New Bohemia Designs
This article in the New York Times covers the resurgence of traditional hand-painted signs in San Francisco.
Unlike the bold, colorful hand-lettered signs he makes for restaurants, bars and other businesses, Damon Styer, the owner of New Bohemia Signs, is an understated guy.
Urban Murals
Buzzfeed has a collection of 30 amazing murals by an artist who goes by “BLU.” The page takes a while, but these are pretty amazing.
Could not agree more!
Great article by David Carr in The New York Times about the tech loop that keeps people from TRULY interacting.
But even more remarkably, once the badge-decorated horde spilled into the halls or went to the hundreds of parties that mark the ritual, almost everyone walked or talked with one eye, or both, on a little screen. We were adjacent but essentially alone, texting and talking our way through what should have been a great chance to engage flesh-and-blood human beings.
Dan Needle’s poster redesigns
Seven redesigned posters promoting movies and shows. Worth a quick look. Via buzzfeed.
Michael Bierut is a genius
Michael Bierut is a great designer. He’s also a really great teacher and speaker. He’s been teaching a workshop at the Yale School of Art for the past few years where he gives his students a fascinating assignment. Basically, he requires them to do a “design operation” that’s simple enough that they can do once a day for 100 days.
The only restrictions on the operation you choose is that it must be repeated in some form every day, and that every iteration must be documented for eventual presentation. The medium is open, as is the final form of the presentation on the 100th day.
5by5
5by5 is an “Internet broadcasting network” that features a wide range of interesting podcasts about technology, design, work, and media. Lots of good stuff here.
Lots of interesting letterhead designs
Letterheady is a blog devoted to letterhead design. Thirty-eight pages of it, but it’s sort of addicting.
The Verizon iPhone is here …
But according to Farhad Manjoo over at Slate.com you might want to hold off.
The Groupon story
James Surowieki wrote an interesting article in the New Yorker last week about Groupon. The piece has a couple really keen observations about web-based businesses that a surprising number of people don’t seem to get. Couple quotes …
“Most of the companies that have transformed the Web have certain things in common. They have distinctive technologies. They benefit from what are usually called network effects: the more people who use the service, the more valuable the service becomes. (You’re more likely to use Facebook or Twitter when lots of your friends have signed up, and the more people there are who use Google the more accurate its searches become.) Most important, they scale easily, meaning that they can grow very big without much additional effort. To be sure, the more users Twitter and Facebook have, the more servers they have to buy, and so on. But the genius of these companies is that their users do most of the work and create most of the value; once the ball is rolling, it’s the users who keep pushing it along.”
“When we think about the Internet, we often think of businesses in black-and-white terms: either they’re huge, world-changing hits or they’re flops. But that’s a false dichotomy. These days, the Web is full of good, solid businesses that may not be remaking the world but that are helping give people what they want. If that’s what Groupon ends up being, well, there are worse fates.”
