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Between The Legs: The Most Copied Layout
The "A-frame" shot—between the legs, with something framed in the middle—is called the "most frequently copied trope ever used" in the design world. PRINT Magazine pulls together a great collection of novels, movie and theater posters, ads, comic books, magazines, and album covers that all use the device, in a cacophony of legs that quickly goes from edgy to uniform. The best from five different mediums, after the jump: More »
campaigns
Logobama—the Perfect Way to Add Hope to Any Camwhore Photo
Many years ago, the Bush reelection campaign site had a little gadget that allowed users to put their own slogans on Bush campaign signs. This gadget was abused, humorously. No one learns any lessons on the internet, thank god, and now a site created by a Barack Obama supporter allows you to upload any photo you want and stick it in the candidate's official logo. Animal has a bit of fun with this. Can any of you do better than this terrifying Julia Allison/MisShapes/Corey Kennedy triptych? [Animal]
Dude, Fliers
Here's a list of 63 different whimsical faux-stencil fonts you can use to make fliers for your indie band that look grittier than just normal fliers which would not indicate your indie tendencies quite as well. [Outlaw Design Blog via Kottke]
art
Design is Dead, According to Sad Philippe Starck
Philippe Starck, the totally influential French designer of interiors, furniture, and consumer objects, seems to be having an existential crisis. "Everything I designed was unnecessary," he told a German publication, adding that he will retire in two years. "In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant." [Breitbart]
advertising
Why?
"Since 9/11, I've secretly measured the socioeconomic well-being of New York City by the advertising content and graphic design of the billboards on the Long Island Expressway between the Midtown Tunnel and the Greenpoint Avenue exit in Queens. I like seeing lots of billboards, and I want them to be filled with terrific ads." [Creativity Online]
Unsung Heroes
A respectful, comprehensive, and interesting overview of the historical evolution of the design of farm magazines. A must-read for poultry portrait aficionados. [Design Observer]
A respectful, comprehensive, and interesting overview of the historical evolution of the design of farm magazines. A must-read for poultry portrait aficionados. [Design Observer]
we hate your kids
Yuppie Shock: Rich DINKs Not Equipped For Parenthood
It turns out, according to today's Times, that when you have children, you might have to slightly compromise your aesthetic design sense and maybe even tape the corners of your designer furniture. Or put it in storage! All because the little puke you finally conceived after putting it off for a decade or two spent finally snagging that prewar apartment and filling it with dead-tech post-modernistic bullshit might hurt himself on the sharp edges of your Barcelona chairs. Or smudge your glass-top Noguchi coffee table. The obvious answers to the problem—belt-delivered beatings should young Atticus get near the Ligne Roset brown microsuede one-arm sofa, locking young Libertad in your minimally appointed sleek modernist basement until he's 18, abortion—are not provided. [NYT] Photo: Evan Sung for The New York Times
Artist Scott King reimagines Vogue. "His 12 artworks featuring fictional proposals for Vogue covers ruthlessly lampoon the fatuous froth of the glossy. Take January, The Angry Issue: its main feature - 769 Things That Make Scarlett Johansson Angry At Injustice. Inside, we are promised advice on 'how to dress angry', a report on 'whatever happened to New Orleans' and 'how Bono saved Africa'." Highly recommended. [Creative Review]
newspapers
The Newspaper As Font Salad
With newspaper redesigns happening every other week—and more and more of them being conducted by fun-loving text-haters like Mario Garcia—readers are getting more strident attempts at impact shoved in their faces. This guy's gone through the fairly new LA Times and counted 22 font uses (not, probably different fonts, as he says, but definitely different stylings) above the fold. More »
penguin
DIY Covers for Penguin Classics
As part of their continuing efforts to make endless re-releases of classic books at least somewhat interesting, Penguin has lately been experimenting with different cover design strategies. Across the pond, Penguin UK has hit on an ultra-minimalist approach: no cover at all. That is, they're releasing six classics with shrink-wrapped blank white paper covers, the idea being that you, the creative consumer, will draw your own cover. Artistes can then submit their cover designs for display on Penguin's website. For the next cycle, the pages will also be blank, allowing you to give The Picture of Dorian Gray that happy ending you just know Oscar Wilde would've wanted. More »
penguin
Look Back in Penguin
Inspired by last year's tome on 70 years of cover designs at Penguin, this Flickr gallery attempts to collect examples of the last few decades' worth of Penguin/Pelican jackets. If anything, the starkly crude, mod, and/or trippy designs are testaments to doing a lot with relatively limited graphic resources. Of course, you've also got plenty of purely objectionable cases of crap abstraction for abstract subjects, such as the coma-inducing Psychiatry To-day. More »
blogs
The Ists That Never Were
Font obsessive Ironic Sans mines new minerals from the vein of Gothamist blog parody humor, even though we do a little secret cutting every time we read the phrase "istaverse." Observe the various logos created for Ist titles covering fictional cities. If there really was a Bedrockist, perhaps we could thrill to posts like "What's Fresh: Mammoth." More »
design
Web 2.0 Floats, Reflects
Our only interest in Web 2.0 is that it gives us whole new versions of things to crap on, but somehow this farcical revolution has infected even the rarefied realm of logo design. Most of the suggested Web 2.0-ified logos in this thread on design-nerd hive Yah Hooray are predictable takes on media or Internet companies; common themes include gradient color, roundness, hovering, reflections, and the sarcastically permanent suffix of "Beta." Still, who could resist the updated PBR logo at right? Lowbrow-loving hipsters might squeal, but that nostalgia trip is only going to get you so far in our brave new 2.0 world. More »
new york observer
The New 'Observer': Did It Change Its Hair?
Oh, how our mouths were watering after reading Gabe Sherman's dispatch on the Observer's Media Mob blog yesterday afternoon, and not just because its headline alluded to smoked fish. Starting with today's issue, Sherman reported, the Observer would look different. A smaller trim size! (Like The Washington Post!) Five columns instead of six on the front page! A brand-new frontpage design! It is all being done, as it will soon be done at The Wall Street Journal, to save some money on paper, of course. But, still, "it gave us a face-lift," editor Peter Kaplan lemons-to-lemonaded, "that we needed." A face-lifted Upper East Side-bred beauty? This we'd have to see. And so we found ourselves out of the house uncharacteristically early today, purchasing an Observer at the corner newsstand. (Couldn't begin to tell you the last time we did that.) We gave it a good look. And we reached a verdict: The new Observer looks just like... the old Observer. More »
new york magazine
