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Want to see the state of the art in web design using web fonts and Typekit? Check out Lost World’s Fairs. It’s all good, but Frank Chimero really knocked it out of the park with the 1962 Atlantis World’s Fair. With HTML5 and web fonts, experimentation with web design seems open and fun again; reminds me of the 90s a bit.
Vote for your favorite magazine cover from the past year. Lots of nice work in there.
Designing Obama, a book chronicling how the visual branding of the Obama campaign came about, is available in several formats, most notably in a completely free online version. Written by the campaign’s design director, the making of the book was funded through the first big Kickstarter campaign.
A very nice US currency redesign by Dowling Duncan.
When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.
The note imagery relates to the value of each note:
$1 - The first African American president
$5 - The five biggest native American tribes
$10 - The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution
$20 - 20th Century America
$50 - The 50 States of America
$100 - The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Needs more guilloche but other than that: fire up the presses.
Nick Gleis shoots the interiors of corporate jets owned by African dictators and other heads of state. I couldn’t decide which jet interior was the gaudiest, but this one is definitely a contender because of the classy naked ladies on the wall of the bedroom.
Who knew that African dictators were so nostalgic for the set design of Star Trek: The Next Generation?
A look at how little the essential design of National Geographic magazine has changed since its introduction in 1888.
National Geographic’s front cover is a great example of how well simple branding can be tied to a product or message. In this case, the slightly warm yellow has become a symbol of wonderful photography, intriguing articles and serves as a doorway into places worlds away.
I have fond memories of Fleer’s otherwise forgettable 1991 set of baseball cards because of the yellow border…probably NatGeo spill-over.
…From the past. It doesn’t take much to look at this book and imagine the pitch meeting at how Sterling Cooper Draper Price would pitch this.
In 1964 United States Steel called upon the nation’s electric utility companies to reconsider the current look of our power stations and transmission towers to be both functional and beautiful. Two years later, Henry Dreyfuss and Associates were commissioned to investigate possible design alternatives, and I believe they were documented in a book entitled “Power Styling” which was produced by United States Steel in the mid-to-late 1960s.
(Thanks, Wendy!)
Kevin Kelly has a short Wired interview with Fred Brooks, author of the essential Mythical Man-Month and the new The Design of Design.
The next film in Gary Hustwit’s design trilogy (after Helvetica and Objectified) is Urbanized, an investigation of urban design.
Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? Unlike many other fields of design, cities aren’t created by any one specialist or expert. There are many contributors to urban change, including ordinary citizens who can have a great impact improving the cities in which they live. By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, Urbanized will frame a global discussion on the future of cities.
Meant to post about this when it was announced: the Brand New Conference, Nov 5 in NYC.
The Brand New Conference is a one-day event organized by UnderConsideration, focusing on the practice of corporate and brand identity — a direct extension of the popular blog, Brand New. The conference consists of eight sessions offering a broad range of points of view with speakers from around the world practicing in different environments, from global consultancies, to in-house groups, to small firms.
Speakers include boldface names Michael Bierut, Paula Scher, and Erik Spiekermann. Surprisingly, tickets are still available.
The legendary Braun designer talks about his craft.
A design should not dominate people.
And hey, I didn’t know that a book had been published on Rams’ work. I bet Jony Ive has at least three copies. (via monoscope)
I love these minimalist Mad Men posters by Christina Perry.
Prints are available. (via footnotes of mad men)
Artist and designer Tobias Wong killed himself last month. Or did he? Sleep can be a dangerous thing.
A really nice collection of prints** of collective nouns. This is a hush of librarians:
I also like the seemingly empty room of ninjas, but more for the term than the illustration. Several other great ones here, like:
a wunch of bankers
a deutschbag of nazis
a fixie of hipsters (coined here, actually)
a knot of string theorists
an array of geeks
**Wait, what’s the collective noun for prints? A charming of prints?
[I would] grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70’s, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.
Fantastic. Much more here. (via df)
A lovely visual look at redesigning the map for the Moscow Metro. (thx, matt)
Peter Merholz says there should be a toddler mode for the iPad (and probably iPhone as well).
You know how iPhone and iPad have “airplane mode”, which turns off all connectivity? Right under that, I want “Toddler Mode”. When switched on, you’ll get a dialog letting you know you are entering Toddler Mode, and an explanation of how to get out. Unlike Airplane Mode, you can’t get out of Toddler Mode through settings, because there’s no way Toddler Mode should allow access to the settings panel. I haven’t figured out the best way out of Toddler Mode, but I’m thinking a quick triple-click on the home button, followed by a swipe, should work.
The problem with toddler mode is that the capabilities of kids change very quickly at that age. For instance, the home button is only a problem for a short time. My almost-3-yo son Ollie pretty quickly figured out that if he wanted to keep doing what he was doing, he had to lay off the home button. Now he knows exactly what it does: gets him back to the screen where he can pick a new activity. He also has no problem finding his apps…he knows exactly which of those icons mean fun and which do not.
(BTW, if you’re an interface/interaction designer and you haven’t watched a preschooler using a touchscreen device, you really should. It’s fascinating how quickly they learn some things and just can’t get the hang of other things. It’s a really eye-opening experience.)
If you’ve ever wanted to live in a rolling house that doesn’t take up much space and even has space on the outside for advertising, get thee to the U of Karlsruhe (non-German link here).
This cyclindrical design is a modular protype that provides flexible space within a minimum housing unit. Three different sections are dedicated to different functional needs: there’s a bed and table in section, an exercise cylinder, and a kitchen with a sink.
Yulia Brodskaya makes elaborate typographic creations entirely out of paper. She calls them PAPERgraphics.
This is like Si Scott in 3-D.
IANAHRSYMMV**, but here are some well-known English language logos redesigned and translated into Hebrew language logos. Nice student work from a class taught by Oded Ezer.
** I am a not a Hebrew reader so your mileage may vary.
Posters of classified ads from local newspapers, gussied up by a group of designers chosen by the Type Directors Club.
That’s from a lovely poster that James Mattison made for his daughter.
The theme and title of the piece was ‘Learn your A-B-Sea’ and took the format of an alphabet chart illustrated with fish and sea creatures that could be found in the local stretch of water, the Arabian Gulf.
(via @h_fj)
Phil Gyford’s spot-on critique of the number and quality of infographics currently choking the web. As Phil notes, far too many infographics decorate and don’t communicate.
The Selby has some shots of Cindy Gallop’s apartment, which has to be one of most personality-drenched living spaces I’ve seen since Martha Stewart’s house. (Not that I’ve seen Martha Stewart’s house. But I can imagine.) Here is, for example, Gallop’s Gucci chainsaw:
There is also a video tour on Vimeo and a 2006 New York magazine article about how Gallop turned a former YMCA locker room into her “ultimate bachelorette pad”.
She had a specific vision for her new home. “I was looking for something dramatic,” she says. So she told her designer, Stefan Boublil of the Apartment, a creative agency in Soho, “When night falls, I want to feel like I’m in a bar in Shanghai.”
Dribbble (that’s 3 ‘b’s…triple letters are the new omit the vowels) is a show and tell site for designers to display their works-in-progress. The color tags are a fine idea; ex: red. Launched, I believe, just today after a lengthy closed beta.
Based on their great Mag+ concept unveiled late last year, Bonnier and BERG have developed a really nice looking iPad version of Popular Science. No page-turning business…you swipe left/right to page through stories and then scroll to read through single stories.
What amazes me is that you don’t feel like you’re using a website, or even that you’re using an e-reader on a new tablet device — which, technically, is what it is. It feels like you’re reading a magazine.
It’s nice to see the original concept come to life so quickly and completely. Get it in the App Store.
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