abbyy finereader sprint plus Buy Adobe Audition 3 download microsoft streets and trips free interactive check boxes i adobe captivate Buy Adobe Premiere Elements 8 microsoft streets and trips 2005 updates adobe audition surround encoding digital output Buy ABBYY FineReader 10 Professional Edition adobe audition for radio adobe premiere elements preview error Buy Adobe Captivate 4 burning mp3 cd from adobe audition tutorial adobe audition 1.5 Buy Microsoft Streets and Trips 2010 adobe premiere elements dvd templates

Zuckerman’s Bird’s Eye View

“When you take anything out of its context and put it against a white background, you see something different” explains photographer Andrew Zuckerman. “It forces all attention on the subject….It’s the absence of space and color…in the end, all you’re left with is the form and range of colors contained in the subject.”

Like his previous books “Creature” and “Wisdom,” Zuckerman’s latest book, “Birds,” is shot entirely against a white background. Using a Leaf Aptus 75S digital camera along with high-speed strobe lighting, Zuckerman caught details that would be impossible to see if the birds were photographed in their natural environment. Instead, Zuckerman set up a mobile studio, mostly at zoos, in four countries and coaxed 74 species of birds into the camera’s range. The result is microscopically crisp detail and dazzling nuances of color. To see more Zuckerman birds and a behind-the-scenes video of the photo shoot, visit Show-Off, a virtual nonprofit gallery conceived and curated by San Francisco/Newark, UK-based design firm Dowling Duncan.

Read More »

Posted in Photography, Publishing | Comments (0) | Permalink | del.icio.us

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Photoshop

As we in the United States celebrate Independence Day (aka Fourth of July), those of us in design communications can marvel at the freedoms that technology now allow. The living photograph here by Mole and Thomas was taken decades before the invention of Photoshop or even 35mm handheld cameras.

Around 1918, during the height of World War I patriotic fervor, Arthur S. Mole, a British-born photographer based in Zion, Illinois, joined forces with John D. Thomas, a choir director who liked to position choir members to form various religious icons-a talent that made him the perfect photo choreographer for Mole’s grandiose ideas. Together the two set about creating gigantic patriotic symbols by using military personnel essentially as “human pixels” and then photographing them.

Read More »

Posted in Photography, Pop Culture | Comments (1) | Permalink | del.icio.us

Google Stories One Letter at a Time


A clever bit of collaborative advertising between Google and Pixar, the latest Google search story video was timed to the release of “Toy Story 3” and features the familiar voices of Andy’s toys. It runs just one-minute long and is devoid of any fancy animation. A mini-preview of the next “Toy Story,” the video introduces us to key characters and hints at the plot and happy outcome.

Google search stories originally started out as a series of online videos about the product and its users. One search story, “Parisian Love,” got so many hits during the first three months that it played on YouTube that the company decided to break its rule about not running TV ads and aired it on the 2010 Super Bowl. What’s brilliant about the Google search stories are their utter simplicity and charm. The “searchers” always remain faceless and anonymous, yet their stories unfold through letters clicked into the search box, forming words that reveal tales of romance, adventure travel, job changes, health concerns, and personal passions. Viewers become voyeurs to the searchers’ life, yearnings, paranoia, interests, peccadilloes, and wild imagination, following their logic to delightful conclusions. “Every quest is its own story,” claims Google’s YouTube channel, which invites visitors to create their own search story. Actually, that is something we do everyday, often unaware of how much that says about where we are coming from.

Read More »

Posted in Humor | Comments (0) | Permalink | del.icio.us

E-Mook: Buy the Mook to Get the Gift

The e-mook has become all the rage in Japan. An enhanced version of a mook (cross between a magazine and a book), the e-mook, published by Takarajimasha, expands the hybrid concept a step further by including a premium gift inserted in a box attached to every mook. Typically focused on a single trendy fashion label, e-mooks are brand specific, containing articles about the designer, manufacturing process, celebrity customers and a catalog of the latest collection.

Read More »

Posted in Publishing | Comments (0) | Permalink | del.icio.us

Moleskine for e-Book Notetakers

Corporate anthropologists who observe consumer behavior watch out for “workarounds” — solutions that people rig up to overcome shortcomings in the design of a product. These are typically one-off designs that are sometimes ingeniously clever and sometimes humorously strange and barely workable.

In coming up with a Moleskine cover for an Amazon Kindle e-book, Moleskine admits it eavesdropped online when bloggers posted workaround suggestions or wrote wistfully of the satisfaction they got when jotting notes on paper.

“The very idea of this new cover came from ‘notebook hackers,’ who create their own custom-made accessories weaving together paper pages and digital tools,” Moleskine says on its website. “Throughout the web, hundreds of communities and discussions can be found where such Moleskine ‘hackers’ publish their own invention.”

Read More »

Posted in Product Design | Comments (1) | Permalink | del.icio.us

RSA Animate: Moving Motivation

Teachers often write important points on a whiteboard to emphasize things they want students to remember. This is even better.

The Royal Society of Art (RSA) in London has collaborated with illustrator Andrew Park to animate talks given at RSA. This video takes an excerpt from Daniel H. Pink’s lecture on “Drive: The Truth About What Motivates Us” and visually brings Pink’s key points to life. In addition to “Drive,” Pink is the author of “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” — both recommended reading.

Yes, this video is long (10 minutes), but Pink, as always, has thought-provoking things to say, and Park’s sketches are fun and fascinating to view.

Posted in Illustration | Comments (0) | Permalink | del.icio.us

Art Exhibit for the Birds

Placing manmade installation art in a national park seems counterintuitive since national parks were established to preserve and protect wildlife habitat. But the 1,491-acre Presidio is unlike any other national park. Set in San Francisco’s tony residential area, it overlooks the Golden Gate entrance into the Bay, the reason why it served as a military outpost for 219 years (successively under Spain, Mexico and U.S. rule) until Congress closed the army base in 1994 and made it into a national park. Today, the Presidio is a mix of forested hiking trails and historic buildings converted to other uses, including the Walt Disney Family Museum.

Its proximity to urban surroundings has also resulted in some interesting collaborations. In 2009, For-Site Foundation (a nonprofit dedicated to the presentation of art about place) in partnership with the Presidio Trust invited 25 designers, artists and architects worldwide to propose custom-designed habitat for the wildlife living in the park. From there, 11 concepts were chosen for a site-based art exhibition called “Presidio Habitats: For the Place, Of the Place.”

Read More »

Posted in Sustainability | Comments (0) | Permalink | del.icio.us

Sasquatch Festival Posters Leave Big Footprint

The remote reaches of the Columbia River Gorge in the Pacific Northwest are rumored to be Bigfoot country — the place where a gigantic creature, called Sasquatch, has been photographed by people with vivid imaginations and blurred-focus cameras. Every Memorial Day weekend since 2002, music lovers have descended on Bigfoot’s stomping grounds, setting up tents and RV’s near the lake to enjoy the three-day music festival. The closest town is George, Washington (yes, you read right) — population 528, give or take one or two people, about a three hours drive from Seattle and five hours from Portland, Oregon. The music is lively and eclectic, the scenery sublime, and the posters made for each performing act are the next best thing to a Bigfoot sighting. Here are just a few.

Read More »

Posted in Posters | Comments (0) | Permalink | del.icio.us

Barcodes That Make You Smile

You’ve heard of vanity license plates; now think of vanity barcodes. In the U.S., Vanity Barcodes, a business started by Reuben and Yael Miller of Miller Creative in New Jersey, has turned these boring UPC codes into decorative elements. They have a number of barcode designs in stock or will customize one to your preference.

The idea of disguising this inventory management device into something else is believed to have originated in Japan with Design Barcode in 2004. The agency made the barcodes an integral part of the packaging design, tying it into the brand or cleverly building the stripes and digits into a line drawn picture.

As simple as this concept may seem, it’s not one that designers should try on their own. As both Vanity Barcodes and Design Barcode emphasize every manipulated barcode has to be thoroughly tested to make sure it gives accurate readings when passed through a retail scanner.

Posted in Packaging | Comments (1) | Permalink | del.icio.us

ESPN FIFA World Cup Murals

ESPN took a different approach to promoting its coverage of the 2010 FIFA World Cup to be played in South Africa from June 11 to July 11. Through its ad agency, Wieden & Kennedy, New York, it commissioned a Capetown artists group, called Am I Collective, to paint 32 murals that spoofed each of the countries participating in this year’s soccer tournament. The paintings integrated cultural themes, caricatures of real players, and visual commentary on each team’s World Cup standing. Soccer fanatics may understand the symbolic meaning of some of the depictions; the rest of us take pleasure in viewing the images.

USA
This take-off on the famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware during the Revolution against Britain alludes to the fact that Team USA will face a formidable challenge in the opening group stage matches against England. The team USA boat bears the nation’s motto “E Pluribus Unum,” Latin for “Out of Many, One.”

Denmark
The heist film “Ocean’s Eleven” inspired this poster showing coach Martin Olsen and the team from Denmark ready to steal the trophy.

Read More »

Posted in Advertising, Illustration, Posters | Comments (0) | Permalink | del.icio.us

Clever Marketing or Simulated Sex?

We know that sex sells, but at what point do you cross over the line from suggestive to simulated? For the past week, the @Issue editorial team and interested others at Studio Hinrichs have been engaged in an ongoing dispute. My opinion and that of several others (who just happened to all be women) was that this commercial bordered on soft porn (the next ad in this series even more so). The male designers in the office watched the commercial attentively before describing it as “stylish,” “well-designed,” and “clever marketing.”

Read More »

Posted in Advertising | Comments (0) | Permalink | del.icio.us

“Television,” for example

Visual tone of voice – it’s a much-discussed concept in design. How do you let the product, company or service speak for itself through choice of typography, color, pacing, and style of imagery? How do you communicate mood, energy, personality, urgency? What we liked about this video by Beth Fulton of b.fulton multimedia production in Atlanta is that you can feel the frenetic quality of the poem by screenwriter/actor Todd Alcott, even without hearing Alcott’s frantic voice. First look at the video with the sound on and then watch it again with the sound off. Consider how different the poem would have felt if the typeface was more ornate or the pacing was less erratic and staccato. Although the Fulton/Alcott video is more compelling than, say, giving expression to a brand, it does show us that when the visual tone of voice is on target, the message is far more memorable.

Posted in visual communications | Comments (0) | Permalink | del.icio.us

Things Go Better With Coke

If you think you’ve seen this chair before, you have. Emeco’s Navy Chair has been around since 1944. So why was it such a sensation at the 2010 Milan Furniture Fair in April? And why is Design Within Reach hosting events to tout that it has the retail exclusive on the product? It’s because this 21st century model is made from recycled plastic Coke bottles – 111 of them, more or less, hence its name the 111 Navy Chair.

Read More »

Posted in Product Design, Sustainability | Comments (0) | Permalink | del.icio.us
  • Editor: Delphine Hirasuna

    Design Director:
    Kit Hinrichs, Studio Hinrichs

    Designer: An Luc


  •  

    • Blanchette Press

      Blanchette

      The “designer’s printer” of high-end corporate marketing materials and advertising. Consistent winner of the most prestigious printing and design awards.

    • Studio Hinrichs

      SHinrichs

      Studio Hinrichs, founded by Kit Hinrichs in 2009, is a San Francisco-based design consultancy engaged in all aspects of design, including packaging, brand identity, corporate communications, environmental graphics, interactive media, and publishing.

    • Utopia/Appleton Coated

      Visually vibrant, www.curiouspapers.com celebrates “Paper for the Senses”. Treat yourself to rich imagery, vibrant color, and intuitive navigation while you explore the site and discover the Curious Collection.
      click here for more

    • Pentagram Design

      Multidisciplinary design firm with offices worldwide, specializing in graphic design, architecture, interactive and industrial design.

    • Sappi Fine Paper

      Learn how to reduce your carbon footprint. Click here to read about Sappi’s new eQ tools.

    • Designing Brand Identity

      Get the expert scoop on how to use tactical innovation in the design process to create a timeless company identity.
      click here for more

    • Whirlpool

      When it Comes to High-Efficiency,
      the Choice is Yours.

    • Terry Heffernan Films

      Marketing and advertising tabletop photography. Food. Still life. Beverage. Portraits. Commercial films. Books.

  • Hand/Eye Magazine

    Hand/Eye describes people, places, products, projects and ideas that bridge the worlds of art and craft, design and development, culture and commerce, and environment and ethics.

    Scout's Honor

    US Postal Service has just released a commemorative stamp celebrating the 100 anniversary of the Boy Scouts in America, designed by Craig Frazier.

    PUBLIC Bikes

    Rob Forbes, founder of Design Within Reach, has launched PUBLIC, a collection of modern bikes and gear for cyclists who want to ride in style.

    TO Watch

    From designer / architect Tokujin Yoshioka comes a sculptural stainless steel watch for Issey Miyake. The hands are interior faces that move independently to tell the time with hour etched on the outer face.

    Ammunition adds HeartBeats
    for Lady Gaga

    This is the latest extension to Beats by Dr. Dre highly successful headphone line. It's both a fashion accessory and a high-end audio product.

    Mohawk’s Felt&Wire
    Gets New Look

    Mohawk’s blog FeltandWire.com has just been redesigned by Pentagram to accommodate wider coverage of the world of paper, print and design. While you’re there, check out the original paper products at the Felt&Wire Shop too.

    Gung Hay
    Fat Choy!!

    February 14 marks Valentine’s Day and the Chinese New Year. As every year, Seattle designer Juliet Shen created her own New Year’s card, using the calligraphy for tiger to shape the letters in the “tiger” sign off.

    Typographic
    Conundrums
    Conundrum

    Pentagram London partner and typophile Harry Pearce launches his new book, Typographic Conundrums, filled with pages and pages of thought-provoking wordplay.

    Fashion Designer’s Logo Rob_02

    San Francisco-based Rob Duncan Design created a simple and elegant signature for fashion designer Rebecca Beeson by using warm gray, black and white to carve the “r” letterform out of the letterform “b.”

    Gifts of the Street GiftsFromTheStreet

    Sam Smidt, legendary San Francisco Bay Area designer and teacher just released a book, Gifts of the Street, showing some of the thousands of vernacular images collected from the highway.

    Lip Gloss from
    P.S. Aeropostale
    Braley

    This flavored lip gloss in a tin is part of Aeropostale’s new P.S. line for girls aged 7 to 12. Michael Braley Design in New York created the graphic identity, naming system and packaging for P.S.

    The FEED Bag 51AcWvxlkzL._AA280_

    A fashion statement that says you care, the FEED tote - from Feed Projects and the UN World Food Program – is sold to help feed the world’s 400 million starving children. Proceeds from one bag will feed one child in school
    for a year.

    Disney buys Marvel money-marvel

    Disney buys Marvel Entertainment creating a powerhouse of pop icons.

    PACT Underwear Pact2

    A fuseproject-venture that blends design and sustainability to support social and environmental causes.

    Revitalized Logo NewLogoM

    Designed by Lippincott, the updated logo for Meredith interlaces “m’s”, signifying the media and marketing giant’s multi-platform distribution capabilities.

    New SparkChina Awards spark

    With CitiExpo, Spark Design and Architecture Awards will extend its role in the booming China design industry through SparkChina.

    Kid-Size Saarinen Chair chair

    Knoll has introduced a line of furniture for kids, including a scaled-down version of Eero Saarinen’s 1948 Womb Chair.

    The Obsessive
    Images of
    Seymour Chwast
    seymour002

    A book that shows how Seymour Chwast, illustrator and co-founder of Push Pin Studios, transformed the American visual language.

    Jock's Cuba Portraits jock

    When photographer Jock McDonald isn't shooting faces on assignment, he is doing it for pleasure in places like Russia and Cuba. Collectible as art, his Cuba portraits are packaged in "cigar" boxes.

    Lego Architecture lego

    Lego collaborated with architectural artist Adam Reed Tucker to create the Lego Architecture Series for several iconic landmarks.

    iPhone Games
    for Designers
    formationalliance

    From Jason Franzen of FORMation Alliance in Dallas, three app games for designers: Press Check, Eye vs. Eye, and Kern: Space, the Final Font Tier.

    Salt&Pepper Cell saltpepper

    D size battery Salt & Pepper shaker by Antrepo. Made from steel and glass, the power indicators on the side shows the amount of spice inside.

    Y Water yves

    Yves Béhar of Fuseproject has created a boldly-colored water bottle that is also a children's toy.

    Method Hand Wash method

    Another bright idea from designer Karim Rashid – Method’s lightbulb-shaped packaging for an eco-friendly hand wash.

    Signs of the Times signs002a-thumb

    Photographers Randal Ford and Michael O’Brien teamed with writer/musician Joe Ely to focus on the homeless in America, the subject of Pentagram Papers 39.



  • Recommended Links

    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    • quote
    -->