hyponeiria

Finally, Ars Electronica announced the theme of this years’ festival. Cultural Economy. I am planning to write more on the topic in the following days because hopefully we will be exhibiting a project in the festival concerning this theme as well. However, for now you may check the press release web page of the festival.

I usually do not blog casual design studio portfolio sites and so, however, the portfolio site of Modernista is hillarious. Everything is on web 2.0, site is just an invisible interface. It is just a gateway and it is a good evidence to show how social services are powerful today.

I decided to make some interviews with good artists/designers/thinkers and publish them at this blog to open some discussion, exchange the ideas and maybe create some vibration among different people in the field. This serie is not going to be the ‘most serious’ interviews, however, I am hoping that we will make some nice chats with friends. So the first interview is already online. It was a very nice interview with Neil Freeman from fakeisthenewreal.org. We talked on mapping the data, thinking on public spaces and urban culture. Check it out now!

“Newspapers tell you about the world; magazines tell you about their world.”

This great quote is from a great article on good magazine. It is about the *Smartest, Prettiest, Coolest, Funniest, Most Influential, Most Necessary, Most Important, Most Essential, etc. magazines. Other than the article, the list is quite good for print designers to check out all of the magazines that has been published through the history.

One thing that surprises me, is the position of “national geographic”(11st), at least because of its history it deserves a better place, though.

Via type for you.

The image above is a piece from project called “very low quality jpgs” by fake is the new real.

Other than this one, there is a bunch of clever ideas for small projects realized by them(?) such as “symbolic alphabet” and “subways at scale” etc. I am not sure whether they are a group or a single person, however, I really loved the ideas and application of them on the web. Please share with us if you know something more on them.

The History of Branding is an information website on how most powerful brands started. It includes important details and notes of the histories of several brands. I found it quite useful for a designer. It is important to know details especially when you work on corporate identity.

There are some nice and strange details, for example:

IKEA was founded in Älmhult, Sweden, in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad, then 17. The company name is a composite of the first letters in his name in addition to the first letters of the names of the property and the village in which he grew up: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. This acronym is incidentally similar to the Finnish word oikea.

The very first item sold on eBay was Omidyar’s broken laser pointer for $13.83. Astonished, he contacted the winning bidder and asked if he understood that the laser pointer was broken. In his responding email, the buyer explained: “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.”

Ray Kroc, at 52 years old, invested his entire life savings to become the exclusive distributor of a milk shake maker called the Multimixer. Hearing about the McDonald’s hamburger stand in California owned by Dick & Mac McDonald running eight Multimixers at a time, he packed up his car and headed West. It was 1954. Ray Kroc had never seen so many people served so quickly. He pitched the idea of opening up several restaurants to the McDonald brothers, convinced that he could sell eight of his Multimixers to each and every one. “Who could we get to open them for us?” Dick McDonald said. Well,” Kroc answered, “what about me?”

A new comics origin movie, 300, will be coming to theatres in march. It is based on the epic graphic novel by Frank Miller and directed by Zack Snyder. The trailers of the movie looks very promising in terms of story and visual atmosphere. A blog on cinema, called Solace in cinema, compares the screens from trailer with the drawings in the original comic book. It is a very well done comparison.

My interest in the film ‘300′ is bordering on obsession. I thought it might be interesting to see how closely Zack Snyder is sticking to the original comic books. Pretty damn closely it appears.

Pretty same idea applied for sincity by filmrot before.

YWFT -the famous shop for designers- just announced a new article, Forecast: cloudy, by Willi Kunz is online for their Profile Magazine. Willi Kunz is the author of Typography: Macro- and Microaesthetics (1998) and Typography: Formation and Transformation (2003) and obviously this is a good article o read.

You may also reach the other articles & interviews of Profile Magazine here.

Now, This is a nice idea! by Saumel Bebbington.
“A typeface based on each letters frequency of use in the English dictionary, letters with the same frequency are paired by colour.”