The New York Times iPhone GUI
July 14, 2008 | Categories: Apple / Design

It’s a strong held belief of mine (and many others) that good design is the design you don’t notice. It sits there like it’s always belonged there, such as the stop sign and the red cross. So when I came across these GUI (Graphic User Interface) designs for The New York Times iPhone application, they reminded me of something you wouldn’t notice, they just worked. The GUI was put together by Felix Sockwell, Khoi Vinh, and Caryn Tutino, who had to create the icons in greyscale and black and white at a size of 29 x 29 pixels.

Felix’s website has a nice exploration of the their ideas as well as Felix’s thoughts and a bit of the process as well. One of the most interesting parts is how much The New York Times flip-flopped on the GUI for the Obituaries section, as they deemed many of the ideas too morbid, finally deciding upon using a flower to signify death. Does that seem a bit off to anyone else? Anyhow, check out the rest of the sketches and ideas, it’s an interesting inside look.

Bobby

Earth As Art: A Landsat Perspective
July 14, 2008 | Categories: Photography / Science / Technology

Since 1999 the Landsat 7 satellite has been circling the earth, taking photos of the surface to provide for a more accurate picture of our planet. In 2000, NASA scientists parsed through some of the 400,000 images to create a gallery of amazing images of earth, which were then displayed in the Library of Congress. The collection was called Earth As Art, and featured almost 100 images, showing just how amazing and abstract our planet can look from afar. The images are displayed in real color and infrared, whichever made for a more interesting and dramatic appearance.

I love shit like this. It still amazes me to see images like this, though seeing them blown up at a huge scale would be 100 times more impressive, I’m sure. There are actually several ways to view the exhibit. There’s this more childish (not in a a bad way!) map of the earth where you can click on a continent and view the images. Or you can click here to see the whole shebang, which is probably your better way to go. Take some time to look through all the images!

Found through Environmental Graffiti

Bobby

P.S. Wouldn’t those make great mixtape covers?!

Behind The Scenes with Dennis Darzacq
July 13, 2008 | Categories: Photography / Video

The folks over at Lens Culture were able to get their hands on a documentary about Dennis Darzacq, the photographer who takes those photos of people about to splat into the ground in random locations. It’s an interesting look at the process of how he gets these images, as you find out that he hires professional dancers to perform these moves, capturing them at just the right moment. It’s also cool to hear the dancers talking about their “performance”, and how they felt they weren’t really doing a great job, but Dennis was still about to catch such amazing moments.

This kind of reminds me of that behind the scenes video with Todd Hido, which also gives you a look into his process as well.

Bobby

Creative Scrape
July 13, 2008 | Categories: Blogs / Design / Internet

When I started this blog I knew I wanted it to have big and exciting images, as a lot of design blogs I had been reading at the time used smaller images, making it less exciting to me. So it was interesting when I started to get some regular hits from a new site called Creative Scrape, which uses a “hand-picked number of RSS feeds and Flickr sets in order to deliver a random smattering of beautiful, ugly, and inspiring things.”

The site was created by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs and acts sort of like an automated FFFFOUND, albeit with a much smaller concentration of sources. As far as I can tell the feed sources are from Kitsune Noir, Design Notes, Rojo Magazine, Behance, I Love Typography, and then a bunch of folks from Flickr. It might be narcissistic, but it’s really cool to see these images as purely images, with no words to describe them or a blog to give them a greater context. Definitely pop over and check out what they’re up to, and if you really like it, download the screensaver they created as well!

Bobby

Damien Correll Updates
July 9, 2008 | Categories: Art / Design / Illustration / Redesign

Friend of +KN Damien Correll has finally updated his website with a ton of new projects and it’s looking mighty sharp. He’s got work from 2006 to the present, all of it full of great colors and textures. It’s also really great how simple and straightforward the whole thing is, and I love that you can click an image and get a larger view as well, I hate when all I get is tiny JPG’s. I think my favorite pieces are his contribution to the newest issue of Faesthetic, the (sadly) scrapped cover for Atypica, and the AMAZING stack of meat shirt he did for Sixpack. I think any and all things related to meat are great, call me easily amused.

Take a visit for yourself and get inspired!

Bobby

Is This The End of Taco Trucks?
July 9, 2008 | Categories: Food & Drinks / Los Angeles

Photo courtesy of josewollf

One of the best things about Los Angeles is definitely the food. After a long night of dancing and drinking, there’s simply nothing better than a stop by the local taco truck to sober you up for your drive home. Sadly, my friend Max just forwarded me a link from a couple months back talking about Los Angeles County’s attempt at keeping taco trucks off the streets. I guess a number of brick-and-mortar restaurants are complaining that the taco trucks are taking away their business, so L.A. County has passed a law that makes it illegal for them to linger at one location for more than an hour. If they do, they face a “$1,000 fine or up to six months in prison.”

I’m not really sure why, but this pisses me of sooooooo much. If I have a craving for Mexican food, I go to a sit-down restaurant and have a nice meal. When I want a late night snack though, say at 2 AM, that same sit-down place is NOT GOING TO BE OPEN. This is the beauty of taco trucks, they stay open late, they’re cheap, and they’re fast. The picture above is my absolute favorite place in L.A., Taco Zone, and they make the best damn chicken quesadillas. The funny thing is that the closest “restaurant” to Taco Zone is a McDonalds, and the next closest is at least 6 or 7 blocks away.

I think the only thing that may be protecting them is that they moved the truck into the parking lot of a Vons supermarket, so hopefully they’re safe there. Still, it would be a shame to lose any sort of food truck anywhere in Los Angeles.

Bobby

Colour It (RED) by Koma
July 9, 2008 | Categories: Art / Design / Illustration / Music

Andy Miller of Koma sent me an email earlier telling me about this awesome project he did for his final degree show called Colour It (RED). Andy used the (RED) organization as his jumping off point, creating an adorable CD/coloring book that comes together with the help of a red crayon. As soon as I saw this I was kind of in love with it, especially that you only get one color and how great it all looks when it’s colored in. I also really love his wonderful illustrations, they have this great excitement and fun to them. More than anything, I could totally see these being sold at Urban Outfitters all over the world, and that to me is what really makes this successful, I completely believe that this could be real.

Be sure to check out the rest of Andy’s work as well, he’s a damn talented guy.

Bobby

The Desktop Wallpaper Project featuring Nik Daum
July 9, 2008 | Categories: The Desktop Wallpaper Project








Good morning and happy Wednesday! It’s gray and chilly here in LA, so hopefully it’s nicer out wherever you are. This week I decided to bust out the big guns, giving you three wallpapers to choose from, thanks to the wonderful Nik Daum. It’s funny because Nik seems like such an oddity to me, and I mean that in a really good way. He’s probably one of the funniest designers out there, as you can totally tell when you visit his site, but he’s also one of the most talented, doing some amazing work for clients like Old Spice, HP, and Jamba Juice. One of my absolute favorite things he did were these t-shirts for Old Spice, including one that reads, “My other shirt is a boat”, haha…

Now he’s hooked us up with three great wallpapers, all in totally different styles to fit your mood. The first is a trio of highlighter birds of paradise, to take you away from the drudgery of your work day. The second completely illustrates the how crappy your work day is and how you’re all going to die soon, and the third is deep and dark and reminds me of an old Russian cartoon. I hope you enjoy these as much as I do, I pretty much freaked out when I saw them.

Also be sure to keep on sending in your DESKTOP BATTLE! entries as well! I’ve gotten quite a few, but I still need a lot more! And be sure to check back next week for another awesome wallpaper.

Bobby

Studio KXX
July 8, 2008 | Categories: Design / Illustration

If I ran a super-rad design firm, it would produce a lot of work just like the kids over at Studio KXX. Working from Poland, the studio is made up of Krzysztof Domaradzki and Eliza Domaradzka, a husband and wife team who together are making some really awesome work. They have a really great list of indentities they’ve done, each of them with some really great fonts and logo marks. They’re design section is also pretty rad as you can see above, the top one being a detail from a wedding invitation and the delicious looking meal promoting the Studio. I also really love the ambiance of the site itself, with it’s spacey vibe and bright yellows on black.

Check out the rest of their work by clicking here.

Bobby

Ed
July 8, 2008 | Categories: Art / Illustration

Yes, I didn’t forget the rest of the title to this post, this all about a guy named Ed, spelled exactly like the horse. Ed is an illustrator and comic artist who lives in Argentina, making the world a more beautiful place with every drawing he does. Ed does illustrations mostly for magazines, newspapers, and books in Europe and Latin America, so sadly the U.S. is missing out.

What’s amazing to me is how many different styles he has. You can visit three websites that he runs, one is for magazines and newspapers, one is for books, and another for personal drawings and doodles. Amazingly, all of these have different work on them, and they’re all really incredible. The pieces above were my absolutely favorites though. The textures in each of the pieces make me so happy, and the technique used in each of them is so unique and beautiful. Definitely took a look at Ed’s work on one of this three sites, you’re in for a treat.

Bobby