Brand New

Brand New is a Speak Up spin-off displaying opinions, and focusing solely, on corporate and brand identity work. It is a division of UnderConsideration. The blog compares older brand identities and their recently updated versions. The deconstructions of the logos is sharp, educated and catty. Kind of like a carload of really smart designers, home for the holidays, driving around their hometown riffing on all the strip mall signage.

Posted on Jan.20.2007:

I have never eaten at Hardee's or Carl's Jr, mostly because I rarely eat at fast food burger places but partly because if you asked me to name five Quick Service Restaurants (QSR for short) focusing on burgers I would have a hard time getting past McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's. In fact, it wasn't until today, while googling around, that I finally made the connection that the faux hot commercial with Paris Hilton soaping up a Bentley was for Carl's Jr. And for Hardee's. Apparently my brand neurons never made a full synapse between these two places and Paris. Or that Hardee's was the crazies that were pushing the 1420-calorie burger earlier this century. Perhaps the reason is that I'm not their target audience: Young, hungry guys. I guess I am the three things: Relatively young, sometimes hungry and genderly a guy. But when put together, I prefer to disassociate from my brethren. And, hopefully, this too explains why I can't bear the sight of these new logos and much less comprehend how "research showed that the new logos were seen as classier, more unique, more appealing and more attractive overall."

Fake Model Photography

from Receding Hairline:

With a very little effort, you can take existing photographs of everyday scenes and make it look like they're actually of miniature models.

It doesn't take much to fool the mind of the viewer, but there are a few basic rules you can follow to help convince your audience that they're looking at a railway set rather than the real world; see the section on picking the right photo at the bottom of this page. You'll need a copy of Photoshop CS or later to follow this tutorial.

Sean Starwars

From our friends at Yee Haw Industries:

The UTK Print Club is happy to announce the visit of Outlaw Printmaker Sean Star Wars. Sean Star Wars will be giving an artist lecture as part of the visiting artist series at the University of Tennessee. His lecture will be at 7:00pm on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 in room 111 of the Art and Architecture Building on the UT campus.

Sean Star Wars received his M.F.A. in 1999 from Louisiana State University and has taught printmaking at several universities including University of Southern Mississippi, Tulane University and has conducted a relief print workshop at Frogman's Print Workshop in Vermillion, SD. Star Wars has been included in many group exhibitions as well as solo exhibitions and his work is in permanent collections including Amity Art Foundation, Philadelphia Print Center, and New Orleans Museum of Art. He currently lives in Laurel,
Mississippi.

http://seanstarwars.com/

Social Software Montage

LOGO2.0 part I, originally uploaded by Stabilo Boss.

Like a coral reef filled with brilliantly colored tropical fish, this montage shows a mere snapshot fo the number of social web apps in the Web 2.0 aquarium.

Design = Business Catalyst or Financial Drain?

Stretching back in time before the era of the printing press or the pyramids, there has been a war raging within the human race--a war between accountants and designers.

From the FastCompany blog:

No Accounting for Design

Is market share a meaningful measure of design's financial performance? You'd think so, judging by the number of design consultancies that use increases in sales and market share to trumpet the "success" of their redesigns. The Industrial Designers Society of America even uses market share and sales as two important metrics for its prestigious Design & Business Catalyst award, which recognizes "market and financial performance" so as to demonstrate to executives "the value of design."

But while market share might be meaningful to designers, it has far less resonance with CFOs, the ultimate arbiters of design investments. Julie Hertenstein and Marjorie Platt, two Northeastern University accounting professors who've attempted to quantify the contribution that design makes to the bottom line, argue that market share, by itself, doesn't really mean much. "Market share is just that, a share˜it's measured as a percentage," says Hertenstein. "If you can't measure it in dollars, it doesn't show up on the accounting statement." read full post>>

Changing the World is Not Enough

The Skoll Foundation, started by Jeff Skoll of Ebay, is focused on changing the game for social change and entrepreneurism.

In fact, the label "social entrepreneur" is the nom de guerre in the current war on poverty, disease, conflict and intolerance, with the long-time foot soldiers finally gaining popular acclaim.

Last year, the man who is oft cited as the prototype of the modern social entrepreneur was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize: Muhammad Yunus, founder and manager of Grameen Bank and its growing family of social venture businesses in Bangladesh.

Fast Company has dedicated entire issues to celebrating Social Capitalists who've used business savvy and social conscious to create successful ventures that reap an ROI tracked in the new gold standard of success: The Triple Bottom Line. Business school students are emailing their parents, declaring that they are going to take their $200,000 education and start a business selling eyeglasses to Haitians. Oh, and make a ton of money doing it.

Heck, even the Oscars were declared green this year! [details]

With all this good press, an very self-reflective and worried conversation is taking place on-line at the Skoll Foundation's project site, The Social Edge. Social entrepreneurs are having a moment of doubt as to the depth of this perceived global change.

As the topic itself becomes more popular, more mainstream, more Hollywood, will this spotlight yield practical leaders who can effectively leverage the emergent power of social media to mobilize decentralized activity in combination with true political will to lead change in policies and regulations on a global scale?

Changing the World is Not Enough
Is social entrepreneurship ready for the real challenge?
by Social Edge

As a social entrepreneur, I worry. Changing the world through the work of one social entrepreneur at a time is not good enough. Improving life for even one person is worthy. It changes the world…one heartbeat at a time. And sooner or later, as life for enough people is changed for the positive we will reach a tipping point beyond which the entire world will change itself into a better place. I believe this will happen, given time.

But what if it doesn’t happen soon enough? What if we don’t have the time it will take? What if the world tips the other way first? Some days, for every tip toward a better world there is an opposite and greater tip toward a horrific world. What if those days overpower the good days?

A new wilderness is engulfing us. How we see this forest for its trees and who leads us through it could make the difference between life and death for civilization as we know it.

Intervention: Genetic Pollution, Smart Breeding and the Risks of Unregulated Transgenesis.

As a kid in the 70's, I remember walking the shores of Lake Michigan and dodging the rotting piles of dead fish covered in maggots.

These small, silver fish, called alewives, grew in unchecked mega-pods because of the lack of a top predator in the lakes. Lake trout were essentially wiped out around the same time by overfishing and the invasion of the exotic, rapacious sea lamprey. For a time, alewives, which often exhibit seasonal die offs, washed up in putrid layers on the shorelines of the Great Lakes.

There was (and is) a crazy cascade of invasive species that were intentionally introduced to solve the problem. Each intentional introduction of a foreign species creates a new ecological issue that permanently altered the ecology of the Great Lakes. The most recent intruder? Massive Asian carp that can grow to be 80 to 100 pounds. They're ravenous eaters, consuming up to 40 percent of their own body weight in plankton each day. And they're bullies, pushing out weaker, native species. (Listen to NPR story.)

So... the prospect of having genetically modified organisms and micro-organisms invade my personal ecology fills me with dread. Even if measures of accountability are imposed, once the damage is done, there is no point of return. The latest book by science writer, Denise Caruso, details the threats of introducing new organisms--whether on the nano, the micro and the macro-levels--into the fragile ecology of our planet. Ecological catastrophes that would dwarf the breech of New Orleans' levees.

These potential disasters would, in the words of Caruso, "create stewardship challenges for generations into the future that are already far beyond our present scientific knowledge or capabilities."

From Worldchanging:

Denise Caruso holds a somewhat legendary status among tech journalists. A columnist for the NY Times (her old Information Industries column was a must-read for years, while her new column Re:Framing just kicked off on a bang with a piece titled Someone (Other Than You) May Own Your Genes) and founder of the Hybrid Vigor Institute (an NGO dedicated to facilitating interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to scientific problem solving), it's not going too far to say that Caruso's work has helped shape our society's thinking about the future of science.

That future may be riskier than we like to think. In her new book, Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet, Caruso lays out in chilling detail exactly why even (perhaps especially) those of us who are strong supporters of science and innovation ought to be extremely concerned about the unintended consequences of contemporary biotechnological industrial research.

Damn Cool Pics

Lots more fun photos like this. It's like the old "I'm crushing your head" skit from Kids in the Hall. 'Cept different.

Duct Tape Wallet Kit

From Josh Rubin's Cool Hunting
by Ami Kealoha, 16 February 2007

It doesn't get anymore DIY than a duct tape wallet. But simple as they may seem, there's a right way and a wrong way. MyDuctbills Duct Tape Wallet Kits comes with step-by-step instructions written by the pros behind dbclay, the Portland-based company that makes quality duct and (more recently) gaffers tape wallets.

For $20, you get a booklet and all the materials you'll need, including three strips of colored duct tape for decoration.

Pick one up from myDuctbills. If you'd rather leave the crafting to the experts, you can still get a ductbill (the original duct tape wallet that preceded dbclay's gaffers tape wallets) here.

The Monastic Help Desk

After a year of working on MissingLink with GradientLabs, and trying to introduce it to the larger graphics and facilitation world, I identify with this Old School Brother of the Monastic Help Desk.

[Thanks to Mark Frisse]

The Biggest Valentine: Salvation Mountain

Salvation Mountain, originally uploaded by Eye-Appeal.

This pretty much sums up what I plan on doing for my retirement: Making a big, crazy colorful mountain in the middle of nowhere.

Salvation Mountain was created by Leonard Knight, if you would like to learn more go to www.roadsideamerica.com/.

In the mid-1980s, Leonard Knight, with the aim of spreading God's word, began building a hot air balloon from bed sheets. In bold letters, he painted “God is Love” on the balloon’s face. He planned to float it high above the earth where all could see its message. Attempts to get the balloon airborne failed, however, and Knight was left in the Southern California desert with a pile of rotting linen. It was this aborted mission that led Knight to his eventual calling, the 20-year construction of Salvation Mountain. Today, Knight’s mountain is a colorful array on a neutral canvas. Built of adobe and covered in over 100,000 gallons of donated paint, Salvation Mountain forms part of the cultural landscape.

See more at PBS Travelogue.

Chimps in Thailand

Sita Magnuson sends us greetings (and some stellar pics!) from her scribing gig in Thailand.

Check out some of her fun and exotic photos.

FLICKR SET: http://flickr.com/photos/hoodsie/sets/72157594522832680/
SLIDESHOW: http://flickr.com/photos/hoodsie/sets/72157594522832680/show/

Digital Anthropology's Web 2.0

As graphic facilitators, the tools that allow us to synthesize ideas into images--whether static or dynamic--are expanding exponentially.

In this video thought piece hosted on YouTube, Kansas State Anthropology professor Michael Welsch uses the simple, cheap digital tools at hand to weave an engaging narrative of the birth of Web 2.0.

[ via Jarrell McAlister ]

Welsch expresses the miracle of that birth, writing: "We're teaching the machine, and the machine is us. Time to rethink the world. The network is the machine; the machine is us."Digital Ethnography is a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty

dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital
ethnography.

He literally draws the path of communication evolution from handwritten, linear text to non-linear hypertext, HTML, XML, RSS and mash-ups.This is the most elegant and engaging description of where media is today. And to think, he did it without using a single bullet point!Currently Wesch is launching the Digital Ethnography working group

at Kansas State University to examine the impacts of digital technology
on human interaction.

The first outcome of this work was a short video called "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us." The video was released on YouTube on January 31st 2007 and quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere.

The Future Perfect Sense

My New Year's resolution is this: To be more observant.

Recently, my family downshifted from living in a city neighborhood behind two national sports team stadiums (oh, the fireworks--they never ceased!) to living in a little house on a 23-acre farm in rural Tennessee.

Now, I find myself walking and listening again in a way that had been degraded by the rhythm of taxi-airport-work-airport-taxi-home. This morning as I walked along a muddy gravel road, instead of the dull thuds of a souped up Lincoln Navigator thumping Hip Hop beats, I heard what turned out to be two teenage boys galloping up the ridge on horseback.

Jan Chip is an extreme observer. As Principal Researcher in the Mobile HCI Group at Nokia Research, Jan divides his time between running user studies and developing new applications, services and products. As he writes, "If I do my job right, you'll be using the product 3 to 15 years from now."
In the majority of culture that his team studied, three objects were considered essential across all participants, cultures and genders were keys, money and mobile phone.

(Read Jan's essay Why We Carry Mobile Phones).
But his job (and personal obsession) is observing The Now through the eyes of an ethnologist. Whether beer bottles discarded at Tibetan holy sites, playfully designed rat traps in Asian airports, or the menu of a Chinese "greasy spoon" (rats again!), or international rubbish collection norms, Jan's eye catches the easy-to-miss details and strings them into deep cultural patterns.

His blog, Future Perfect, is inspired by the traveling research required by his day job, but Jan admits, "The material that you see on this site is what I do in my spare time - the stuff that inspires or challenges me, helps me understand how the future might turn out."

Make Mag's EduVideos

Make Magazine brings you weekend projects of stuff you can make at home.

I found this too late for the holidays, but this video demonstrates three techniques for creating small holiday cards: aluminum foil, woodblock prints and writing with light!

[via Blip.tv]

Rushkoff's Reality Tunnel

This winter, Doug Rushkoff experienced a series of changes, confrontations and revelations that refocused his understanding of "value".

As a media critic and author, he has been writing books for 15 years and has been hosting an online community of one sort or another for nearly as long.

In a short period of time, Rushkoff was challenged to a duel by a member of the “psychedelic elite” and was shaken to learn that one of his heroes of the 60s, Robert Anton Wilson, author of Cosmic Trigger and Prometheus Rising, was near death and near bankruptcy.

In his article, The Light at the End of the Reality Tunnel, in Arthur Magazine, you can read Doug's reflections on the free market ecology based on reputation, the danger of reality tunnels, the power of thoughts, and the value of communities over heroes.

Good News from Kabul!

(From our friend, world-record holder and former Alphachimp intern, the Jolly Juggler himself: Zach Warren)

The children in Kabul want to wish you Merry Christmas themselves (see video).

A special thanks goes to Jay Cole and the West Virginia Dept. of Education, and to all the individuals whose donations have helped build a new juggling gym for children at the circus in Kabul. The plexiglass structure allows children to play in the light, even during the darkest times of the year.

If you are planning your charitable giving for 2007, please consider a gift to help the MMCC children. I'm making a donation too. Tax-deductible contributions can be made online.

Remembering the blessings of 2006, and wishing you the best for 2007!!

(Click here to listen to a podcast an interview with Zach on his experiences working with the Mini Mobile Children's Circus in Afghanistan.)

Pantone Pen Print

[submitted by Jim Nuttle in DC]
Daniel Eatock sets his latest pen print experiment in the second ALSO* commission of The Aram Gallery.

Curator Daniel Charny describes the work:

Eatock’s predictive construct removes the artist’s hand from the pen, reverses the role of the paper, and allows its characteristics and positioning to become the most influential aspect of the work. Balanced on their nibs each of a set of 288 felt tip pens releases ink that expands into the layers of a ream of paper, making each layer of this multi-print different. This predicted variety is translated into a gambling tension for the consumer that chooses to purchase an unknown result on an unseen layer.

Dimensions: SRA1 640 x 900mm
Edition Size: 73 original prints

– One complete set of Letraset TRIA Pantone markers
– arranged in the colour spectrum
– left for one month
– resting on their nibs
– on a stack of 500 SRA1 sheets
– 70gsm uncoated white paper

The edition number was determined by the number of sheets the ink bled through from the possible 500.

The numbering of each sheet corresponds to the position it was within the stack and also determined its value.

The final sheet the ink reached, (furthest from the top) was numbered 1 / 73 and valued at £1, the one above numbered 2 / 73 and valued at £2 etc. The top sheet (the sheet the pens rested on) was numbered 73 / 73 and valued at £73 [SOLD OUT!]

Pantone Pen Print

Kevin Kelly's True Films 2.0

As a contributor to The Whole Earth Catalog in the early seventies, and as founding editor of WIRED Magazine, Kevin Kelly has been a collector of the cool and the esoteric. We continue to glean precious nuggets from his current on-line catalog, Cool Tools.

True Films 2.0 is the second version of Kevin's reviews of the best documentaries and "factuals" available. This time he reviews 150 of the best true films and list two dozen others which he deems only "good."

For each film Kevin presents 4 or 5 screen shots, and captions, snagged from the film to give you some idea of their texture.

Kevin designed the book in color, but you can buy a black and white softcover version from Lulu.com, where it is the cheapest, or for a bit more from Amazon, where it is the easiest to order. Or you can buy a luxurious 156-page full color softcover version from Lulu. Or you can buy a dirt cheap color version as a PDF download, and get it instantly. In a few weeks you'll be able to get versions for e-book readers and PDAs.

• PDF Download [ $2 via PayPal | $1.88 via Lulu ]
• Black and white softcover book: $10 [ via Lulu ]
• Color softcover book: $30 [ via Lulu ]
  

Visit the official True Films website to see all of Kevin Kelly's reviews at www.truefilms.com.

From Kevin Kelly:

Now here is the thing. In each mode, I make exactly the same profit: $1.50 per book. In an experiment in new publishing I have priced each version $1.50 above my costs. So the different prices merely reflect the different costs of that venue. This means I don't care which edition you choose! Whether you buy the $2 PDF version, or the $30 color Lulu print version, or order from Amazon, I make exactly the same $1.50 per book. As I add other options for purchase the same process will apply: my total markup will be $1.50 above my costs.
Do I need to mention there is the free website version? Not as handy as a book, but updated with my latest additional reviews. However, I'm partial to the book version. It is a great browse, very concentrated and accessible and as it says on the cover "Perfect for Netflix."

-- KK

Best Small Art Gallery: moxie DaDA

Pittsburgh - Best Small Art Gallery: moxie DaDA - Main Feature - Main Feature Extra - Pittsburgh City Paper

BY BILL O'DRISCOLL

Conventional wisdom says the blank canvas is every artist's nightmare. For an art-gallery owner, though, it might be another story.

Christine Whispell, at least, seems right at home in the tabula rasa space where she and her colleagues are preparing to transplant moxie DaDA, their 2-year-old gallery.

The new venue is located in The Firehouse Ceramics Studios, an actual old North Side firehouse. And on the gallery's half of the first floor, beneath the high ceilings and fluorescent lights, three big wooden frames -- painted white and hung by chains on the bare brick wall -- suggest naked canvas.

The Arch Street gallery's grand re-opening, on Jan. 6, will be the latest chapter in a story that began when Whispell, a native of upstate New York, moved here in 1994 to attend The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. In 2004, after seven years as a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review news artist, Whispell left to combine her love of art with a long-held desire to run a community space.