Design related what-not and soforth from Poccuo. http://www.poccuo.com/ All content copyright Poccuo. All rights reserved. Every year the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) gathers all the nation’s budding and established creative writers in one place for readings, seminars, and some good, old-fashioned fun. Later this month (January 30–February 2) the show descends on New York City. Among the hundreds of topics slated for the conference are an exploration of how blogs are transforming American writing and the value of understanding the depth and connotations contained in single words. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST McSweeney’s, the innovative literary publisher with a knack for being clever, invites writers to contribute lists. Lists of what? Just about anything they can think of. Proof positive that pith and wit can make a list so much more than just a list. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Keep Looking, a book of Tim Klein’s photography, just rolled off the press. In addition to the printed edition, Keep Looking was produced in a limited-run hand-bound format and a digital format. You can flip through the digital version online at Tim’s website. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Poccuo is pleased to announce that our work for the Newberry Library has been selected for inclusion in the Society of Typographic Arts Design Archive. This inclusion marks three consecutive years that we’ve been invited into the archive. We’re kicking off 2008 with the goal of making it four. Our thanks to both the STA and the Newberry Library. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST The Mapping Manifest Destiny catalog is off press and on its way to book shelves. Poccuo is extremely honored to have had the opportunity to collaborate with the Newberry Library on the catalog’s design, and we’re happy to have perused so many great old maps along the way. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Poccuo was very happy to have Vince Frost’s latest book Frost Stuff (sorry trees again) make its way from Frost’s Sydney studio to our front door via a very kind friend with a little extra suitcase space. The new book focuses as much on showing the design process as it does the end result, which is a nice change of pace. It is now the smallest book on our bookshelf, and the brightest by far. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Information Architects Japan have posted their 2008 Web Trend Map. This year they’ve pinned 300 sites to a map of the Tokyo train system. Likelihood to find the poster on Poccuo’s wall before the end of the year: high to very high. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Paul Shaw recently put together a typographic tour of Brooklyn for AIGA Voice. Check out the link below to see what he found. We hope to do something similar here in D.C. — when it’s a bit warmer, of course. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Photosynth Technology, by Microsoft Live Labs, examines photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays them as reconstructed three-dimensional space. The UI is a great example of how progressive technology creates an opportunity not only to visualize relationships between data, but also to simultaneously explore and understand them. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST On any given day at Poccuo you’re bound to hear a diverse selection of music filling the air. Our most recent, and certainly most eclectic, addition to the music library is Tinariwen. Noticeable blues progressions and familiar western hooks flavor a more traditional Middle Eastern/African sound that might initially ring as primitive to most western ears, but you realize immediately that you are listening to something quite developed and, well, special. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST We live in a world where the statement “I wish ____ existed” seems to set the cosmic wheels into motion. If you just wait, someone is bound to create your idea. For us, EveryBlock is one of those wishes come true. Pop in your zip code and you’ll be greeted by a list of news, activities, and other interesting bits of information for your very own neighborhood. At the moment this service is only available for Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. We wish a DC version existed. And having said that, it should become a reality soon enough. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST We tend to get very excited when good things happen to people we like. We’re very excited right now because Vinci | Hamp Architects recently won the prestigious Honor Award for Interior Architecture, presented by the American Institute of Architects for VHA’s work on the restoration of the Illinois State Capitol. Poccuo had the privilege of teaming up with VHA to design an announcement for those involved in the Capitol project. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST This is the blog of a friend of ours who is in grad school at MICA. This summer he found a trail of blood — and he started following it. He then ended up writing/designing a letterpress book about the experience. Follow the link for more details. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST This guy (Kent Rogowski) takes puzzle pieces from multiple puzzles (same brand) and then constructs new images. What’s interesting is that he’s not only indulging in synthesis, but he’s doing it with everyday things in a completely original way. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Looking for the latest way to keep up on everything that everybody you know is doing? Look no further than Twitter, a service that allows you to receive regular updates (for instance, via text message or IM) from whomever you allow to send updates to you. Nearly two years old now, Twitter was conceived as a business tool to keep employees informed of scheduling changes, but the world of social networking just couldn’t keep its hands off of it. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Finally, a project that gives artists a chance to use building sites as their canvas. On Broadway in New York City, the paint morphs from simple safety stripes into a wild orange zebra pattern to show that urban redevelopment need not abandon its creative urges. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Museo Aero Solar is the first flying museum — meaning, it’s built with recycled plastic bags and flies using only solar energy. And it’s still being made. In case it lands in your town, be aware that plastic bags of all kinds are useful for its construction. The Museo Aero Solar will travel across the world, and every time it lands, more plastic bags will be added to it from the local community. The museum, therefore, is constantly evolving — its dimensions, shape, color, and location change by the day. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST It’s all above board with Illegal Art, a group of artists whose aim is to create interactive public works that inspire self-reflection, outward-focused thought, and human connection. Each piece is then presented or distributed in a manner that encourages participation and champions simplicity. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST The New York Times tends to serve up some very interesting information graphics after the President’s State of the Union address. This year, NYT compared the amount of times Bush used specific words across his eight addresses. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST This company creates special-edition shirts that depict heroic people in history — from Gandhi to the “unknown rebel” in Tiananmen Square. A percentage of sales is donated to nonprofits. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Every week, journalism.org measures what percent of the total news media (network TV news, online news sites, cable news, and radio news)is taken up by different stories. Is the media talking about what matters to you? View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Publicolor, a New York City-based nonprofit organization dedicated to brightening the walls of inner-city schools, has painted nearly 200 schools and community buildings since 1996. After the painting is completed, teachers and students feel safer, and graffiti and violence decrease. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Did you know that Valentine’s Day sees more text messaging than any other day of the year? Visit Gizmodo to learn what IWALU means, and to school yourself in plenty more romantic text phrases you might want to have on hand (or heart). View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Where did Google’s colorful logo come from? That’s the subject of a short piece in a recent edition of Wired. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Combine wit, imagination, experimentation, narrative thrust, and some video cameras. What you get is a Matt McCormick, who creates short videos (and other things) under his Rodeo Film Company. He recently brought his talents to the video for “Australia,” a song by The Shins. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST CASULO, the latest in “mobile living furniture,” is a complete furniture arrangement that can be assembled in under ten minutes and later repacked in a small-ish transport box. In other words, perfect for people who tend to move around. Watch the video. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST The Graphic Graphic is “a multi-disciplinary art & design collective” with headquarters in Portland, Oregon. They’re focused on “exploring new graphic and typographic solutions.” And honestly, we just appreciate what they do. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST If you’re a sucker for vintage beats and rhythms gone by, look no further. The Numero Group releases compilations of now-defunct record labels, which means music fans can get their hands on the best of many little known movements that have moved out of the limelight. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Somewhere in the Poccuo business plan, in 48pt bold type, are these words: “Build the design robot.” There is some dispute over how that made the final cut; however, we are no longer squabbling over how we’re going to accomplish the task. The open-source and MIT-approved programming language called Processing has put the debate to rest. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Ever wonder what the IBM or Motorola mark looked like in the mid-twentieth century? Neatorama dishes up a fascinating look at your favorite tech logos in years past. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Good illustrations can cross language barriers. From Berlin, these spoke to us. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST How can you be green when you’re searching the web? Lose the white. Blackle was created by Heap Media to do just that. Blackle offers the same search functionality as Google, minus the white background. Why? Because illuminating the background takes energy... and every little bit counts. As of today, Blackle has saved 450,822.291 watt hours. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Nam June Paik’s Megatron Matrix is currently on display at the American Museum of Art in DC. The billboard-sized installation includes 215 monitors. On the screens, video from Korean folk rituals, modern dance performances, and the Olympics combine with larger animations that cross over the matrix in contrast to the other imagery. While the magnitude of the installation is impressive, the attention to detail and sequencing is exceptional. We found ourselves as amazed during the third loop as we were when we watched the first. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST As designers, we love to indulge in the work of fine artists playing with type — and that’s why we’re currently smitten with Jenny Holzer. Throughout her career, Holzer has used all sorts of media — posters, LED signs, plaques, benches, stickers, T-shirts, and the Internet — to present ideas in public spaces. If you’re in DC and would like to check out Holzer’s work, there’s a particularly intriguing cylindrical LCD work titled “For SAAM” on display in the contemporary gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (a.k.a, SAAM). View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST SxSW has announced this year’s finalists for the 11th annual Web Awards, and Poccuo is honored to hold a spot among 2007’s top five websites created in the “arts.” The selection committee down in Austin chose Poccuo’s website for Magazines & War, an art exhibit that began in Madrid, moved to New York City — and now extends its reach to the heart of Texas. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST According to the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger, the Amazon Kindle — a new ebook kind of gadget — may be significant in reshaping the newspaper of tomorrow. And in fact, today’s New York Times, Le Monde, Irish Times and Frankfurter Allgemeine can all be read on the Amazon Kindle. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Every issue of Zoetrope: All-Story, one of the nation’s leading literary magazines, bears the mark of a guest designer. The latest issue is designed by famed rocker, outspoken activist, and renowned oddball David Byrne. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST These days, you don’t need a can of spray paint to create graffiti. The Graffiti Creator allows you to choose a graffiti font and design a message that looks as good on your screen as it would on a wall. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Petri Purho, native of Helsinki, Finland, has recently taken home the grand prize in the Independent Games Festival for Deluxe Crayon Physics. The 2D physics puzzle looks absolutey fascinating, and we obviously applaud new approaches to interactive design. Now we have to get our hands on a copy. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST The New York Times has recently made its archives (over 13 million of its articles in total) searchable. Articles from 1851-1980 are available in .pdf while the rest are in text-only documents. Ain’t the internet a beautiful thing? View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST UK-based artist Richard Box has an astounding body of photographs of fluorescent tubes planted into the ground and mysteriously glowing. They aren’t plugged into anything; they get their charge from electrical fields produced by power lines above them. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Get your geek on, people. This American Association for the Advancement of Science t-shirt first appeared on the cover of Science magazine, and is now available for purchase. The shirt is covered front/back/sleeves with the human genetic sequence. It makes the information designer inside of us all warm and fuzzy. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Every day that Kohl Vinh posts on his blog Subtraction is a good day. Vinh is the design director for NYTimes.com and always has insightful posts about all things design. Simply put, Vinh serves up one of the best blogs around. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Large editions + low prices x the internet = art for everyone. This site helps artists and buyers connect in an affordable and fun way. Each week, 20x200 introduces two new pieces: one photo and one work on paper. Each image is available in three sizes. The smallest size is reprinted in the largest batch &ndash an edition of 200 – and sold at the lowest price — $20. Hence the name 20x200. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Few people comprehend the physical proportions of the White House, since much of it is below ground or otherwise concealed by landscaping. The White House includes: six stories and 55,000 square feet of floor space, 132 rooms and 35 bathrooms, 412 doors, 147 windows, and 28 fireplaces. What if the White House were designed today? The Storefront for Art and Architecture, in association with Control Group, challenges you to design a new residence for the President of the USA. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Developed by two design students at the Cooper Union School of Art, The Shirt Project seeks to inform viewers about recent news via t-shirt graphics. Shirts can be purchased individually or through a five-shirt subscription. Topics range from commentary on the value of the American dollar to a diagram of a steam-pipe explosion in New York City. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST The Times Square Alliance unveils “LOVE in Times Square,” a public art project featuring 15 unique banner designs by 12 top graphic designers and illustrators. Each banner incorporates the word “LOVE” in a strikingly different typographic treatment, as each artist delivers a personal interpretation of the word. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST The London Underground is testing various graphic devices on the Jubilee Line of its subway system. The markings are designed to encourage those waiting on platforms to let passengers off the train before getting on themselves. Maybe other train systems in the U.S. can follow these initiatives too. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Starting May 12, there’s a colorful new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. What’s it all about? Check out the companion Flash site that goes along with the exhibition. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST In TM-City, Dutch graphic designer Richard Niessen uses his method of “Typo-graphic Masonry” (TM) to build a city out of more than 150 of his designs: fliers are stacked to form skyscrapers, posters are laid out to become parks. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York City and other cities around the world. On exhibition at MoMA February 24 - May 12, 2008. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Using a 1975 Polaroid SX-70 camera, Iowa City-based photographer Grant Hamilton creates one-of-a-kind original photographs from found objects and colors. He often trains his lens on the details of mundane objects like trucks or signs — an approach that reveals unexpected areas of quiet in a sea of visual clutter. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Modeled after a small Moleskin notebook, humus is an online “book” (of sorts) that invites people to submit entries, which are then “published” into a Flash slideshow. Photography, design, collage, writing, drawings, and more fill the pages. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST The Visual Dictionary is a collection of words in the real world. Photographs of signage, graffiti, advertising, tattoos, you name it — they’re trying to catalog it. Since February 2006, the creators have racked up over 5,000 images of over 3,000 words. Anyone is invited to submit photographs. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Can you tell which logos are real and which are fake? View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Jonathon Yule, a design student in Toronto, has created fontbots, a series of typographic illustrations based on his favorite sans-serif typefaces. We find Helbotica to be most endearing — in a Johnny 5 kind of way. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Penguin UK has launched its most ambitious digital writing project to date by challenging some of its top authors to create new story forms: narrative made specifically for the net. During a six-week stretch, writers will create tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity, and interactivity inherent to the internet. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Each year Pentagram issues a small holiday book as a greeting to its friends and colleagues. The most recent edition is Decipher, designed by Harry Pearce, who chose cryptography as its subject. Pentagram invites readers to participate in breaking the codes through a microsite created from the book. How good are your code-breaking skills? View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Designer/artist Oscar Diaz is the creative force behind a series of “self-printed“ calendars and posters that are made by controlling how and where ink is slowly absorbed into paper. In the calendar series, the numbers that mark the days of each month are carefully filled with ink. The plant posters mimic the growth of an actual plant as the ink embodies the shape of a sprout. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST What one word embodies your personal or company website? The Big Word Project allows you to purchase a word from its site, and every time someone clicks on that word in the Big Word Project List, they’ll be taken to your site. Not sure you understand? You kind of have to play around on the site to get the gist. And be careful; it’s easy to spend a lot of time looking up a lot of words. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Designer Christopher David Ryan created these posters that Mac users and designers everywhere find very easy to understand. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST From Brand Tags: “The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.” So, what’s the first thing you think of when you see a certain logo? Check out the site to see how your brain reads brands. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Ever wonder where the ampersand came from? How it got to be the oddest shaped “letter” in the alphabet? Type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones shed some light on the mystery of the ampersand on their typography blog. (Yep, that’s right: an entire blog devoted to typography.) View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST The blogosphere = all weblogs and their interconnections, and it’s based on the idea that blogs exist together as a connected community. The data displayed in these images was provided by the blog search engine Blogpulse and represents a month’s worth of data collected from the entire blogosphere. Each of these Blogpulse ”maps“ was produced by Matthew Hurst, a scientist at Microsoft’s Live Labs and a co-creator of Blogpulse. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Jeff Deck and his team traveled across country eradicating typos wherever they saw them. “We do not blame, nor chastise, the authors of these typos,” they say. “It is natural for mistakes to occur; everybody will slip now and again. But slowly the once-unassailable foundations of spelling are crumbling, and the time has come for the crisis to be addressed.” We smilingly approve of this crusade. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. The objective is to divide information into quickly recognizable bands that, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in global news reporting — across cultures, within news segments, and over time. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Simple concept, wonderful execution. Flip the colored pages to reveal more and more and more... View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Catherine Ledner, a commercial photographer who lives with two dogs, two cats, 11 rabbits, and one husband, became fascinated by the idea of using wallpaper patterns in animal portraiture. She pored over wallpaper books from the 1930s and ’40s, and then cast 47 animals from a pool of potential participants local trainers had available. Once she had chosen her matches, she wallpapered movable walls in her studio and invited the animals in. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Creative Review commissioned photographer Jason Tozer to shoot pictures on behalf of Sony using its new Alpha digital camera. And they are pictures of...what? Bubbles? Planets? Worth looking at, regardless. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Place the objects in your pocket, bag, or purse on the scanner. Add your face, or a part of it. Hit scan. And finally, send the image to this website. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Americans use 2663 plastic bags, also known as urban tumbleweeds, every second. MSLK, a small design studio in Brooklyn, is preparing its exhibit, 2663 Urban Tumbleweeds, for the Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, Nev. The folks at MSLK hope to raise awareness of the number of bags that are used and the environmental impact they create. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST If you’re like us, sometimes you buy a DVD just for the title sequence. Now you don’t have to. This website catalogs nearly 100 great title (and end!) sequences that you can enjoy whenever you have the urge. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Photographer and artist Yeondoo Jung created a series of photographs where she reinterpreted children’s drawings as photographs. We’re reminded why childhood is such a great time for the imagination. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Method’s new natural personal care collection features a quilted pattern design and an easily removable label allowing the packaging to blend in with the home environment. Method believes that a logo doesn’t need to be the center of attention on a home care product, and we agree. View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST Paper is the preferred medium of Spanish-born artist Elena del Rivero, whose “Home Suite” exhibit opens July 12 at the Corcoran Gallery in D.C. According to the exhibit’s website, “the artist drew and walked on, ripped, stained, bound, embroidered, wove, spun, cleaned, mended, and archived the paper that ultimately became her finished works of art.” View Site Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:33:28 PST