

Two, why is it that I enjoy working with graphic designers so much more than I do advertising art directors?

I think there may be one answer to both questions.

Want more? You can read a few excerpts on Howe’s site, or go grab it on Amazon.

*I didn’t link to Sandstrom’s website because I hate with the fire of a thousand burning Pantone swatches.

You know who thinks the iPhone 3GS stinks? Steve Jobs. No one is working harder on an “iPhone 3GS killer” than Apple.

I find this comment from Gruber to be as inspirational as anything else I’ve read in recent weeks. One theme amongst the incredible designers and entrepreneurs I’ve met over the years is that they avoid talking about their past work to the point of embarrassment. If you want a good conversation out of them, ask about what they’ve got coming up next. Excitement is found in being given the opportunity to improve.

Show me someone who won’t stop talking about the brilliance of their last product and I’ll show you someone compensating for the fact that no one is doing it for them.

I guarantee a woman conceived of and designed this. “Men are simple; simple speaks to them. ‘Man Can’ is short and to the point, like their phone calls. It’s brilliant, really.”

Recently on the Book Cover Archive Blog, I posted a handful of my favorite book-related logos.

I thought it may be worth showing some old concepts I’d done for the Book Cover Archive. Partly just to show process, and partly to show how things just don’t work out sometimes.

BCA was originally titled the All Cover Archive, which I abandoned because “Book Cover Archive” is more authoritative, and because we had considered calling a project the “All Peer Review” at my old firm, Fwis. I didn’t know if they were still planning on pursuing that, so running with the “All” schtick would have been sleazy of me.

My primary beef with all the logos I’d done for BCA were that they were mediocre and mildly corny. I had initially wanted to design a contemporary version of a classic book trade label, but never found a sweet spot that worked with the website design. To this day, the Archive doesn’t have an official logo. I hope to remedy that at some point, ideally with something as amazing as this.

Pretty brilliant. Granted, it’s still early days, and there aren’t yet more than a handful of users. But give it a bit of time.

Nice.

Speed:

Topography:

I refuse to believe that Michael Freimuth is my age.

Okay Mountain ..Austin based, artist run gallery
Sacred Mountain ..The work of San Francisco Based Illustrator Scott Barry
Rad Mountain ..(Kickass) Brooklyn talent pool

It spans three years!

The family plot, southeast of Lincoln. My grandparents plowed this land, dug this pond, planted these trees. As of this past month, this side of the family has passed on. I will bring my own kids here to continue the tradition. Legacies of catfish and clay pigeons and long summer shadows.

The Foreign Affairs cover & masthead have always been a favorite.

The utilitarian blandness coupled with the expansive name, and the table of contents-as-design-element yields a design akin to something an ambitious intern would come up with while summering at the Pentagon. Its presence on a magazine rack can best be interpreted as a subtle dare, a stolid prod at your attention span.

Most of its draw comes from the coupling of the poker-faced name (Foreign Affairs) with its suggestive, regal emblem. Like a flourished medal on an otherwise spotless military uniform, the combination is a proclamation of confidence and history.

The design of the cover was decided by its first editor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, (how’s that for a name?), while the man and horse were illustrated by his two sisters. Unsure what their training was, but apparently they were wry enough to include the latin characters for VBIQVE, which translates as “Everywhere“. VBIQVE = UBIQUE = Ubiquitous.

Fantastic.

I haven’t watched West Side Story since middle school, when it was about as sissy-la-la as things come. Watching this prologue now, I’m certain more planning and art direction went into these 8.5 minutes then the entirety of the latest GI Joe movie (which I wish I hadn’t watched the other night.) You could base a short thesis project on their clothing alone.

Skip to 7:28 for the worst graffiti ever put to film.
Skip to 5:21 for a close-up of king Xerxes.