Winnipeg, Canada

The great Canadian educator, philosopher, scholar, literary critic, rhetorician, and communication theorist Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born 99 years ago today and grew up here in the ‘Peg (he attended Kelvin High School). Fitting, then, that I would receive an e-mail today from good friend (and former Circle colleague) Kevin Guenther (who knows that I’m somewhat of a McLuhan fan)… providing a link to a video clip of a classic piece of Woody Allen cinema that Marshall makes a cameo appearance in (Kevin came across it via Boing Boing… Sorry link is broken).

Good fun. Thanks, Kevin!

I’ve often wondered what consciousness might look like… until this explanatory illustration crossed my desk today, that is. Thanks to Robert Fludd (aka Robertus de Fluctibus, 1574-1637), I need wonder no more. Full explicative notations here.  :-|

Auditus, Visus, Odoratus, Gustus, Tactus… all ports open for input.

This made me laugh out loud… and I’m still grinning. A suitably tongue-in-cheek quote by my friend Noreen Morioka, chanced across on a somewhat self-aggrandizing website posting entitled “All the Quotes About Design You’ll Ever Need or Want.”

No slight to dentists intended…

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We’ve all done it, at one time or another… playing with clouds. Likely only a few have documented this fun for the enjoyment of others—and fewer yet with the determined playfulness of the late Horst J. Bernhardt,* an industrial designer who spent most of his 40-year career with Lightolier. View his image series entitled SKYplay here.

*Horst passed into another dimension in May of this year… R.I.P.

(I’ve posted about clouds and how much I like them before, here).

Loachapoka, Alabama (USA)

June Corley is a talented designer, art director, and visual artist (as well as an avid gardener and animal lover) living and working in a log cabin (built in 1842) surrounded by woodlands. During several decades she spent in the advertising field (including a spell as principal of her own agency), June collected old signage letters, vintage letterpress type, and a plethora of found objects (many resembling faces) which, for the past several years, she has been fashioning into remarkably engaging sculptural assemblages—each piece offers hidden elements of surprise, discovery, and humor.

Delightful!

All images © 2007-2010 June Corley (used here with her permission, thanks). Visit June’s lovely website to see nearly eighty additional sculptures, browse even more on her Flickr site (updated weekly), and read an in-depth background article from HOW magazine about June and her charming oeuvre here.

(Thanks to friend Martyn Schmoll for introducing me to June’s work).

Unexpected juxtapositions and hard-to-anticipate contextual settings provide for delightful moments… (original image sources unknown).

Winnipeg, Canada

First vanity license plates; now vanity barcodes. In the U.S., Vanity Barcodes has turned the ubiquitous and boring UPC codes into decorative elements. They have a number of barcode designs in stock or will customize one to your preference.

The idea of disguising this inventory management device into something else is believed to have originated in Japan with Design Barcode in 2004. The agency made the barcodes an integral part of the packaging design, tying it into the brand or cleverly building the stripes and digits into a line drawn picture. A caution: every manipulated barcode has to be thoroughly tested to make sure it gives accurate readings when passed through a retail scanner.

We’re working on a product/package design right now that I think we’ll try to incorporate one of these “more engaging” barcodes on… (thanks to Delphine Hirasuna of @issue for the image and links).