Michael Beirut at DesignObserver:

“…at another presentation, I glimpsed what perhaps will be a starting point for a new certainty, perhaps the ultimate one. Michael Braungart, author with William McDonough of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, talked about how graphic designers are contributing to the destruction of the environment. Braungart is not a designer. He’s a chemist. At one point in his presentation, he displayed a chart that described the precise amount of toxic elements in a single ink color. You felt the audience, 2000-plus strong, draw a collective breath. Here, at last, was true certainty: the promise that every piece of graphic design, each an amalgam of dozens of arbitrary, intuitive, ‘gee, this looks right to me’ decisions, could be put into a centrifuge, broken down into its constituent parts, and analyzed for the harm it could do to our environment.”

Best not get started on the ecological impact of the stuff that makes up a typical designer’s computer then…

A typeface designed to combat dyslexia [thanks Jeremy!]

James Spahr:

“One of the first things I was told when I took a film class was that in order to show motion, you needed to have something that did not move; ie. A moving car is not moving until is passes a static telephone pole. In this context the telephone pole is playing the role of a consistent design element. From a purely visual standpoint, consistency is the design element that lets other parts of your design stand out.”

Lovely.

» Designweenie: Hobgoblin?

says in “Make it Bigger” [found via Christina]

“What most scares people in a corporation is a design that looks too far afield from other things like it in the marketplace (which is ironic, because the point of design in the marketplace is to identify and differentiate)”

Luckily – we’re not meant to call it design anymore, apparently. Or maybe we are.

I can’t keep up.

Mike Lee make us all look like the ugly puny humans we are, daily. Go and visit him at once.

Soulpacific is gorgeous.

Recently I was lucky enough to get the chance from Andrew Losowsky to design a print piece for m-Real’s Visual Perception magazine. These are design and theory showcase mags produced by the paper manufacturer, each centred around a theme. This issue was themed around ‘Advertising’, and my brief was to produce an ad for a non-existant product that would make my life easier.

I resurrected some nonsense from the blog and with a quick photoshoot in our office, came up with this.

You can order the lovely glossy magazine for FREE here. It has interviews and articles by and of the great and good like the founder of ad-agency mavericks, Mother, the editor of UK Vogue, interviews with the founders of AdBusters etc.

BBC reporter Jane Hughes is retracing the steps of the 1953 British Everest expedition on it’s 50th anniversary, and posting daily to the BBC News Online as they go.

This caught my eye:

“In the steep main street, there’s a 24-hour cyber café, and though the region’s too remote for newspapers, an enterprising shopkeeper has pinned up pages of news from the BBC News Online website to keep people up to date.”

Cool.

This is amazing [requires Flash] Make sure you don’t skip anything, and stick around for the sneeze.

[thanks Ben!]

James Spahr’s beautiiful, spline-tastic visualisation of apache webserver traffic as feedback mechanism for information architects