New autechre album
The new Autechre album is now for sale at our favorite download store. I haven’t heard it yet, but check this out:
.. or listen to it here directly:
Highlights in graphic design: german calendar from 1914
I just uploaded a Flickr-Set with 55 photos of a beautiful german calendar for electrical engineering technicians from 1914. Enjoy – and a happy new year!
Eselsohren.
Das sehr gelungene Spreeblick-Redesign bekommt von uns 10 von 10 Eselsohren.
Es ist immer wieder interessant zu beobachten, wie schön (oder überhaupt) gestaltete Online-Publikationen als “print-mässig” bezeichnet werden. Darüber machen wir uns alle ein paar Gedanken über die Feiertage, ok?
John Szabo.
Awwww.. this girl was on my favourite Dinosaur Jr. band-tshirt when i was in highschool (and also the “Green Mind” album cover). Wearing this tshirt in the schoolyard is how i met Max, the american exchange student from Washington D.C. He was wearing the very same shirt and that incident let us become best friends during my last year in highschool till he went back to D.C. I finally met someone i could talk to about music for hours. Lots of fond memories. Yeah, we just talked! :-)
Today i found the new Lost at E Minor newsletter in my inbox and there was an interesting topic about Joseph Szabo in it. He is the photographer of this picture. So i wanted to know more about him.
Joseph Szabo’s subject is adolescence – the all too familiar, twilight time of life between childhood and young adulthood. For 25 years Szabo truthfully documented his teenage students at Malverne High School, Long Island. Taken in the seventies and eighties, these photographs represent a remarkable evocation of that period and yet there remains something timeless and compelling about Szabo’s portrait of the almost grown.
Here is a website about him. There is also a vintage book out there i definitely have to buy!
(BTW the girl’s name is Priscilla and the picture is from1969. I always thought she is too cool for school when i was young and a Dinsosaur Jr. fan..)
Barfin’ Arfin.
Some of you might know Lesley Arfin because of her regular column in Vice magazine where she published her very own diary from age 11 to 25. Honestly i never happened to read her column though i read Vice magazine every once in a while and dare to say that i really enjoy that kind of stuff. When Johannes showed me their newly launched website a few weeks ago (which i think is also genius because it turned into a very entertaining web-tv website) i discovered the “Dear Diary” channel by Lesley Arfin (subtitled “Digging into the past with Lesley Arfin and her celebfriend Chloe”). I was immediately hooked because i am always interested in diaries and teenage angst (and also celebrities to be honest - i need my daily dose of d-listed and Perez Hilton..).
I myself never wrote any diaries. The few times i tried to do it i always had to barf all over the pages i just wrote because i couldn’t stand the blabber. I guess Lesley wasn’t so uncomfortable with her own writings, she just wrote and wrote and wrote about being popular in junior high, being an outcast in junior high, having bad ass friends in high school, being into hardcore and punkrock, then being into raves and special K, then going to Hampshire college where she started the harder stuff, finally living in New York City and becoming a full-blown junkie ending up in rehab twice.
Today she is clean and a while ago she dicided to turn her column into a book. Besides the diary entries there are little passages where she is interviewing her friends and enemies from the past (some of whom she hadn’t been in touch for years) which makes the book different from the vice column. When i read this book there were a lot of things that sounded familiar (okay, just to be clear here: i was never into the heavy narcotics department and therefore never had any excursions to the Betty Ford Clinic ;-)). Sometimes it makes you laugh hard and sometimes it even makes you almost cry, but after all it is a very honest book! Buy!
Peecol toy series
A new creation by eboy: The Peecol toy series. Is there a way to get around these? Especially due to their very clever release announcements ready for christmas trade.
Every peecol character will have its own Myspace page. And there is a flickr group. Damn, these guys already own these guys.
Make a mellotron out of walkmans
Speaking of Compact Cassettes, here’s some Walkman vs. Arduino vs. QWERTY pleasure:
Via Make: Magazine.
Home Taping.
Remember the good old times when you where making music compilations on a cassette tape? I always was one of the girls that gave her (potential) boyfriends mixtapes and not the other way around! :-) I really miss that a bit nowadays. If you share your music you tend to give away the whole mp3 backcatalog of a band or even a label sometimes (i am evil, i know.. shame on me!) and not a personal selection of your favourite songs anymore. I try to do that with my last.fm playlist every once in a while but there is no possibility to make a special sequence yet and that is kind of lame. If you miss making mix tapes this product will inspire you again! SUCK UK produced a Compilation tape USB drive - for home taping. How great is that? Available at the end of september here.
Beautiful login page
Login pages are tricky. Whilst we as designers appreciate the clear focus and the beauty of space, very often clients think it looks “empty”, “too boring” or “not entertaining enough”.
While watching this great video, I found that beautiful vimeo login page:
Handsome worldmap
Click for larger view!
Found at Zoologisches Museum/Universität Hamburg.
EVS
I found this old and cute logo of Energie-Versorgung Schwaben AG, an energy supply company from southern Germany that does not exist anymore.
UDK Rundgang 2007
Was very impressive to me. This year illustration and art more than the communication design and typography classes. Class Klar was a real disapointment. Hickmanns Class had some nice Stuff. But the illustration and art works was so nice! UDK has open until tomorow, Sunday. Worth for a Visit! I left the exhibition with some kind of euphoric smile :)
Oenothera
The sequence shown takes only about a minute (image borrowed from Wikipedia).
I’m currently residing at my parents house and we’re sitting in the garden a lot. A highlight every evening is the opening of Evening Primrose blossoms, a gorgeous progress you can observe with the naked eye.
I’m not only impressed by the speed of this procedure, but also by the apparently highly sophisticated sensory perception* of this plant. Several blossoms open up every evening (and only in the evening) and are already withered the next morning.
* As far as I read on german Wikipedia, the moment of opening blossoms depends on altitude of the sun, daytime temperature and air humidity.
