Best wishes to friends far and near on the eve of the old year… and the dawn of the Year of the Rabbit. Kung Hei Fat Choi! Sun Leen Fai Lok!

(lovely masking-tape graffiti from down-under… found here)

Watching live-streaming news on Al Jazeera with a hopeful heart…

Basel, Switzerland

It’s funny how one becomes so attached to certain places… I’ve found myself pining for Basel again of late (I spent most of my school-aged years in and around this fine old city on the banks of the Rhine).

Illustrated poster by Marcus Schneider, Graphis Annual 61/62.

Vilnius, Lithuania

I’ve just accepted an invitation to speak at the “spring” icograda design week (conference) in Vilnius in May. I’ve never been to Lithuania before—looking forward to this, and to crossing paths with many old (and new) Icograda friends again…

Paris, France

“Death is Not Justice” exhibitions organised by poster for tomorrow opened in some 50 locations around the world on 10/10/10… exhibiting 100 of the 2094 poster submissions received from 81 different countries. While last year’s initiative was coalescing opposition against the Death Penalty, this year’s focus for poster for tomorrow is “The Right to Education.” View past poster galleries and learn about the latest call for entries here.

Images: It must be stopped by Natalia Lazarashvili, Georgia; We need the time to reflect, Tomoko Miyagawa, Japan; a spread from the available catalogue.

(meme | rhymes with cream)

Interesting news out yesterday that Toronto entrepreneur Jamie Salter has bought the rights to the image of 1950s Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. Salter’s New York-based intellectual property corporation, Authentic Brands Group, is thought to have paid in the area of $50 million for Monroe’s name and likeness. “Marilyn Monroe is recognized around the world as the embodiment of beauty and glamour,” says Salter, CEO of Authentic Brands. “Quite simply, her name and her image have timeless appeal. We feel fortunate to be responsible for the future.”

The question in my mind… in this day and age, can you really own a meme?

Images: some quick grid|meme studies I just did… decidedly not of the famed Marilyn, yet triggering recall to the glamorous legacy of the unhappy starlet who died of an overdose in her Los Angeles home in 1962, age 36.

Barcelona, Spain

I shot this pic of an elegant and clever sign hack (No Stopping becomes No Bombing) back in 2003, as the U.S. was raining down bombs on Iraq.

(on products… almost everywhere)

We each encounter them almost continually—so much so that I would suggest we have become numbed by them. These ugly, intrusive little zebra-contrast patches have been a part of buying and selling since the first bar-coded item, a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, was scanned in 1974… we’ve been hearing the ubiquitous bleep bleep ever since.

Bar codes were originally invented in 1952 by Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland in Philadelphia, USA, but it wasn’t until 1973 that Woodland created an entire bar-code system, the Universal Product Code (UPC), to help stores track inventory and make check-outs faster. The UPC barcode was the first bar code symbology widely adopted by the grocery industry, followed by the EAN code format (similar to UPC, used internationally) in 1976.

The black bars represent a sequence of numbers. The five digits on the left represent the product’s manufacturer, with the five digits on the right representing the specific product. Bar codes are configured the way they are to permit a laser scanner to read the varying widths of lines to determine the digits listed underneath. The information is transmitted to a store computer which matches the numbers to a product price—in the bleep of a second.

Images above: at top, the UPC-A, the universal product code seen on almost all retail products in the USA and Canada; below, a selection of creative bar code iterations from Japan… go figure.

(as seen in Good)

In the past ten years, the human population of the earth has grown by a billion—to a current total of 7 billion (it was a mere 2.7 billion when I was born). For the first time in the history of our planet, more of us now live in cities than outside of urban areas. Cellphone subscriptions have multiplied almost ten-fold, while internet users worldwide have multiplied more than five times during the same period (now 1.96 billion have online access).

In the meantime, the worldwide temperature has risen, 60% more fauna species are considered endangered… and 15-times as many people were killed by natural disasters in 2010 than a decade ago. Don’t say you didn’t know…

Above: a handsome chart (if somewhat skewed to U.S. statistics) by Stephanie Fox, here (or click on the image above for an enlarged view).