spider

Very Funny.

Micah Lidberg

One of my favourite illustrators at this moment Micah Lidberg. (and I'm not alone). His moods are dark and fantastic. His sense of line, color and shape is astonishing. He's also a great typographer, or actually a great letterer.

cool speedy animation about motivation

Interesting story too!

Walter Naeslund on a worrysome trend

The wise Walter Naeslund writes:

As I read in Dagens Nyheter about “virals” being the advertising trend of the decade, I feel a slight jolt of motion sickness as I sit on the train from Stockholm to Gothenburg. I can’t tell if it’s the tilting of the high speed X2000 train or if it’s actually a jolt of worry for our future recruitment to Honesty and the reputation of our business.

The clownvertising virus has truly spread like the swineflu across the board now that viral marketing has reached the radar of the mainstream advertising agencies and creatives are celebrated across the board for creating highly irrelevant YouTube hits instead of boosting their client’s bottom line. This in turn creates “heroes” among young creatives for precisely the wrong reasons, and has them filling their portfolios with “fun”. I don’t want to get a bunch of people here banging on my door wanting to create films with the sole purpose of grabbing YouTube-views by use of humor, and where every strategic positioning is going to be the “fun”-position to excuse the use of humor as a shortcut to major traffic. This is wrong.

The challenge is not in creating the maximum number of views on YouTube. It’s to build brands and move goods out the door, while ALSO creating real value (can in some cases be humor) that can be the vehicle for these goals. It’s a non-zero-sum-game where everybody wins, where value is created and where efficiency is increased. Much like the evolutionary origins of social psychology and trade. Some of these creatives would really need to get a book on business and one on evolutionary psychology for christmas. Maybe we can do a viral fund raiser on Facebook?

I couldn't agree more

original article here. This post for my personal reference only

jobs interview transcript

from an article by Brier Dudley, orginal article here:

"
Swisher jumped right into the interview with Jobs, asking for his thoughts on Apple surpassing Microsoft's market capitalization last week.

"For those of us who have been in the industry a long time it's surreal," Jobs said. "But it doesn't matter very much, it's not what's important ... it's not why any of our customers buy our products. So I think it's good for us to keep that in mind."

Walt Mossberg kept up the pressure, asking Jobs about his controversial decision not to support Adobe's Flash technology on mobile devicies and how it's affecting consumers and developers.

Jobs said Apple's makes technical decisions to support what it sees as emerging technologies such as its early decision to support the 3.5-inch computer disc over the 5-inch floppy disc and to drop serial ports on the Mac. He said Apple believes Flash is on the "wane" and HTML5 is in its spring phase.

"Sometimes when we get rid of things like the floppy disc drive in the first iMac people call us crazy," Jobs said.

"Or at least premature," Walt said.

"No they call us crazy," Jobs said.

Mossberg said consumers may not agree it was the best choice when their iPads show Web sites with holes where Flash items should be displayed.

"What if people say the iPad is crippled in this respect," he asked, drawing a heated reaction from Jobs.

"Things are packages of emphasis," Jobs said. "Some things are emphasized in a products, some things are not done as well in a product ... so different people make different choices."

Jobs said Apple has "the courage of our convictions."

"We're going to take the heat because we want to make the best product for customers. .... they're paying us to make those choices. That's what a lot of customers pay us to do - to try to make the best products we can. If we succeed, they'll but them. If we don't, they won't. I.... so far I have to say that people seem to be liking iPads. We've sold one every three seconds since launching it."

Swisher and Mossberg also pressed Jobs to discuss the more tense relationship Apple now has with Google. They also tried to pin him down on whether Apple will replace Google as the search service on its mobile devices - some have speculated Microsoft's Bing may take its place - but Jobs sidestepped the question.

What changed in the relationship between Apple and Google?

"They decided to compete with us and so they are," Jobs said.

How about PC operating systems with Google's Chrome O.S.?

"Chrome is not really baked yet so we'll see," Jobs said.

Asked about Apple's long platform war with Microsoft, Jobs said he never thought about the competition that way.

"We never saw ourselves in a platform war with Microsoft," Jobs said. "Maybe that's why we lost - we saw ourselves buiding the best computers we could build."

Jobs also drew laughs talking about why he prefers the consumer market over the business enterprise market.

"What I love about the consumer market and I always hated about the enterprise market is we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it and every person votes for it themselves. They vote yes or no," Jobs said.

"The enterprise market, it's not so simple - the people that use the product don't decide for themselves. The people that make those decisions sometimes are confused."

Their conversion elicited an interesting story about the genesis of the iPad. Jobs said he'd asked his team to develop some kind of display he could type on early in the decade and they produced an amazing touchscreeen system. Scrolling and other features made him think, "my god, we can build a phone out of this."

Phones were a more important market so the tablet was shelved while the iPhone was created.

"When we got our wind back and thought we could take on something next, (we) pulled the tablet off the shelf, took everything we learned from the phone and went to work on the tablet."

Jobs predicted that PCs going to be used less and less as new computing devices emerge. PCs - including Macs and Windows systems - "are going to be like trucks but they're going to be used by one out of x people."

What the dominant computing device will be is unclear.

"Is it the iPad? Who knows. Will it happen five years or seven years from now, who knows?" Jobs said. "But I think we're headed that direction."

Swisher asked Jobs about future plans for the iPad and how it could help the struggling news industry. Jobs said he hopes that he's helping newspapers "find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid, so they can keep their news gathering organizations intact."

"Even more than magazines, some of these newspapers - the news gathering and editorial organizations are really important," Jobs said. "I don't want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself. I think we need editorial more than ever right now."

Apple's also going to enter the advertising business itself, but Jobs said the company won't make a lot of money with the new venture. He said the objective is to help developers make money so they can keep providing free or low-cost apps.

"We're not going to make much money in the ad business," he said. "We're doing it for our developers."

During questions from the audience, Jobs told an iPhone owner frustrated by poor network service in Houston that improvements are on the way. Jobs said he's been told that the network is being upgraded with faster connections and switches and improvements should be there by the end of summer.

Jobs said he's been told that "things - when they start to fix them - get worse before they get better. If you believe that, things should be getting a lot better soon."

News Corp. Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch opened the event, recalling how Steve Jobs appeared at the first D conference eight years ago. Jobs talked then about misunderstandings between technology and content creators, a gap that Murdoch believes has since narrowed.

The worlds of technology and content have moved much closer since our first gathering," Murdoch said. "In fact sometimes the line between them has been completely erased."

Content is also key to technology products such as music players and e-readers, Murdoch said.

"You need content too - after all, what is an iPod without music?"

Murdoch used his introduction to assert the need for content to be paid for online, and noted that the Wall Street Journal is growing circulation despite it's subscription approach. He also noted that the paper already has more than 10,000 iPad subscribers.

"We need a fair price for our content," he said. "There's no great secret here. In response to skeptics who say technology is killing the news business, I believe technology is ushering in a new golden age for those willing to embrace it."

the wonderful work of Sarah Charlesworth

These series by artist Sarah Charlesworth are based on newspaper. By blacking out certain parts of the original lay-out she leaves us with a different sort of "news" (is truth). The reconfigured works are show the essence of a medium and confront us with an aesthetic and editorial bias. It reminds me of the concrete poetry of Paul van Ostaijen, though I think his interest is more in the language itself en in the inherent eclectic beauty of the early newspapers.

beck, tweedy, kotch & more friends sing All Come To Meet Her from Skip Spence, the other tracks from Becks record club are also worth checking out.

Record Club: Skip Spence "All Come To Meet Her" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

beautiful musical instruments of Harry Partch (1968)

This clip I found on Beck's fantastic Site.

I want this

Ain't this the dearest fox? The  attachment of the legs to the body is like fingers to a hand. And besides that the poor thing is either bashful or slightly ashamed of killing a wee chicken.

cool shirt

Check out this cool shirt made of Lacoste logo's, for sale here

map works

funny maps by Christoph Niemann.

world street

this is an intersting idea; what would the ideal street look like, if you could pick the best stores, bars, homes etc from all over the world and line them up in a long street? The idea is better than the execution, but google street view could maybe help out here? Since it's now limited to the dull reality of registration, users could maybe compose their ideal world? Combine bits and pieces to create new parks, villages, countries even?

A Splendid Eye

Eric Tabuchi has a splendid eye for the tragic melodramatic, tragi-comic everyday theatre of abandonded objects. Artifacts of human behaviour. Not a single "person" appears in his photo's, but the buildings, objects, debris and trash become characters. really beaytiful work, check it out.

camera axe trigger

the post made use  used the camera axe.

see article here

drop capturing

the beauty of drops photographed with the use of technology. here's a set up instruction

Massimo Vignelli's Bicentennial Poster

What a fantastic Typgraphic design.

i want this!

Unfolded designed this really cool Tea Pot. I am not much for Tea, coffee is more my drink when it comes to hot beverages. Still, I wouldn't mind having this polygone tea pot. It was based on the first complex 3d model:
The Utah teapot is a 3D model created in 1975 by Martin Newell which has become a standard reference object in the computer graphics community. It is a simple, round, partially concave mathematical model of an ordinary teapot. The objective of Utanalog by Unfold is to return the iconographic teapot to its roots as a piece of functional dish-ware while showing its status as an icon of the digital world.
On the website they state it's for sale and has been actually produced. I sent a mail about the price, though I am afraid it will be quite expensive.

Fantastic Type Illustrations

Really nice imaginitive typography: Alex Trochut

De Groene Amsterdammer - Verbale oorlog

De Groene Amsterdammer - Verbale oorlog