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...