Over at the brilliant Signal vs. Noise, there’s an interesting post on some rather unknown but super insightful communications theory. Here it is, verbatim: Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. He has studied, among other things, readability of texts, organizations and communication within them, and the general theory of communication. His laws [...]

Seriously, this video is the dope! From three legged leg, of course. Check the video here.

So we were asked to design the name, logo, interior, website, and experience for a new restaurant here in San Francisco’s Mission District. Super fucking fun. It’s called Beretta, and they serve up gourmet pizzas and fancy-ass cocktails you won’t find anywhere else, except for maybe a Hemingway novel. We’re psyched they’re blowing up. Oh [...]

And just in case yer new around here: Jim Coudal runs the brilliant and playful Chicago design studio known as Coudal Partners.

via boingboing.

This is fuckin smart. I’d love to see it implemented. And I can’t help but take this idea even further: what if we combined location-aware technology like RFID or GPS with a networked database of images so that the figures in red were drawn to look like the driver’s loved ones? Yikes! via notcot.

On the very very slight chance you don’t already know about the torture—I mean, “interrogation”—technique called waterboarding. Launched by Amnesty International. Created by a firm called Drugstore. Wow.

Ok, so we just learned something that might help young freelancers and the people who hire them: Design students are used to thinking of their assignments as homework. Homework is something you do on your own. And asking for the teacher’s help is not really the way the game is played—it’s seen as a sign [...]

Check out the awesomeness of this old Atari game packaging. Note the amazing copy too. There’s a whole bunch more here.

Check out what happens when ferrofluid (iron particles suspended in liquid) is put in a magnetic field (like an MRI). Make sure you watch the second half!!! What do those shapes look like to you?

This is the “preliminary traverse map of the primary landing site.” Er, I mean, this is the path Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took on their very first walk on the moon, overlaid on a soccer field. If you wanna see which path Buzz walked vs which path Neil took, all the details can be [...]

Recently, we blogged our dismay at discovering that design students today don’t really know what design means today. That blog post generated a lot of conversation around what “communication design” means, and this made us realize that a definitive definition might be useful. So let’s break it down: Communication = creation of shared meaning. Design [...]

We’ve talked before about design as a process for solving problems, not an end product. ideasonideas‘s got another good way to talk about it. Here’s a little sample: This kind of design forces us to see ourselves as intermediaries, who facilitate defined outcomes. To do this, we consider and weigh business, marketing, communications (and other) [...]

So Nokia’s pushing their new N-Gage software with this pretty cool, musta-taken-forever-to-make, stop-action movie/game. You’ll like that it’s pong (one of the first computer games I ever played, only with people as the game pieces. You may not like that it’s a lot of work for very little payoff. Still, free content is a great [...]

The good people at the Small Planet Institute—who helped us spread the word about replate—have launched a new website to help reduce climate change by offering help and info about how we can easily change our food, shopping, and eating habits. Go check it out.

Check out the Rather Difficult Font Game. I know that some of you anal designers out there will a) not rest until you’ve gotten everyone of these correct, or b) get everyone of these correct on the very first try and then make fun of those who didn’t.

Seriously, I’ve got no idea what this is.

So a few weeks ago, we participated in the CCA Career Expo. They gave us a booth alongside a shitload of other local creative shops and set the students loose on us. I never went to any of the job fairs when I was in school, but I assume that they’re kinda like this: students [...]

So Al Gore commissioned a new logo for his non-profit advocacy group, the Alliance for Climate Protection. You have to applaud the fact that he donated his Nobel prize money and then some to the cause. But mostly, I’m inclined to believe that it’s really fucking hard for a simple logo to spur people to [...]

Oh joy! You have to write a resume and cover letter. You have to package yourself up for people you’ve never met, and if you don’t get it right, you get to move out of your apartment and sleep on your fat cousin’s couch. And when you apply for your next apartment, if you ever [...]