or … Rubitone!

I’d like to see an 8bit color cube with the base system colors (labeled in HEX!). 216 unique colors that you need to organize by chroma. That would be a puzzle.

Three days until the Japanese department store Muji opens in SoHo. We went to the Muji in Hong Kong and I was blown away by the products and food. There was a set of linen bedding I was going crazy for— but of course the store did not have our crazy American bed sizes. I can’t wait to get into the SoHo store. More Muji.

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. I'm not sure Tufte would have presented it like this.

See also my new favorite blog: indexed

Wired magazine’s art directors have just discovered kerning. Next breakthrough they’re working on is ligatures, which will be dubbed “The Law of Letter-Mashups.”

Some of the Hoefler & Frere-Jones bashing in the comments isn’t fair. I’ve been madly in love with H&FJ’s Whitney since it’s release. My first use of it was on a revamping of the StudioOne logo in 2004. The before and after is below. It goes to show that my portfolio pages on this site haven’t been updated in over 5 years… Yikes. The updated logo isn’t “all that and a bag of chips”— but it’s a heck of a lot better than the original (designer unknown). Since this redo I think I’ve used Whitney far more than I should have.

Murph's shu uemura store design wins best of show and is featured on the nasfm site for the stellar design.

There's nothing I'm looking forward to more than buying him a pint of Guinness this weekend.

I’m in the midst of a corporate identity job— and stumbled upon Kevin Mitnick’s business card while doing research. It’s genius and perfectly encapsulates his life. Must cost a boat-load to print.

Update: Originally Melvin’s card?

The Book
The Movie
The Wall Paper

New York advertising students take on a Sixth Borough campaign.

The sad thing is that they’re better than GoPhilla’s BENergy or the crazy “Philly’s more fun when you sleep over” campaigns. Show tunes and musicals? Broadway is in New York.

Dave’s “killer” promo:

Since the 7th grade he’s been scaring me silly. He’s also the genius behind the Wes Anderson AMEX spots. I miss our Budweiser fueled tag-team art directing cage matches.

As part of its never-ending philanthropy, Studio2f has launched the Foundation for Learning in Tredyffrin/Easttown’s website (FLITE) which will assist in helping the district’s students reach their potential.

Needless to say it was a way to give back to the community as a T/E alma mater, but it also provided a way to get the band back together. My former roommate and BFF (best-friends-forever! and also a T/E alumnus) is an Art Director at Ogilvy (of which I am ALSO an alumnus!) did the ID work. Always quite the team, we were able to solve many complex creative problems in record breaking time.

It’s been years since I’ve updated my portfolio section with recent work. I’ve been so busy that it has become one of the last tasks on my to-do list. I’m going to start posting some of my recent design work here on the blog. I’m also starting to “think” about a redesign of studio2f and new portfolio site. We’ll see. Real work and paying clients always come first…

Bye-Bye to Saul Bass. The new logo is almost as wrong as the UPS redesign. Best quote:

…I didn’t think anyone actually used Kai’s Power Tools anymore

Interesting look-back: the evolution of the SBC and AT&T Brands: logo-evolution-factsheet.pdf

Things are crook in Muswellbrook. Neil did a spoof of the half-baked NYC Olympic logo last April. The spoof mistakenly ended up on-air in Australia during a legitimate Olympic news segment.

Good-on-ya Mate!

Heaps of fun: Typedrawing. This could be easily turned into a Raygun/David Carson/Dr. Moreau title sequence machine. I’m glad we didn’t have this as a freehand/illustrator plugin in the early 90s… it truly would have been the end of print (in a bad way).

The story behind the iconic Che Guevara image

Or hell hath no fury like a graphic designer screwed.

I slaved away building collateral materials (powerpoint decks, SEC financial documents, charts, etc.) for a roadshow to raise funding for a small New York startup. The client contact was old colleague. The project was grueling (see: scope creep). I completed the design work on time with a happy client. I received numerous emails thanking me for the great work, telling me that it had been used in many money raising meetings. I received confirmation that they had received my invoice and had no issues with it.

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Tips on taming scope at ALA.

Last month I had a project go extremely south due to poorly defined deliverables and expanding scope creep. The end product was completed on time and the client was happy with the final deliverables— but the client/designer relationship soured and both parties parted on bad terms.

It’s a shame and I’m part to blame… The client was a old friend, business associate and fellow agency creative. After years of consulting and learning the freelance lessons, I made the mistake of accepted the project “off the cuff” without clear definition of the final deliverable or compensation. The due date was a solid set date, but the work load and additions to the project keep growing and growing. Consuming over 110% of my time. Other projects and responsibilities in my life suffered. In the end I felt cheated and abused. The client felt exploited. A difficult and sad lesson learned by both of us.

You can’t reorder pages in Pages. You can’t modify the base page template in Pages. You can’t delete a page in Pages. WTF?

Seriously— what the fuck? What a useless page layout application. They should have followed the Keynote metaphor and had user defined master pages and a left hand column of page (slide) previews that could be re-ordered or deleted. I’ve been trying to automate a dumbed down design workflow for JJG, only to discover you can’t DELETE.

Cripes. A page layout application that can’t delete pages. What were they thinking? This is for laymen that can’t understand inDesign or Quark? Don’t you think novice users will make mistakes and want to delete something?

It will be interesting to see what type of traffic Google drives here with this post title.

I’m struggling to design business forms for a SQL-Ledger deployment. SQL-Ledger uses LaTeX to generate PDFs for all its output (invoices, purchase orders, checks). It’s a bear. LaTeX is typesetting language developed in the days before sophisticated WYSIWYG editors arrived. It’s still very actively used by academia— I take it that it’s da’bomb for thesis writing.

It’s not a typesetting language designed with Graphic Designers in mind. Not only is LaTex a language targeted more to text publishing and mathematical formula display than business form output— the added packages I need (textpos, tabularx) have little documentation.

I feel like I’m back in 1993 when I was learning HTML. I’m having to hack apart other people’s TeX files to try and decipher how they’re structured. It’s a long, hard learning process. I’ve installed all the open source TeX editors… even to the point of getting KDE to run via X11 on my Powerbook. None of them seem to be able to handle the type of layouts that I need to design. Much like HTML for me, it seems much easier to do all the work in BBEdit.

To add some “spice” to this project: most Google searches for LaTeX resources end up returning mostly fetish/BDSM sites.

I find the rumors of a potential Apple/IBM union hard to believe.

I do think that IBM has been trying to distance itself from Microsoft with their major push into Linux. Apple’s OS X runs on IBM’s PowerPC chips. Despite how far-fetched it all sounds, I guess I could see the synergy of putting OS X on to IBM boxes with very little effort. How things have changed. 10+ years ago IBM and Apple were arch enemies.

During my tour of duty doing IBM branding at O&M, creatives were never allowed to let the client know we used Macs. All presentations— and work done in front of the client— had to be on Thinkpads. By the time Clement Mok Design took on the IBM online brand, I think Big Blue had warmed up to Macs as their agency’s tool.

When I developed the first IBM online store, I designed half of it in the CKS|Partners New York office— and the other half at IBM’s Research Triangle Park in Raleigh, North Carolina. We spent a month at IBM putting the final touches on the templates that would drive the 80k pages of the site. I had my Apple G3 shipped to IBM as my design tool, and I set it up in an office deep in the heart of the IBM PSG (Personal Systems Group). My design assistant and faithful quit-your-day-job-programmer also setup Mac workstations. The rest of the team, CKS Enterprise and our own CKS NY Information Architect had PCs.

Working onsite for over a month, we had daily visitors of IBM developers to our tiny office to see the wonderful and mysterious “Apple Macintoshes” that the “designers” had brought deep into enemy territory. All of them seemed truly amazed at Apple’s hardware and OS9. Mixing Apples and oranges. It was an experience— and a project— I’ll never forget.

There’s two completely unrelated memes I’ve been following for the last month that someone else may find interesting: Tufte’s mini-info-graphics and the debate that the “rumors of branding’s death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Inline display of information:

• Edward Tufte’s Sparklines
• PHP class to generate Sparklines

Branding:

• Decline of Brands
• The End of Branding as we know it
• Branding is Dead
• Why Branding is Dead
• Brand Stewardship R.I.P. (for Dave)
• Beyond Brands: Lovemarks, and the Love/Respect Axis

Let’s not forget…

A brand is the intangible sum of a product’s attributes: it’s name, packaging and price, history, reputation and the way it’s advertised. —David Ogilvy

I’ve been trying to find a project management system for sometime. I haven’t been able to find one that sported a clean UI and all the features that I want (milestone tracking, task management, extranet functionality, rss feeds). I also haven’t had the time or effort to skin an open source project.

I’m undertaking a corporate identity/re-branding project for a syndicated media company, and I’m giving BaseCamp a try. It’s regularly praised in del.icio.us links. So far I’m impressed. The only problem is trying to find a FTP server to use for Basecamp’s offline storage. FTP is so unsecure, that I’ve got it turned off everywhere. If Basecamp would either support sftp, webDAV over ssl or even provide storage for an additional fee- I’d be even more excited.

If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers. Funny stuff, and frighteningly true.
(via del.icio.us)

One of the best examples of this is UPS. The terribly designed Worldship software, with it's god-awful GUI, only runs on Windows. However the wonderfully designed UPS.com shipping section runs on anything that has a browser. Why tie yourself to specific platforms when you can be free of system restraints? Updating one web application beats applying updates to software installed on hundreds of desktops-- and everyone is always using the same version. With CSS your application is available to you in any form and on any device you choose. Web based applications empower your users to use the tool that they're most comfortable with-- and that's good design.

Our Nuptia-Log has shown up on CSS Vault. CSS Vault is a gallery of vaild xhtml sites that acts as a resource to inspire other designers. It's a site I visit to see what kind of websites those crazy kids are making these days. There's always great eye-candy, and outstanding designs. I'm honored-- and quite frankly amazed someone submitted our site. Too bad they can't see the integrated meat-space invite.

The interface is a satellite photo of NYC, linked to stories that correspond to their geographic locations. I've read all the stories from my hood in Alphabet City (East Village). The Corner of Canal and Bowery story of the woman getting hit by a Cement Mixer evoked a feeling that I've had a million times in New York-- when something amazing happens directly in-front of you, and in seconds the city has wiped all traces of it all way. The whole site and interface is voyeuristic and strangely engaging to me.
(via J-Walk)

Via ScriptyGoddess: how to fake Lomo shots in photoshop (lomo effect , lomo actions)

Photoshop will no longer open images of bank notes. New U.S. currency and Euros are encoded with a pattern detected by Adobe apps. You can try it yourself with your copy of Photoshop CS and a $20 jpeg. (image to the left manipluated with photoshop7)

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Shouldn't the terror colors be Red Orange Yellow Green Blue?

15 trends taking shape in graphic design.

21st Century Futurism.

I finally went out and got myself a new set of Gray Cards. I'm going to put the digital camera away for a while and start shooting again with my Lomo and my medium format. For being so inexpensive- both take funky "super-saturated" shots. I think I'm in need of some hardcore lomography.

A Flash app that lets you preview all of the fonts installed on your system.

After 4+ years, we’ve discovered that The Truth in Advertising clip is more than a Director’s promotional reel piece- a longer version with additional scenes is available on DVD! If you work in advertising or marketing- you have to see this Quicktime clip. It’s a riot.

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Too busy to do the house book. The design of studio2f is tired. Even I dislike it. It's dated and a poor example of my design style. I'm surprised it's repeatedly getting ripped-off. This site is more than 7 years old. The current design has served a 3 year tour of duty. The code is barely HTML 4.0 transitional (cutting edge 4 years ago). There's a heap of client projects that haven't made it into my portfolio. I've been putting GREP'd bandages on the hundreds of pages of this site keeping it functional. The architecture is wacked (the entrance is more blog than homepage these days). Even the studio2f nomenclature no longer applies.

I've been so busy with real projects, there's been no time to work on studio2f. I'm going to have to decide soon: Leave it as it is? Manually update every page to XHTML? Wipe it clean and start fresh? If there was only more time in the day... Any thoughts?

Helvetica/Arial death match. Helvetica offspring Neue is one of the studio2f house typefaces.

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