Some great packaging design from third-year student Ruth Pearson. I especially like the aesthetic of the self-initiated Tesco Value rebrand. There's something really fit for purpose about the look, even if the idea itself is probably flawed — prices in supermarkets fluctuate so wildly that you'd need to reprint the labels constantly, I would have thought.
Via the Die Line, which has been turning up some really excellent packaging design recently.
“ When you tell people something about type design, they would always come up with the idea that Futura is probably the best legible typeface, because people understand how the forms are being made — this is a circle, this is a triangle... People think that if they can understand how letters are being constructed, they can also read them easily, but that is nonsense. One doesn't need to understand the way letters are made before one gets to read them. ”
A great interview with Albert-Jan Pool, on the creation of a typeface I'd dearly love to own.
I've been working for a little while now on getting my portfolio site, GENERIC TEXT, back up to standard. Last time I worked on it was mid-2006, right after I finished my degree. In addition to all the new work that I've done since that time, there's also the fact that when I last coded the site, I shared the common graphic designer's opinion that web design == Flash. Obviously, the theme of my work since then has been very much to the contrary, and I felt that my portfolio site should probably reflect this.
Well, it's still going to be a little while until I reveal the full site. But I have put together a fun (and hopefully useful) little holding page until then. More details in the full post!
Everyone and their Mum has been writing about Twitter recently, thanks (in the UK at least) to Stephen Fry and Jonathan Woss bringing it to the mainstream's attention. I wrote about my own experiences with Twitter a few months ago, and I hadn't really intended to touch on the subject again. But, following a discussion on the subject on the MKMC mailing list recently, I thought it might be useful to put together a post pointing out some less obvious points about the service, with a view to helping a new user get the most out of Twitter. Read it here!
This ticks all of the boxes for me — a seven-track album by Kutiman, created entirely from samples taken from YouTube . The site (built by Bacon Oppenheim, who are now ones to watch as far as I'm concerned) is the perfect visual and functional reaction to the album's concept. I recommend you taken the suggestion that came to me with the link, and make sure you check out track 3 right away. This is not music that needs the site's high concept to carry it — and this whole project is the kind of thing that makes me excited every day to be working on the web.
A bit late on this one — in fact, over a year behind. Sadly, it took me that long to properly appreciate this cracking little Justice mix. Story is, Fabric turned this down for a mix CD, so Justice decided to just release it onto the web by themselves. It's a pretty random selection — a bunch of old disco, a few ballads, a nice little pinch of prog rock, and so on. But it's a lot of fun — check it out, you might get it a bit quicker than I did.
24 excellent downloadable papercraft sets based on Jason Harlan's favourite video games. He's obviously got a pretty serious taste for the Japanese side of games — but why not?
It's things like this that remind me that our fancy 'culture' is really just the results of a bunch of hairless monkeys, walking around and making noises. Apparently, this is the pitched design document that won Arnell the $1.5 million Pepsi rebrand.
Via Ben Goldacre, who has an interesting piece on how bullshit marketing pseudo-science like this is actually harmful to the reputations of real, actual scientists.
Edge magazine is taking its' 200th issue pretty seriously — by putting out 200 different cover images. Some of them are excellent!
Unfortunately, subscribers are apparently all being sent the Littlebigplanet version. While I love Littlebigplanet, I'd much rather have one of the others — for instance, any of the 25 above. And I'm definitely going to be scouring the local newsagents for that Elite cover...
Update — remembered to add the link. Sorry!
If I weren't already looking forward to Heston Blumenthal's 'Feast' so much, I would be after reading Charlie Brooker's excellent preview:
“ It's like a special edition of Come Dine With Me hosted by the unhinged artisan murderer from the movie Se7en. ”
Aren't they all like that, though?