Okay, I admit I haven’t seen this new documentary about Winnebago Man, but if it’s half as good as the infamous clip itself, it will be fantastic.
I will be inviting my friends Graham and Chance to see it with me, for sure. Three angry guys watching one old angry guy. What could be better?
I saw this great set of venn diagrams today, so I thought I’d make my own:
What's Your Type?
One of these things is not like the other...
I love this image (from Alan Cooper via Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog), not least because of the dog jet pilot, but mostly because it so poignantly demonstrates why button placement matters.
For more, read Atwood’s excellent entry, The Opposite of Fitt’s Law.
Layer 8 by Daniel Oeffinger
A Denver exchange?
The always entertaining Christoph Niemann has created some wonderfully pithy information graphics using Google Maps as his inspiration.
Ever wonder what your website would sound like if translated to music? Probably not. Well, anyway, codeorgan is a website that will take any url and convert it to music using algorithms based on the content it finds there. (Thanks to Carl Lorentzen for sharing this little distraction with me.)
Photos of the new Apple iTablet have leaked to the public.
It's amazingly versatile and easy to use.
Apparently, I am New Alphabet from Wim Crouwel.
Pentagram has a developed an online psychoanalytic tool (the password is “character”) to help you determine which typeface best represents your personality. It’s four simple questions, and the format of the test will surprise you.
According to this, I am New Alphabet form Wim Crouwel. (Here is Mr. Crouwel from the movie Helvetica describing how he came up with New Alphabet.)
I’m not sure what this says about me, but here is the description of New Alphabet from Wikipedia (my bolding):
New Alphabet is a personal, experimental project of Crouwel. The typeface embraces the limitations of the Cathode Ray Tube technology – used by early screens and phototypesetting equipment – and thus only contains horizontal and vertical strokes. Conventional typefaces can suffer under these limitations, because the level of detail is not high enough. Crouwel wanted to adapt his design to work for the new technologies, instead of adapting the technologies to meet the design. Since his letter shapes only contain horizontals and verticals, some of the letters are unconventional, while others are difficult to recognize at all. Because of this, the typeface was received with mixed feelings by his peers.
Most of the letters are based on a grid of 5 by 9 units, with 45-degree corners. There is no differentiation between uppercase and lowercase. Many of his peers were of the opinion that the design was too experimental and that it went too far. So much so, that it got a lot of newspaper coverage, which sparked a lively debate. For Crouwel it was mostly a theoretical exercise, ‘The New Alphabet was over-the-top and never meant to be really used. It was unreadable.‘
Wordle is cool.
Wordle will generate those interesting word-cloud images you see around the Web from words you paste or URLs you provide. On top of that, you can modify a lot of settings to customize your image. The cloud above was generated from the words on the home page of this blog as of January 2, 2010.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Retro (or Turbo) Encabulator: quite simply, the greatest invention of all time. (And certainly one of the best industry inside jokes ever. Scroll down for the full text version!)
And, as a special bonus, the actual copy:
Here at Rockwell Automation’s world headquarters, research has been proceeding to develop a line of automation products that establishes new standards for quality, technological leadership and operating excellence. With customer success as our primary focus, work has been proceeding on the crudely conceived idea of an instrument that would not only provide inverse reactive current, for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters.
Such an instrument comprised of Dodge gears and bearings, Reliance Electric motors, Allen-Bradley controls, and all monitored by Rockwell Software is: Rockwell Automation’s ‘Retro-Encabulator’. Now, basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it’s produced by the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive diractance.
The original machine had a base-plate of pre-fabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the panametric fan. The lineup consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzelvanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar wane shaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-deltoid type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots of the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversible tremie pipe to the differential girdlespring on the ‘up’ end of the grammeters.
Moreover, whenever fluorescence score motion is required, it may also be employed in conjunction with a drawn reciprocation dingle arm, to reduce sinusoidal depleneration. The ‘Retro-Encabulator’ has now reached a high level of development, and it’s being successfully used in the operation of milford-trenions.
It’s available soon; wherever Rockwell Automation products are sold.
Coffee? It's martini time!
While it’s true I’ve worked on Madison Avenue for the past 5 years (as a creative director, no less), I would hardly say my life is anything like the characters on the hit TV show.
Nonetheless, even you can create your own MadMen character using AMC’s MadMen Yourself interactive tool.
I confess, at first I thought this was a parody. Apparently this Joel Bauer guy is for real. Don’t get me wrong, as a designer, I appreciate the passion he feels for a well-crafted calling card. But, seriously?
Reminds me of…this.
(Thanks to Carl Lorentzen for the link.)
While I’m guilty of the incredibly mundane tweet, I do wish we could all agree to make our posts a little more interesting.
For example, most tweets go something like this:
Wouldn’t it be nice if they went something like this?:
