How to use this Page

• Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows | Video on TED.com—Hat tip to Mental Multivitamin

• “If Socrates Had E-Mail…”—About Kenyon—Kenyon College

Augustine’s brilliant emphasis on language as a means of passage between our interior selves and the external world, a bandwidth for the expression of desires, introduces a theme which resurfaces again and again, almost uncannily, in the consideration of communication or information technologies. What is striking is not the truism that media of communication provide a link between internal selves and the world around them; what is striking is the anxiety that surrounds that linkage. We find that anxiety even in Augustine’s conclusion, that language acquisition propelled him “into the stormy life of human society.”

• Trianon: A Novel of Royal France by Elena Maria Vidal in Literature & Fiction—Another title for my TBR list.

• mitali’s fire escape: Amazon as Publisher? An Insider’s View From YA Author Zetta Elliott—Excellent post. Zetta Elliott talks about her experience with AmazonEncore, a “program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate.”

• Welcome to the April Carnival of Children’s Literature! | forwordsbooks (Did I really never post this? I just found this link in a draft. Doh!)

So, I think I’ve solved my “I dislike WordPress” problem by using ScribeFire which I got working after a lot of back and forth with my techie people at ibiblio and some help from Ask MetaFilter. Can you imagine your librarian helping you get your blog software working?

Speaking of, I’ve been reading an old but great paper about social networking stuff and how its used differently in rural communities. This is science stuff not just “here’s what we think people are doing on facebook…” and I think you’ll like it. It’s called The Network in the Garden: An Empirical Analysis of Social Media in Rural Life and it’s a numbers analysis of how people are using MySpace in urban versus rural areas. You can also see it as slides prepared for the CHI conference. The slides are quite good at getting some basic points across.

The conclusions are a little surprising to me and I live in a rural area [interesting side note, when I move up the street next month I will no longer be living in a rural area because Randolph has a slightly higher population than Bethel] and social media is still not on the radar of a lot of novice computers users. I think this information will help me help people understand what it’s all about.

Rural and urban people use social media very differently: four of our five hypotheses were confirmed. Rural people articulate far fewer friends, and those friends are located much closer to home. Women occupy a much greater segment of the rural user base than the urban user base. Rural users, particularly rural women, also set their profiles to private at higher rates than urban users. However, both rural and urban users seem to communicate with roughly the same proportions of strong and weak ties.

Side note: I’m going to talk to the principal of the high school today to talk about the dissolution of my job for next year. Not expecting any big changes but maybe at least a little more understanding about what happened and focus on what to do next.

Cover illustration/typography for the Yale University Art Gallery spring catalog

Garrett Morin does great work. He draws lots of type and makes people happy. You may have seen his works in the likes of Mike Perry’s Hand Job book. If you click on over to his site, you’ll find lots of happy characters, t-shirt graphics, corn-cob pipes, animated GIFs, skateboard graphics, magazine covers, and a great animated spot for Death Cab for Cutie / MTV.

Garrett’s also a member of the Rad Mountain collective, which recently did some yummy illustrations for Good Magazine. Check it.

Share This

1960s IBM 7094 poster - Designed by Clarence Lee

Clarence Lee graduated from Yale in 1958 and went on to work for the uber graphic designer Lester Beall. In 1962 Clarence left Beall’s firm to work for IBM. During his time at IBM he designed the poster above for the IBM 7094 Data Processing System. The 7094 was released in 1962 and was built for large-scale scientific computing.

During the late 1950s - early 1960s, Paul Rand, Charles Eames ,Marcel Breuer and Eliot Noyes were involved in design work for IBM. It would be interesting to find out if Clarence had any interaction with these designers.

Share This

Jesse Kaczmarek is a one-man, super-clean design shop located in NYC. His clients include BMW, Sony, Pepsi, HBO, and on and on. The work remains consistently clean, sophisticated and fun — all at once! Just look at those happy families in their Hertz rental cars!

Also, bonus points for a super slick website.

Share This

Silkscreen Print for a Drama magazine sponsored show at Nonesuch Gallery

Cool design work from Wyeth Hansen (Casual Aesthetics). His website includes t-shirts, posters, type faces as well some motion design. I’m loving the type work above.

(Via Wrong distance)

Share This

This Land - A Geography of Canada by Edward Wahl c1961
Hans Kleefeld cover designer

Great book discovery by Rosemary Travale.
Hans also designed the original logo for the Toronto Zoo.

Share This

Luke Williams is a third year graphic design student at the Maryland Institute College of Art. While making sweet calendar-meets-packaging cubes, he is also working for Abbott Miller/Pentagram in Baltimore. From magazine and book layouts to posters and self-initiated work, Luke’s work is fresh. It’s nice to see a large body of work with this much variety, attention to detail, and experimentation with other mediums.

Share This

Portland based designer Gavin Potenza (Exploratory Design) has cooked up a series of sweet stamps. The series which was inspired by the work of Otl Aicher is entitled Homage to the Stamp.

Share This

BarryBlog has posted a rare glimpse of some in-house publications for Herman Miller. They were produced in conjunction with the great design thinker Ralph Caplan, and designed by John Massey of Container Corporation of America fame. I’m drooling! I’d love to read these. Maybe we can get the good people at Barry Blog to make photo copies.

Enjoy!

Share This

Flickr user ex.novo has posted some amazing examples of spanish modern design in advertising from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The ads are taken from magazines/ journals titled “Clínica Rural” and “Glosa”. Anyone know anything about these journals? Most of the advertisements seem to be related to pharmaceutical products so it’s a great follow up to my previous post on Swiss modern design in the chemical industry.

Big ups to Mike from Burlesque for dropping this gem on me.

Share This

“Documentary” directed by Justin Leibow for Superfad

It’s friday and what better way to celebrate then by watching a good ole animated short.

grain edit reader and rad guy Justin Leibow sent in this animated film he directed for the Seattle Film Festival. Nude skydiving wee hoo!!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Share This

Poster by John Foster / fuszion

Great posters for a better cause.

Donated by designers and artists around the globe, posters sold at the So-Cal Fire Poster Project raise funds for victims of the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Diego Counties. All proceeds will be given to the Salvation Army, for the 2007 California Wildfire fund.

Posters by: Paul Frank / Park La Fun, Hatch Design,Wink, Modern Dog, Micah Smith, John Foster / fuszion, Josh Higgins / Mike Carnevale, Robert Palmer, Barretto & Co., Frank Chimero, Buchanan Design, Lanny Sommese, Jason Gomez, Madeleine, Ryan Russell Design, Chaz Russo/The Graphic Soul, Nick McPherson, MiresBall, Bernie Tiano and Shepard Fairey.

Get some here

Share This

Christopher David Ryan is a “Brooklyn-based graphic artist, daydreamer, pseudo-scientist, wanna-be astronaut and untrained intellectual.” His work shows a similar range of experimentation — photography, collage, illustration, found images, etc. Why! He even makes pillows! On his personal website, Ryan is posting at least one image of his work per day for every day of the year. Busy, busy.

Share This

Some great book covers in the Dick Bruna Flickr group.

(image via onno de wit)

Share This

Quarteto em Cy - Quarteto em Cy (1966), for Elenco

Dynamite record cover for this female vocal group from Brazil. This is a great album. I highly recommend their 1972 Self titled lp as well.

Heres a video of Quarteto em Cy on the Andy Williams show with Marcos Valle. You might recognize the vocals at the beginning of the song. I believe Nicola Conte sampled it.

(via the excellent Loronix)

Share This

I found this great example of information design in ilusiones_design’s flickr photostream. Can anyone translate the text?

Share This