Coffee Printer / Latte Printer

Soon you'll find advertising on top of your Evil Empire coffee...

2010 National Geographic Photo Contest

I LOVE me some National Geographic. Here's a link to the winners of the 2010 National Geographic Photo Contest

The Design Process

Hilarious. Click to see it full size.

Thanks to Eran for the link.

Inked

An interesting new specialty jersey from the ECHL's Ontario Reign. They've called in tattoo artist Corey Miller of LA Ink fame to help come up with a design. It's an interesting look. You can click on the image for a closer look at the details. Certainly better than the holiday jersey the Florida Everblades came up with anyways...

Thanks to Icethetics for the link

Business card design

Some of these you've probably seen before but some great business card designs all the same

Google Demo Slam: Epic Docs Animation

Nice bit of animation using Google docs

A really creative ad that's a little bit cheeky ;-) by Kolle Rebbe for Elixia fitness clubs in Berlin.

Meet Buck

Meet Buck from TeamCerf on Vimeo.

Seasons Gree... what the H-E-double hockey sticks?

And from the world of hockey, could these possibly be the worst jerseys of the season? The ECHL's Florida Everblades unveiled their special holiday jersey on Dec 10th for their annual Teddy Bear Toss game. Not sure if it was their jerseys that caused them to drop a 2-1 decision to the visiting Greenville Road Warriors.

Threepio

Well, back in October I wondered when Threepio would come out. Well, here it is.

Salesman Pete

Salesman Pete from Salesman Pete on Vimeo.

A beautiful bit of animation and music.



and the making of:

Thought of You - Behind the Scenes Preview - ROUGH CUT from Cambell Christensen on Vimeo.

Somebody gonna get a hurt real bad...

Some rather extreme ads by Samsung as part of their Somebody campaign:

‘The One’ motorcycle

This is a hawt bike

Magic Chair

uh...

Someone missed this when they were product testing...

TAC Campaign - 20 year Anniversary retrospective montage "Everybody Hurt...

Everyone has a choice. Be safe out there everyone.

I have PSD

I Have PSD from Hyperakt on Vimeo.

artoo

I wonder when the threepio version will come out...

Dare infographics

Pour me some light

Pretty sweet lamp design by Yeongwoo Kim.

Night of the Living Dead OneClub stylez

Ads and ideas are slaughtered each and every day by account execs, clients, focus groups, etc, but they’re never forgotten (and neither are the late nights spent creating them). So on “Night of the Living Dead” we pay homage to the fallen and bring some of those moneymakers (and duds) back to life. Come view the bloodletting and see what you make of it. Prizes will be awarded as follows:

1) idea that never should have been killed
2) idea that should have stayed dead
3) the best reason for being killed

Deadline for submissions extended to Friday, October 22nd.
Hit theoneclub.com or their Facebook page for more details.

Motel Sign Prompts Angers Type Nerd

To be honest. I don't blame him. After watching this video I was pretty saddened by just how bad the new sign was too. Terrible...

Gory Ad

Is this ad going too far?

Super creepy iPhone charger...

Gap turns to crowdsourcing?

Wow. When I first saw this when I woke up this morning (Thanks Robbie Sug), I was mindblown by just how bad the "new" Gap logo was. It appears though that the gag was on us as it was meant to stir up a lot of debate and now it looks like Gap is crowdsourcing to come up with a new identity. From my personal experience with crowdsourcing there's a high potential for something to go sideways and unfortunately some braintrusts just don't get it. Here's hoping whatever Gap winds up using it doesn't destroy a strong 20 year old brand. You never know...

Here's another article on the new brand and the hinted crowdsourcing.

Michael Grills posted this link that also addresses the new crowdsourcing tactic

GDC Alberta South event

Don't drink and drive

A nice collection of ads reminding us, don't drink and drive

Intereactive poster

Hallowindow IV

The wait is over. Hallowindow IV is finally here.

R2D2 sucks...

Mini unveiled their new Scooter-E concept. They look hot. I'd get one...

Drew Struzan

What do Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter and the Muppets have in common?
A creator of iconic images.

You've most likely seen his work dozens of times but have never heard of him. Now, they're going to make a movie about him. Meet Drew Struzan. Creator of such iconic movie posters such as the Star Wars series seen above as well as Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Harry Potter and Blade Runner.

Glass speakers

When I first saw these I thought they were pretty cool. Then I found a picture of them in context and went, "omg. They're massive!" I had originally thought they were small enough to plunk down on top of your desk on either side of your monitor. Not so much...

Audio is created at the base of each speaker, and it's distributed up (and around) the pane with the lows coming from the bottom, the mids from the middle and the highs from the top. Unlike regular speakers, these speakers can project sound from both sides of the panes of glass giving you 360˚ of sound projection. Pretty cool piece of tech from Greensound Technology.

May the Sushi be with you.

Something from last year but I only stumbled across it today. I'd get a pair...

Make your case

Kelly posted a link to this the other day. Pretty interesting idea. When you think about it though, it seems to be one of those ideas that surprises you hasn't been done before. The controls are a little finicky but still pretty cool.

Ninjabread men

Cos really, who doesn't enjoy a good ninjabread man?

Taga Bikes

I know there are lots of you out there with young kids and when I stumbled across this I thought it was pretty cool. It seems to be quite well thought out. You can read up some more on Taga Bikes at their website or you can have a quick look at their video below:

Zippy boat

Japanese artist Yasuhiro Suzuki--went to the trouble of building a motorboat shaped like a zipper pull just for the sake of the aerial sight gag of its wake suggesting a parting zipper.

Anti-Theft Lunch Bags

For those of you that have ever had to endure getting your lunch stolen out of the company fridge...
Mind you, in Gord's case where his got thrown out by an overly exuberant office administrator, this would not help matters...

Good F*cking Design Advice

You want some f*cking advice about design? Here you go.

Redesigning the US Bank Note

As someone who worked in the currency exchange industry years ago I can say that the two currencies I hated to deal with were the Indian Rupee and the US greenback. The Indian Rupee was mostly because they were almost always dirty and full of holes (I was told once that punching holes in it was a form of telling if the bills were counterfeit or not). The brand new bills were fine but the vast majority of bills that came through my till were pretty grimy.

The American currency, on the other hand, was hated for a number of reasons:

1. They were all the same colour so visually it was harder to tell the different notes apart. One of my favorite (note sarcasm) things to hear from the American tourists was, "your money is so pretty. Its all differnt colours." Actually, your money is the only currency in the world that's one colour.
2. Before this current crop of bills, they were so easy to counterfit that kids were printing off $100 bills in their shop class. They had this marker you could use that would change colour if it was printed on a different stock of paper but some of the smart criminals were circumventing that by bleaching away the ink on a $1 and printing $100 bills on top of it. There was so much counterfeit currency floating around that it was never a surprise to us when we encountered it (although some customers were completely taken aback) and I am sure a bunch of it passed through my float completely undetected.

So when I found this article on Design Boom about Dowling Duncan and their submission to the Dollar ReDe$ign Project I was greatly intrigued. Conceptually, I like them a lot. I think some of them don't look like money though but that may be just a matter of getting used to and using the new design. From a practical standpoint I think the American public will never go for it. They love their American greenback and when a new design was rolled out in 1995 for the first time in nearly 70 years there was a huge, public outcry of how much the new design made their money feel more like Monopoly money. The US made another adjustment to the design in 2004.

In 2008 a US federal appeals court upheld a ruling that having all dollar notes the same size and texture was unacceptable. The case which was brought by the American Council for the Blind states that 937,000 people in the US are legally blind while another 2.4 million count as having low vision (meaning they are unable to read newspaper print) and the current design for the currency made it difficult for those people to use it. I guess we'll see what happens in the coming years.

Feel free to chime in with your own comments on the proposed design or the general state of US currency.

Some interesting facts about American currency that you may not know:

• The US has a $1 coin. Most of you might be familiar with the Susan B. Anthony dollar but did you know a new dollar coin was introduced in 1999 depicting the Native American Shoshone woman Sacagawea, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, carrying her son Jean Baptiste Charbonneau?

• The US has a $500, $1000, $5000, $10,000 and $100,000 bill. Although they are still technically legal tender in the United States, high-denomination bills were last printed in 1945 and officially discontinued on July 14, 1969.

• American Currency is actually controlled by a semi-private company. The Federal Reserve is actually independent within government because "its decisions do not have to be ratified by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branch of government." However, its authority is derived from the U.S. Congress and is subject to congressional oversight. Additionally, the members of the Board of Governors, including its chairman and vice-chairman, are chosen by the President and confirmed by Congress. The government also exercises some control over the Federal Reserve by appointing and setting the salaries of the system's highest-level employees. Thus the Federal Reserve has both private and public aspects.

• Life expectancy of bills are as follows: $1 bill - 18 months; $5 bill - two years; $10 bill - three years; $20 bill - four years; $50 and $100 bills - nine years.

• Martha Washington is the only woman whose portrait has appeared on a U.S. currency note. It appeared on the face of the $1 Silver Certificate of 1886 and 1891, and the back of the $1 Silver Certificate of 1896.

• The US Mint makes around 1 or 2 billion pennies annually but depending on demand has made as many as 14 billion.

Ni No Kuni for PS3

I've seen a number of video games try and transcend the hand drawn chasm with pretty underwhelming results but this actually looks quite good. I'm pretty impressed. From Studio Ghibli comes Ni No Kuni for PS3.

Thanks to Karyl Gilbertson for the link.

Mac Motorcycles

X tweeted this bike earlier and I think my downstairs neighbour must have thought the roofers were back in the middle of the night by the sound of my jaw hitting the floor. Beautiful motorcycles by this great new company.

Winnie the Pooh meets Han Solo and Chewbacca

Stumbled across these fun illustrations by James Hance. I particularly like the one of han hammering a tail on to the AT-AT...

Wow. Curious to know if this will actually work. Or, at least generate enough buzz to show a marked increase in sales.

Matchstick Navy

79-year-old Englishman Phil Warren has spent 62 years to build this amazing fleet of 432 warships. The most amazing thing that all the ships are made of wooden matches and matchboxes.

Orikane

I was trolling through my facebook on my iPhone today and noticed someone posted a link to some money origami which I thought was cool but I couldn't find the link when I got home later. SO I did the only thing any sane person would do. I turned to Google. I found this link instead which contained the two pieces I was most impressed with, the koi and the crab plus a bunch of other fantastic ones. Brilliant...

Are you obsessed with the right things?

Six most insanely misguided attempts at viral marketing

As a designer I understand that we are often asked to come up with creative solutions for clients in order to sell an idea or prodcut to the public. I've had some great fun working on some neat projects and have seen some really clever campaigns. There are, of course, the flip sides to that. Some ideas are so wacky or out there that you sorta have to shake your head and go what the H-E-double hockey sticks were these people thinking when they came up with this? Here are some examples of marketing campaigns gone waaaay wrong.

I like to Müv it Müv it.

Pretty neat concept for a mobile restaurant. Sorta like going one giant step up from a hot dog cart. For more info on the Müvbox concept, hit up their website. Thanks to Alex for the link.

Jan-ken-poi! (rock paper scissors to you English folk)

Pretty cool augmented reality T-shirt. Thanks to Erin for the link. Sweet as.

Shinya Kimura

Shinya Kimura is a Japanese born custom bike builder and founder of Zero Engineering and Chabott Engineering.

I was first exposed to the work of Shinya Kimura on an episode of Biker Build Off on Discovery Channel. His approach to building motorcycles is so... zen, that it gives me shivers. Edwin sent me this video today and I think it really is a nice piece of footage that captures his spirit.

Inked!

These are stylistically some of the most interesting tattoos I've ever seen. Some of the galleries are NSFW so consider yourself forewarned. Thanks to Edwin for the link.

Multi-touch light table

This is pretty neat. Strangely enough I was discussing the idea of this with someone not too long ago. My vision was a lot more traditional but this is really interesting. It looks like they've put a lot of thought into this so I'd be curious to hear what some of my DJ friends think.

Thanks to Mark for the link

Nokia Nex

Neat video that shows all the different concepts and evolutions the Nex logo took before arriving at the final one.

Heritage Classic

So the NHL unveiled the jerseys Calgary and Montreal will be wearing at the Heritage Classic. Montreal didn't venture quite so far into their past for their uniforms. They "will sport the same jersey worn for home games between 1974-75 and 1995-96," according to the club's website.

The Flames on the other hand decided to go waaaaaaaaaaaaay back to 1920 and revisit the Calgary Tigers. It's hard for me to get a good gauge on these jerseys because depending on where you see it, the colours seem to be very different saturations. If you go to the Flames website, the jerseys appear to be really bright red and yellow reminiscent of Ronald McDonald. If you see the video on the NHL website the colours are much, much darker. Personally, I like the darker colours but overall I still don't like these jerseys at all. If I had a choice I would have kept the Tigers logo on the front and put the flaming C on the shoulders. That would make far more sense to me.

Camera lens mug

I imagine some of my photog buddies will fall all over this.
via Sanjai. Thanks for the link buddy.

Hotel Inntel

Design Milk posted, "If you aren’t moved with love or hate by The Hotel Inntel in Zaandam The Netherlands by Wilfried van Winden of WAM Architecten I suggest you check your pulse."

Fillerama

For all of you that are tired of boring old Lorem Ipsum, you can now fill your text boxes with Futurama quotes. When I first got to the site I was a little confused by the interface so allow me to explain. Just select how many paragraphs at the bottom then click generate. You can select and paste it from te field on the left or for you code nuts out there you can copy and paste from the left field.
Have fun!

Comic sans is bad ass...

Read the entire note here.

Pizza and Double Vikings.

I'd seen this once before but today I saw it posted on a site with a caption complaining about how advertising has become too slick or too cute. Time to kick it old school and take it back to the street.

A Joke iPhone Sticker Turns Into a Business

Sometimes, a simple idea can turn into a phenomenon. 2 designers from Brooklyn have turned their joke into a business.

Jeff Nishinaka paper sculptures

One of the great second year projects in the Visual Communications classes at ACAD is the derivative animal paper sculpture project. I always enjoyed seeing what the end results would be like. So neat to see what the kids came up with. I stumbled across Jeff Nishinaka on Cool Hunter and it immediately reminded me of those projects. Jeff does some really neat work. Definitely worth a look.

Ebru

This is incredible. I've never seen this before but it is apparently a traditional Turkish technique called Ebru. Fantastic.

Old Spice Voicemail generator

Just hours after Old Spice Guy uploads a template voicemail message on YouTube, the inspired Reddit community come together to build a a tool that will (in seconds) let you take snippets of theoriginal audio to create your own voicemail message.

Simply insert your mobile number, select from a few different endings and a you’re done. Pure win. Try this now.

I've already made mine. How about you?

Electric Motorcycles

Stumbled upon this today. A company called Brammo makes electric motorcycles and has introduced a new model likely to start hitting the streets in 2011 called the Empulse. Compared to it's younger sibling, the Enertia, it looks a little leaner and meaner. These bikes also have really decent power and pretty good range. Don't know if I'd go out on the highway withit but for urban commuting I'd look into one.