Toronto, Canada
Designer/cyclist Simon Farla (about whose FontBike project I posted back in April here) has recently taken over design duties for Mr. Something Something—he’s given me a heads-up re: the band’s innovative new pedal powered, off-the-grid show format—all the power comes from bicycles! The format was launched in conjunction with International Car-Free Day 2008 (a week ago) in Toronto.
London, England
Kudos to Catharine Brandy (nee Hildebrand; originally from the rural hamlet of Plum Coulee Manitoba; and a senior design colleague at Circle for over a decade) on the rocking success of the UK’s Beatles stamps—not only have these become the country’s best-selling (non-royalty) postage stamps, they have also won a Gold Cube at this year’s New York Art Directors Club (87th Annual Awards), and have been selected as ‘best of category’ in I.D. magazine’s 54th annual design review. Cath has been a design director with Britain’s Royal Mail for the past half-dozen years—for this issue she worked with the talented designer Michael Johnson of London’s johnson banks.
The six stamps (marking the 50th anniversary of Lennon and McCartney’s first meeting in 1957) portray the ‘Fab Four’ in casual stacks of LPs, each topped with an essential album from the band’s brief history.
Poster image by Josh MacPhee of justseeds.org
Following is an alphabetical list of the countries bombed by the United States since the end of the Second World War (the citizens of these countries represent roughly one-third of the people on earth)…
Afghanistan 1998, 2001-present
Bosnia 1994, 1995
Cambodia 1969-70
China 1945-46, 1950-53
Congo 1964
Cuba 1959-1961
El Salvador 1980s
Grenada 1983
Guatemala 1954, 1960, 1967-69
Indonesia 1958
Iran 1987
Iraq 1991-present
Korea 1950-53
Kuwait 1991
Laos 1964-73
Lebanon 1983, 1984
Libya 1986 (and again in 2011)
Nicaragua 1980s
Pakistan 2003, 2006-08
Panama 1989
Peru 1965
Somalia 1993, 2008
Sudan 1998
Vietnam 1961-73
Yemen 2002
Yugoslavia 1999
Louisville, Kentucky
From the “a picture is worth a thousand words” file… flashback to a 1937 Margaret Bourke-White photo from the Great Depression. No further comment necessary…
Winnipeg, Canada
Here’s a cool ‘tool’ that my friend and colleague Adrian discovered recently…
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. (from the Wordle website)
You can either enter text yourself or submit a blog/RSS feed for the Java applet to draw from. Visit http://wordle.net/ to learn more or to make your own “word cloud.”
Image shown: the “word cloud” image above was created using the Wordle applet and text from Circle’s website. You can view the image larger here on Adrian’s flickr site.
Winnipeg, Canada
If you’ve ever sat through one of my lectures (or read my book), you know that I frequently quote Marshall McLuhan (an ex-Winnipeger). Enjoy these quick quips of his…
+ + + + +
Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.
Money is the poor man’s credit card.
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.
We march backwards into the future.
Invention is the mother of necessities.
You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?
Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.
The trouble with a cheap, specialized education
is that you never stop paying for it.
People don’t actually read newspapers.
They step into them every morning like a hot bath.
Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.
The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
News, far more than art, is artifact.
When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.
Tomorrow is our permanent address.
All advertising advertises advertising.
The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.
Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.
The missing link created far more interest
than all the chains and explanations of being.
When a thing is current, it creates currency.
Food for the mind is like food for the body:
the inputs are never the same as the outputs.
The future of the book is the blurb.
The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.
I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.
This information is top security.
When you have read it, destroy yourself.
Pretty much says it, methinks… (image source unknown).
Winnipeg, Canada
Doing online image research has become so easy… it almost seems wrong. A quick search for “vintage matchbooks” using Compfight (my favorite flickr™ search tool of late) brought up these beauties (among hundreds more, such as here, here, here and here). I love old paper ephemera (such as matchbooks)—methinks the considerable limitations of scale, art creation, and printing techniques in early times simply served to raise the design bar.
Universal truths about war…
“There is no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.”
— Abraham Lincoln
“Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.”
— The Bible, Matthew 26:52
“I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask: “Mother, what was war?”
— Eve Merriam
“Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?”
— Blaise Pascal
“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”
— Jeannette Rankin
“Those who prefer victory to peace will have neither.”
— Anonymous
