January 2009
19 posts
“A good logo doesn’t necessarily mean everything — or anything — the day it’s...”
– Michael Bierut, who is a partner at the masterful design group Pentagram. Some of Bierut’s work was hanging near the original comps for the Obama campaign logo (which fits this philosophy perfectly) at an opening I went to tonight.
“We innately believe…that as we walk down a street, we are continuously...”
– Carl Zimmer for Discover Magazine in a pro-technology-invading-our-lives argument that’s richly accessorized with fantastic supporting links.
“Mr. Jobs…appears capable of peering around corners into the future of...”
– Indeed, he does/did. Today’s news is sobering.
“The telephone was justly regarded as an ingenious invention when it was first...”
– Wisdom from an 1877 article in The New York Times. (via a smart O’Reilly Radar piece that cleverly unhinges some of the fearful hype around the death of print)
The Book Cover Archive →
Yesterday I saw one of my favorite book covers (the graphic black/white paperback version of The Stranger by Camus) and was reminded of how clever these flat, fixed little works of art are. They so slyly straddle the line between commercial and not. Then, today, along came Kottke’s link to The Book Cover Archive, which is a lively compilation of all kinds of front-of-tome deliciousness. So,...
“Advertising is the cost of being boring.”
– As in if your product doesn’t sell itself, you’re relegated to whoring it out through ads. Yes and no, but a good brain-tickler. Quote from Andy Sernovitz (via Ty White’s thoughts on how core users/fans create reverberating marketing impact).
“To give you an idea of what it’s like to wait in line at one of these things,...”
– Jason Chen liveblogging the scene before the MacWorld keynote for Gizmodo.
Profiting from Free
Amazon’s bestselling MP3 album of 2008 was Nine Inch Nail’s Ghosts I-IV, which was priced at either
$5.00 through Amazon’s MP3 and other music marketplaces or
$0.00 through legal, backchannel MP3 download sites with an attached Creative Commons license.
You can put this scenario through a lot of different frameworks and rationalizations to try to understand it, but the bottom...
“Women continue to be outnumbered by males in the technology industry. Do not see...”
– Me! From an interview I did for Vault.com about working in technology. The whole shebang is here: “An Interview with Erin Pettigrew…” I find I really enjoy answering questions like these.
Fonts for Contemporary Use →
Anil Dash wonders when we’ll start seeing typography that is designed to accommodate emoticons and other web shorthand. The first step toward this is chat clients replacing smiley type with graphical emoticons so they’d look better inline (which happened awhile ago). But we’ve yet to really see design shifts around letters in the fonts themselves.
“I have been experiencing pangs of analog nostalgia recently…
A pdf,...”
– via Jinxyte