Typography games, Ai Weiwei’s latest gig, and other finds keeping us occupied this week.
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Ai Weiwei served as art director for the cover story of the latest issue of W…via Skype.
File under: Awesome (Also under: Way Harder than You Expect): Cheese or Font?
And while we’re talking about typography games, how’s your kerning?
An interactive Parisian garden that ignite children’s imaginations.
Clever neon posters, from Superman to the Beatles.
These little Lego guys are excellent printers.
Image: Neon posters by Mr. Whaite.
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This week we’re celebrating Steve Jobs’ impact on design, turning eyesores into artwork, and savoring some tasty typography.
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Typography and cookies. Could there be a better combination?
Uniting people around the world through laughter and balloon hats.
The ABCs of Bacon.
A Nebraska non-profit turns abandoned grain silos into artwork.
Haven’t you always wanted a beautiful, handmade wooden bicycle? Well, you’re in luck.
Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford: how a calligraphy class shaped the future of Apple, connecting the dots in your life, and creating great work.
Image by Jonathan Mak, via My Modern Met.
Crowdsourcing public art, building ginormous Lego structures, digitally reconstructing dreams, and our other fascinating finds this week.
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Learn the ropes of working at Disney in 1943.
Got an extra 400,000 Legos lying around? Try building a life-size Ford Explorer.
The origin of Ferrari’s recognizable logo.
Measuring movies’ visual fingerprints.
Crowdsourced public art in the spirit of JR.
The fact that we’re one step closer to digitally reconstructing our dreams is pretty crazy.
Image: Public art in Tunisia. (via GOOD)
Today we’re learning about Banksy-style marketing, honoring baseball greats, and how just about anything can have a QR code.
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Take a break and go on a quick interactive adventure. (via Quipsologies)
Immortalizing baseball’s greats.
The New Zealand Police Department’s unique Banksy-style marketing efforts.
Track the evolution of famous logos (future incarnations included!).
The inspiration behind Fast Company’s four United States of Design covers.
Exchanging phone numbers too complicated? Just scan your new friend’s QR Code.
The artist behind the Starbucks logo.
Image: Scanz bracelets. A smartphone user can scan a person’s QR code to learn select personal information about them. Image from The New York Times.
If you’ve been in downtown Seattle over the past few days, you’ve probably noticed some large, colorful pylons around town. These 25 markers—a trail from Pioneer Square to the Seattle Center—are part of the Seattle Design Festival’s Design Marks event.
The event’s goal is to tell the stories of the city’s landmarks. Studio SC’s marker, located on Jackson Street and 3rd Avenue South, celebrates the King Street Station and its influence on Seattle’s culture and history.
Historically, King Street served as Seattle’s social hub, playing a role in the life stories of thousands of people—each of whom left their mark on the train station. We wanted our marker to be a physical manifestation of that idea, a place where people could share the basic details of their life journeys. Inspired by the design of classic baggage tags, we created a mosaic of blank tags for passers-by to leave behind a piece of their story—from their destination to the reason they travel to the items they can’t live without.
To complement the marker we created a short video about traveling and the many reasons people do it. Baggage tags appear throughout the video, creating a narrative connection among the participants, and also referencing the design of the physical marker.
The markers will be on display until September 25, so you only have a few more days to come down to King Street Station and share your story. We can’t wait to hear about your journey!
You can find more information about Design Marks here, and be sure to check out the markers and the videos made by other participating firms.
This week, we’re checking out Park(ing) Day, a grassroots plan to bring light to a small village, and a logotype lesson from Doyald Young.
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What a fascinating and simple way to let some light in.
Charles Schulz reminds us that there’s a little bit of Charlie Brown in everyone.
A glimpse into the creation of Coca-Cola’s first neon sign at Piccadilly Circus.
Doyald Young talks about his life and the art of logotype design.
He’s a deep-sea diver/race car driver/pianist/Judo master. Oh, and also, the former president of Russia.
We just checked out some of the Seattle “parks” for 2011 PARK(ing) Day. What’s going on in your city?
Image: Coca-Cola’s sign at Piccadilly Circus (via Creative Review).
The inaugural Seattle Design Festival starts this week! As part of the festival, AIGA Seattle is sponsoring Design Marks—a trail of location markers at important Seattle landmarks—and we’re one of 25 local design firms involved in the event.
Each firm selected a landmark in downtown Seattle that has influenced the city’s culture—SC chose the historic King Street Station, which is right outside our office. Participants then designed 8-foot-tall markers exploring the impact their landmark has had on design. Each firm also created a short video to further highlight the connection between the landmark and the design culture of Seattle.
The markers go up this week, and ours is interactive, so we need your help! Swing by King Street Station (you’ll see the marker on the corner of Jackson and 3rd Avenue South) to check it out between September 15 and 25. And don’t forget to tour the rest of the markers, too!
You can find more on the festival here.
This week, we’re loving Marty McFly’s Nikes, Hell’s rebranding efforts, and college football fashion.
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Planning a vacation? This destination’s “simply heavenly”.
Great Scott! Nike has re-created Marty McFly’s awesome self-lacing shoes from Back to the Future.
Time magazine has a feature with fascinating and heartbreaking accounts of people’s experiences on 9/11.
Debating one of the most important aspects of college football: the fashion.
How six designers created posters for upcoming productions of the Mark Rothko play “Red.”
Image: Nike Mags. (via Cool Hunting)
The University of Washington’s new Alumni Commons building will be dedicated on Friday, as the UW celebrates its 150th year.
The environmental graphics program we designed for the building showcases “Husky Pride,” tracing the university’s legacy with an eye on its future. The Commons celebrates everyone and everything that makes the University great—students, professors, alumni, parents, and fans, as well as inventions, discoveries, milestones, and the Seattle community.
Check back soon for more photos and details about this exciting new environmental graphics program!
This week we’ve been brushing up on our fashion history, sustainable farming, and troops’ “home-cooked” meals from around the world.
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We’ve been trying to figure out which part of this cool new “tablet” we’d lose first, the pen or the sensor. Either way, it looks pretty awesome.
Dance your way through 100 years of fashion.
Bringing soldiers in Afghanistan a taste of their home country.
Great branding for the Parklife Music Festival that embraces some classic and clever scenes from the festival. (via Colossal)
If this is the future of air travel, book me a ticket.
A lovely animated short, commissioned by Chipotle, about the value of a sustainable food system.
Image: Parklife Music Festival by Briton Smith.
We’re going to help you head into the weekend grooving to Miles Davis, tagging walls (totally legally, we swear!), and studying up on Steve Jobs’ impressive list of patents.
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Diet Coke gets a temporary facelift. Some designers like it; others, not so much. What do you think?
Steve Jobs’ name appears on a mere 313 Apple patents. Only 313? Oh, wait, that’s about 313 more than we’ve got…
There are way fewer legal implications when you tag the walls in this book instead of the ones in your neighborhood.
This sheet music animation of Miles Davis’ So What is pretty mesmerizing.
To make our dream of being in Tron closer to a reality (you guys dream about that too, right?), we need to get our hands on one of these transforming scooters.
Image: A page of Sherwood Forlee’s Walls Notebook. (via Brain Pickings)
This week we’ve been enjoying the sunshine with a side of punk rock graphics, cool Nike+ visualizations, and a creative design solution for diabetics.
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It’s (really big) outdoor art season.
An awesome visualization of runners’ routes in Manhattan.
A history of punk rock graphic design.
They’re just prints for now, but might become actual bicycles. In which case, sign us up.
The dying art of large-scale ad painting.
Creative design solution for hiding the insulin pumps and glucose monitors that diabetic women wear.
Image: Sex Pistols album cover for 1977’s “God Save the Queen”
The land around the Hanford Reach has been through a lot. From the Ice Age to the Manhattan Project to today, this section of the Columbia River Plateau in Richland, Washington, has seen an immense amount of change. Yet, the rocks beneath the surface and the Columbia River have remained constant.
The Hanford Reach Interpretive Center details this history. The building, designed by Jones & Jones Architects, features a Studio SC-designed site and interior wayfinding graphics program that speaks to the strength and power of the land and the water. The area, once home to the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor and a site of the Manhattan Project, sits on the last non-tidal, free-flowing section of the Columbia River. President Clinton declared it a National Monument in 2000.
The environmental graphics concept for The Reach has a modern feel that highlights the effect of water on the land by using materials that can be treated in a variety of ways. Signs feature both textured and smooth surfaces to mimic the impact of water on the surrounding area, particularly the basalt rock that abounds.
The Interpretive Center will be a destination for visitors interested in the rich history of Eastern Washington. The new building—with its exhibition galleries, classrooms, and activity centers—will tell the story of this community’s impact, both locally and far beyond The Reach.
Image: Studio SC rendering of the Hanford Reach vehicular and pedestrian directionals and the monument sign.
This week, we’ve been visualizing the Tour de France, checking out Wieden + Kennedy’s cool office space, and designing our perfect minimalistic vacation homes in the woods.
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Interesting discussion going on over the redesign of the London Tube map. Or is it a diagram?
This vacation home makes a great — and environmentally friendly — alternative to camping.
Pentagram’s wayfinding system for the New York Times building features wonderfully appropriate photos (all from the Times archive) for the room identification signs.
Whimsical poster illustrations of each phase of the Tour de France. (via Core 77)
Great typographic video about a powerful and difficult-to-detect computer virus. Seriously crazy stuff.
A look into Wieden + Kennedy’s awesome Portland digs (which may look familiar from this episode of Portlandia.
Image: Crayonfire’s poster of Stage 19 of the Tour de France.