From the 29 Things Young Designers Need to Know'29-things-young-designers-need-to-know'-poster poster designed for the January 2011 issue of HOW Magazine by id29 ’s Doug Bartow:

• Sweat
• Play nice
• Don't fear type
• Be yourself
• Learn to say no
• Collect and share
• Observe trends
• Content is still king
• Reject personal style
• Say no to SPEC work
• Become indispensable
• Value your work
• Make mistakes
• Your Mac is a tool
• Respect
• Teach others

See all 29. Unfortunately it only ships to US and Canada.

Well-Placed Pixels — a visual record of beautiful software.

Via DF.

About The. Sneakiest. Design. Ever. at Graphicology. Indeed.

More: Tobacco Brands Under Fire at Brandchannel.

Update: And it's dead: Ferrari remove bar code livery from F1 cars.

This decision was taken in order to remove all speculation concerning the so-called "bar code" which was never intended to be associated to a tobacco brand.

Shameless.

Life must be experienced first, then designed.

—Frog Design's David Sherwin in Zen and the Art of Design.

And since the critically-acclaimed series Mad Man runs on Romanian Public Television, here is Mad Men, Mad Props a classic piece by Mark Simonson on the props and typography used in the movie.

Also on the subject, Mad Men Gets All the Details Right—Except One by Andrew Hearst.

This week the U.S. Treasury unveiled new $100 currency redesigned to discourage counterfeiting. If counterfeiters are deterred by ugliness, this should do the trick.

—Delphine Hirasuna, Why Do We Have Such Ugly Money? at @Issue: Journal of Business and Design.

See also: $100 banknote update

The $100 banknote gets a technical makeover in order to prevent counterfeiting, looks rather ugly.

The new design $100 note will be issued on February 10, 2011.

Also: The $100 Note Unveiling Video.

I think designers complain about that sometimes. They say, “My biggest challenge is educating the client.” I never, ever talk about educating the client. I don’t believe in it.

—Michael Bierut talking about Success Secrets.

Thanks, Iancu.

Steven Heller's commentary on the evolution of Olympic pictograms since their appearance in 1936.

Via DF.

• Designed in 1989 by the American architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (awesome name!) for the private use of the New York-based Cheltenham Press.
• Redesigned in 1902 by the American Type Founders' influential Morris Fuller Benton.
• Adopted as a headline typeface for The New York Times around 1906.
• Digitized in the 70s although with contestable results.
• Reworked in 2003 by Matthew Carter for The New York Times.

Read Know your type: Cheltenham at idsgn.

50 stars and shields of LAPD at the LA Times Magazine.

Via the Longboard.

George Lois is an American Art Director, designer, advertising leader and author best known for the for Esquire Magazine which he produced as a consultant from 1962 to 1972, never actually being an Esquire employee.

Devastating news for the design world: After 55 years in publication, I.D. Magazine, America's foremost design publication, has folded.

—I.D. Magazine, a Design Icon, Folds After 55 Years in Print, Fast Company.

Horror.

Something interesting and meaningful happened on Brand New these days.

First — two days ago Armin Vit launches an open design contest for redesigning Space150's identity (Space150 is a design firm that every 150 days redesigns its identity).

Then — yesterday, after a tsunami of negative comments, Armin had to retract Brand New's support for the contest and "extend an apology to those that were let down by our endorsement of it."

Why? — because the readers regarded it as spec work.

See also: Spec work, free pitch, design contest.

Speaking of "Design is..." principles, here are some more — details at Tim Brown's Design Thinking:

• Transparent
• Inspiring
• Transformational
• Participatory
• Contextual

Some of the themes were explores by Gaura Neagră's contest entrants as well.

They have it and we don't.

Swissmiss teaches: perpendicular cuts=Helvetica, oblique cuts=Arial. Now you know and can be as prejudiced as we are.

Design Observer's Observed reports:

A new typeface by Göran Söderström, Heroine, gets its own promotional movie trailer, appropriate because it's based on Eleisha Pechey's Windsor, that typeface so beloved by Woody Allen. (Via Dean Morris and SwissMiss.) [MB]

Thanks for linking my Woody Allen article again, guys.

Or it's rather about good old Ludwig Van's mesmerizing Fifth for you to watch and see.

Now The Music Animation Machine might sound like clockwork... oh fuck it's too early for this.

Comment of the day: Using Verdana in print is like using your underpants as a hat.

That's not a very good hat.

Is luxury illegal under the new French Law? asks Octavian Sever Coifan, the fragrance historian & writer, weighting the blow to luxury packaging that comes from France as part of its new environmental directive.

Under the new regulations, packaging must be as limited as possible while respecting the needs of product safety, hygiene and logistics.

[...] The new French law cuts out the consumer acceptance part, technically making anything that is not needed to protect the product on the shelf and during its transportation, illegal.

European Commission will most probably initiate infringement proceedings against France.

This might be a different kind of "less" than "less is more". I'm curios what could this lead to, design-wise.

Time Magazine quotes my Brandient colleague Iancu Barbarasa in The Font War: Ikea Fans Fume over Switch to Verdana:

With its attention to the curve of even a $9 lampshade, Ikea has become renowned for its understanding of good design. "Designers have always thought of Ikea as one of their own," Barbarasa notes. "So now, in a way, the design community feels betrayed."

Also, read Iancu's post on the matter.

There is one more thing to pay attention to, "besides the drooling over the aesthetics," when buying fonts: kerning — reminds us Kle·pas.

A useful resource recommended by the article: a kerning test sheet. Thanks.

Typophile thread: 20 most important type designers of all time.

Sounds kinda like a High Fidelity quiz.

In horizontal scaling, that is. Bravo. Keep up the good work!

For the motion graphics pixel pushers (and collateral aficionados), the aptly named Motionographer blog.

My ex-IBM is un-beautiful and not even the elegant stickers can make it look better. Damn.

"Ultimately, nostalgia never carried anything forward. And we must move forward. Always."

Armin Vit in his Goodbye, Speak Up post on closing Speak Up design blog.

Makes you wonder whether the time of blogs has passed.

Design like it's Friday: can fonts make you want to exercise less? Oh yeah.

I bet you don't see presidents unveiling logos all the time.

Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams asked himself an important question: is my design good design? He set about expressing the ten most important criteria for what he considered was good design.

Read about the Ten commandments at Vitsoe.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized (part 1) by Jonathan Jarvis explains what happened.

"On the newsstand today there is no better example of elegant typographic restraint than Monocle—other than the occassional decorative numeral, only Plantin and Helvetica appear on its pages."

Plantin for Monocle at FontFeed.

Metallica wins the Best Recording Package with Death Magnetic (FontFeed editors find it "hard to believe this is the best album packaging released last year") and Radiohead gets Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package for In Rainbows.

Head over to the FontFeed to read about this and more.

Yes, we kern. We do.

The history of well known logos:

• 1940 Boeing looks like an ice cream;
• 1971 Nike designer would be fired today;
• Mazda 1992, um, is that porn?
• Imagine a Nokia phone with its first logo;
• Mitsubishi, I see, awesome solution!
• Playboy—tell me the first logo is a joke;
• Apple's first—imagine it on a MacBook;
• Google, ugly then, ugly now, who cares?
• 1919 Renault, not bad, not bad!

Look and smell history.

Thanks, Iancu.

"The globalisation of the type market and rising interest in multi-lingual typeface design is a source of great optimism among many typographers. Yet despite the proliferation of these beautiful new typefaces, many still do not support some European languages, let lone cater for African and Asian languages. In fact, contrary to the claims of advertisements, the offering is, in respect to language support, quite limited."

David Březina On diacritics. Great article about a complicated issue.

Aw man, Gary Hustwit's Objectified movie is going to be like oxygen for every designer!

"So by this time you might be wondering just what’s wrong with plain old 'Design'? Why does it always need to be qualified with another buzzword of the year? [...] Innovation or transformation, Design speaks for itself. It will in 2009, too."

Conternotions on Bruce Nussbaum's 'Innovation' is Dead. Herald The Birth of 'Transformation' as The Key Concept for 2009 stunt.

Appended Cassandra's Dream and Vicky Cristina Barcelona opening titles to Woody Allen's typography post.

They're both compliant: white Windsor on black, alright.

"The problem is that every rule related to, or governing, design is ultimately ridiculous," says Ridiculousdesignrules.com.

Hmm, if all design rules are ridiculous, doesn't it mean that design itself is ultimately ridiculous? And designers a bunch of nihilistic caricatures?

In my view, rules are to be obeyed, dismissed, broken or improved, but never ridiculed. Laughing at all design rules, dictums and mantras can only splinter an already disjointed professional ethos.

Thanks, Adrian.

Undrln is "sort of like Digg or Reddit but for advertising and graphic design." Gruber.

Oh man, I'm so tired of this naming scheme. It was cool back when Flickr did it, now it's not.

Via DF.

Obsessing over typography? Browse and test FontShop typefaces on your iPhone (or iPod Touch) with FontShuffle.

I'm not a big fan of design contests — see more here and here — but I do like Madrid 2016 logo and visual identity.

Top ten typefaces used by book design winners is — arguably — entirely irrelevant, but pleasing to peruse.

Fuck no!

"Typical Murphy, after working on at least four design projects concerning banking (finance, to be more precise) in one form or another, after spending days scavanging for related pictures on the internet, after asking friends to risk getting arrested photographing banks while on vacation abroad, it took one random search through Flickr to find the Banking in Photos group."

Iancu.

"Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of record covers from the golden age of LPs." LPCoverLover. And yes, some of them are weird, indeed.

Brilliant t-shirts. My favorite — probably Rock Me Amadeus.

Typography like a tasty, warm, home-made meal.

Garamond Powerline. Applause.

"As a graphic designer, Wabi-Sabi is the antithesis of what I pursue every day — perfection in my typography, layout, tight invisible Swiss inspired gridlines, etc. Mathematical symmetry is an unshakeable mission for many in my profession, and the ancient philosophies of Wabi-Sabi rip a hole in the side of it."

Todd Dominey reviwing Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers on Amazon.

The most creative alphabets. The butterfly wing alphabet is 100% mind-blowing.

Via Coudal.

"We produce a weekly online video series on designers.  The show is basically a profile piece on their life as a designer and how their design gets incorporated into everyday life."

Designing Minds series on Zoom In Online.

Diacritics: some yearn having them for some weird reason, while some try to deal with the pain they bring.

Via Iancu.

"Yo momma’s so ugly she was born with ink traps on her face" and other typographic jokes (avoid if not a graphic designer).

Yer doin it rong.

"One of the most insightful minds on design thinking and innovation is now blogging — IDEO's Tim Brown." Bookmarked.

Via Nussbaum.

Bill Gardner announced that the judging of the 33,000 logos submitted for LogoLounge 5 has been completed. The book will be released by Rockport Publishers in early Summer 2009.

Akzo, Saffron and "Bruce"—watch, learn and quit bitching about how hard is your life as a designer.

Via Brand New.

"A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products." Kontra’s law.

How come NYTimes always has some beautiful infographics to show?

Speaking of the un-demonized devil, here's an ode for the perusal of that "designer end of the espresso coffee market".

"Do typographers exert some extraordinary control of the pen that laypersons don't? Does a typographer's handwriting influence the typefaces they produce?"

Have a look.

"Open mailbox," haha! See the movie.

Via DF.

"Good designers are a dime a dozen, he said. Coming up with a great design solution is the easy part. The hard part, he said, is getting the client to accept the solution." Mad Men.

25 new classic book covers from the past 25 years.

And the wonderful 25books.com Bildschöne Bücher was based on.

The dead art of book cover is so not dead: have a look at the winners and shortlist of the 2008 Penguin Design Award.

Via Kottke.

"The U.S. Treasury Department is violating the law by failing to design and issue currency that is readily distinguishable to blind and visually impaired people." Read Paper money unfair to blind.

"Our designers, production and client facing people are living dog-years. They live seven years to any normal designer's one year" — Attik's new NoiseBlog.

Noteworthy even given that I'm against design competitions: a 26-year-old first-time currency designer redraws UK coinage. And Jonathan Hoefler's bitter perspective. Via Kottke.

Starck went on to say that he believed that design on the whole was dead. This "I'm so ashamed to make this job" story is hardly new, but what about fighting "barbaria"?

"If you want options, go talk with other people! I'll solve your problem for you." 1993 Steve Jobs interview about working with Paul Rand at paul-rand.com.

Charles Baldwin on biohazard symbol development: three-sided, easily stenciled and striking enough that it would be remembered. Via Creative Bits.

Curious Ikea Futura punctuation marks, Gruber-style.

Need some nice stock photos? Buy Getty Images. Only $1.5bn and you're all set.

This type has been bastardised and other "visual enforcement kit parts." Genius!

When the book cover bets against its content — the typographic joke of the year.

Who do you think it might hate designers? Take the quote: "Stealing some hundreds of euros is by far MUCH more work than any designer will accomplish in his/her whole life." This kind of people.

It is a real quotation from a blog. And stare in the abyss.

Typography, from Stanley Kubrick’s favorite font to the cover design of The Catcher in the Rye in Michael Bierut's video interview.

138 brands, sorted alphabetically: pencils.

This is on ID Magazine's list of Most Ingenious Products of 2007. Maybe it was a bad year. Via DO.

Wikipedia is a meritorious effort, but when it comes to design or design history its model fails.

The Making of FF Meta Serif.

Some like calendars [link in Romanian], others like their calendars to be very, very compact. Not too late to redesign anything. Thanks, Eugen.

"This page contains some works of 'anomalous motion illusion', which might make sensitive observers dizzy or sick. Should you feel dizzy, you had better leave this page immediately."Via DO.

A great cover telling a great story, that's one thing that separates print magazines from web magazines' mashed look and crummy little thumbs: best magazine covers of 2007. Via DO.

At sixty, Mr Spiekermann has the verve of a thirty years old. The effect of information design or typeface design?

Effortlessly jump-start your career: design like Khoi Vinh in five easy steps. No design studies required. Piece of cake!

"When you give people what they want, they actually complain more." Weird but true. [Thanks, Iancu.]

Dots and NeoSans in Norwegian national broadcaster's idents. [Via 1+1=3.]

"What is 'sustainable architecture'? The expression doesn't really mean much. I prefer 'responsible architecture'." Françoise-Hélène Jourda in Le Monde. Applies just the same for design: 'responsible design' instead of 'sustainable design'. I like that. [Via CoS.]

"Combining a full-witted individual with a half-wit only yields a half-wit." The curve it's about web design, but applies to identity as well. [Via Longboard.]

So neglected, the poor thing. Love it and it'll bloom like a flower. Lowercase 'g', that is.

The Lord of the Lord of the Lord of the Lord of—the credits roll, insert yawning emoticon—the Rings. [Via H&FJ.]

Ever fancied a corporate ID with a Mona Lisa-inspired color palette? A Botticelli-colored web site? Well then, knock yourself out! [Via 1+1=3]

The "can't tell rebranding from redesign—hey, who cares?—I'll rank that stuff regardless" school of thought. [Via Core77]

When the sound is not enough, brand the music! Hmm, I wonder when will slogans appear next to those logos? Via Design Forum.

Follow-up: John Nack, a Senior Product Manager from Adobe Photoshop team, introduces the new Photoshop logo to the public on his adobe-dot-com-hosted blog and a tidal wave on negative comments flows right in. No wonder. [via DF] Others put together long lists (and rather incomplete) of speech bubble logos to demonstrate the inflationism.

Adobe® Photoshop® has a (new) logo, 3D candy, shiny and poor—looks like it's targeted at teenagers and amateurs. And the slogan—"See what's possible"—looks crafted towards inducing trial. Photoshop is "the ultimate playground"... what's wrong with Adobe?!? 100% penetration in the pro market and they try to lure some kids now with colorful balloons?

If you worked with Copperplate Gothic you'll feel deep in your stomach the point Armin makes in Dr. Copperplate and Mr. Gothic: this apparently submissive typeface is a hard-boiled motherf**ker.

After making a royal mess out of their PMS lately, Pantone plans to clean up their act by launching Pantone Goe spot-color matching system. New inks, new numbers, new books and new software. I don't like it. At all.

Microsoft font rendering vs Apple font rendering — what do you respect more: the pixel grid, or the font designer? Read Respecting The Pixel Grid. [via DF]

To find out how Gobierno de Gerpaña got a nice logo — and why — read Erik Spiekermann's blog post Viva España or what?

Design issues in mainstream media: The New York Times runs an article on typography — “a minor technicality of civilized life” — with the occasion of replacing Highway Gothic with Clearview on road signage. Read The Road to Clarity and don't sigh wile reading quotes like “I’ve always thought that design can be a form of social activism.”

Hilarious design-gangsta rap video. It kinda makes sense after all — isn't our professional ethos minority-like? Ghetto-like?

Times (New) Roman and its part in the Development of Scalable Font Technology by Charles Bigelow, initially posted this article to the Usenet in May 1994 in response to the question: What's the difference between Times Roman and Times New Roman?

IDEO took seven IDEA awards, four gold, one silver, two bronze, plus four Catalyst prizes at 2007 International Design Excellence Awards. Read about it in BusinessWeek's Best Product Design Of 2007 (or jump directly to the slide show).

Why "Arial is little more than a shameless impostor"? Read The Scourge of Arial.

Wikipedia entry: "Mon, also monshō, mondokoro, or kamon, are Japanese family heraldic symbols. Mon refers to any symbol, while kamon and mondokoro refer specifically to family symbols." Now you know why Japanese symbol-based logos are so beautiful: tradition. [via PingMag]

Diesel leaves audience open-mouthed in Florence with "Liquid Spaces" holographic catwalk show created by the Spanish CGI animation studio Dvein using the amazing technology developed by the Danish multi-media production agency Vizoo. Download the video and have a look. [Via Cool Hunting]

Are thou a graphic designer? Then learn how to properly pray like a graphic designer. Amen. [via Quipsologies]

The perfect city via smart design is definitely doable — watch in Monocle's City Slickers why "the measure of a city is more about everyday wonders - pavements, well-designed schools, punctual transport - rather than one-off grand projects".

Erik Spiekermann: "The official typeface for our license plates is called FE-Mittelschrift, with FE meaning it is Fälschungs-Erschwert, i.e. difficult to forge. Apparently car thieves, terrorists and notorious law-breakers had been exploiting DIN’s geometric construction principle and turning turning E into F or 3 into 8 etc by simply using a bit of black tape or white paint." Read Complete forgery on SpiekerBlog.

Erik Spiekermann: "We won’t do pitches. We never do unpaid creative work, but sometimes it takes more time and trouble to convince them than to do the work. But it’s a principle." Read the whole interview at IdeasOnIdeas.

The judging for LogoLounge Book 4 has been completed, I am told. Judges this year: Louis Lygo of Wolff Olins, Jerry Kuyper of Jerry Kuyper Partners, Jason Schulte of Office, Gaby de Abreu of Switch Branding & Design, Haley Johnson of Haley Johnson Design, Neville Brody of Research Studios, Janet Martin of Communication Arts, Inc., and Chris Campbell of Interbrand. Congratulations to Founder Bill Gardner and Editor Cathy Fishel for this new baby.

Big fat laugh seeing Top 10 Star Wars t-shirts on The Daily T-Shirt Blog. My favorites are Boo Boo Walker and Ping Pong Vader.

Read The Secret of Apple Design "The inside (sort of) story of why Apple's industrial-design machine has been so successful." and What If Apple Is Bad for Design?. Judge for yourself.

Icograda's week's Feature tackles "the issues of pitching for business and what is appropriate compensation for work presented." The question was: What should you be paid for a pitch?
And the answers — Fair market value for the work produced to present: 60%; A percentage of the value of the contract: 17%; An honorarium based on the time involved: 26%.

It seems that nobody answered "nothing, it's on the house", just like in real life.

Evolution of The Times mastheads — a publication only 9 years younger than the USA. Times New Roman typeface introduced on the masthead on October 3, 1932. [via CCS]

"I've always had my own methods of dealing with [inspiration] and one of them is pressure. I only start work when I really cannot avoid it anymore. And it's not inspiration, it's sweat — perspiration..." Erik Spiekermann. [via Authentic Boredom]

"Design is the new advertising. The agencies should fold, they’re out of line and out of touch. The only advertising that works is about product that you’re drawn to any way." Marc Gobé interview. [via BusinessWeek's Nussbaum On Design]

John Maeda: "So was Paul Rand a grumpy, cantankerous, braggart? Sure. He was also a brilliant, caring, and humble man at the same time. If people were simple they wouldn't be that interesting; they are best when they are complex." Paul Rand Commercial at Maeda's Simplicity.

Rick Poynor's Top 15 Design and Visual Culture Books at Print Magazine. Few usual suspects, more of the heavy stuff.

For casual visitors or for typography-savvy designers admiring the grand master, SpiekerBlog 2.0 is now online. [via D.O.]

At noise Between Stations, Victor Lombardi confirms what everyone working with consultants thought, in Is Design The New Management Consultancy? Not Exactly.

Graphic design is all around us. Watch Studio Smack's incredible movie Kaapital and wonder what's the best strategy to cut through the clutter.

Adobe announced their new "paint chip" application icons philosophy. Designers vociferate on Jason Santa Maria's blog. Adobe explains.

Casino Royale credits sequence graphics "owes to the jagged emblematic graphics of Saul Bass" says Daniel Kleinman, the title designer behind the opening credit sequences for the last five James Bond films. [via Design Observer]

Germanos retail graphics were redesigned using Comic Sans, I noticed at the Plazza Mall outlet. Horrible.

"Apple is a cult, and Apple's design team is an even more intense version of a cult" -- read Who Is Jonathan Ive? in BusinessWeek.