I ♥ the EFF
I thought I’d take a moment and give a shoutout to all my buddies at the EFF and remind everyone about all the good work they do protecting freedom of speech online! ›› Bloggers’ Rights | Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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What’s NASA Been Puffin’?
Probably the worst part about working is the daily commute each way, stuck in traffic. NASA aerospace engineer, Mark Moore, dreams of the day we all get around like the Jetsons, flying around in our own personal space cars, instead.
He’s come up with the Puffin, a vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) personal aircraft, as part of his doctoral thesis. It’s purely designed for single occupancy- only 12′ long with a 14.5′ wingspan, and it’s completely electrically powered. Even more bizarrely, it’s part plane, part helicopter, and part “WTF is that?!?!?”
Marlboro redefines the limits
With the current ban on any form of tobacco advertising on Formula One cars or racing paraphernalia, Phillip Morris was forced to remove all logos relating to Marlboro cigarettes. But, true to tobacco company form, they found a way around the prohibition through a subliminal use of their ubiquitous logo:
They’ve reduced it to a bar code, which reads exactly the same way to a viewer as it would as the car speeds by at hundreds of miles per hour. Clever, dastardly, and probably entirely legal. ›› Graphicology Blog.
Glaad to see great pro-bono work
There’s a huge difference between spec work and pro-bono work. I am vehemently opposed to the former, and a big fan of the latter, and would do more of it if I had the time and money to spare. Lippincott just re-branded the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in a way that really shows off the value of a good pro-bono campaign: it brings a welcome new level of maturity to GLAAD, and shows that Lippincott pays every bit as much of attention to the details for a pro-bono client that they would for a multi-million dollar corporation. GLAAD’s new identity is quite well executed- it is well-focused, eye-catching, and on-message, far more so than their previous version. Futura may be from the past, but I think it works very nicely here as a solidifying part of their logo. ›› Brand New
Neville Brody to head Art & Design at Royal College of Art
Yet another sign that my generation is now greying and becoming the establishment. Here’s the guy who designed renegade typefaces like Blur and album covers for Throbbing Gristle taking the reins at one of the most prestigious art schools in the UK, much less the world. ›› mediabistro.com: UnBeige.
Inspiration comes from the strangest places
So this guy, Alex George, loved his old Volvo station wagon so much, he decided to design a typeface based on it. And it doesn’t suck. I’m as surprised as you are. ›› Autoblog.
Mount Royal redesign
Sometimes a logo redesign signifies a change in identity from the bush leagues to the majors. Such is the case with Calgary’s Mount Royal’s transformation from college to university. Their new logo is classy, understated, and a lot less beholden to a period in time than their previous identity. An excellent job. ›› Brand New – To Maple or Not to Maple
@ at MoMA
In January 1971, @ was an underused jargon symbol lingering on the keyboard and marred by a very limited register. By October, (Ray) Tomlinson had rediscovered and appropriated it, imbuing it with new meaning and elevating it to defining symbol of the computer age. He chose the @ for his first e-mail because of its strong locative sense—an individual, identified by a username, is @ this institution/computer/server, and also because…it was already there, on the keyboard, and nobody ever used it.
Now, because the @ symbol has become part of so many different cultures, The Museum of Modern Art has ‘acquired’ the @ symbol and made it part of its collection. ›› @ at MoMA.
The IMPOSSIBLE Project Pays Off
The Impossible Project to commercially produce and release new Polaroid film has now started selling film to customers! Hurray! Now my cameras can stop collecting dust and get some use again! Link
