tiny gigantic

One of our favorite shops of all time is Maya. Take a look at their youtube channel and you’ll see why. They’re the minds behind the oldie but goodie, Information. Here’s a link to their latest brilliant brilliant video, called Trillions.

Chinese artist Liu Bolin has made an art of camouflaging himself so well against any background that he becomes almost invisible. Awesome.

More here.

Thanks to Delford for the tip.

Creepy and super well-produced. Yowza.

Pretty cool animation by Donato Sansone. At first, I was a little bugged by the inclusion of the animators hands, but now I kinda dig it.

In 1974, artist Gordon Matta-Clark operated on a two-story home in New Jersey slated for demolition, effectively splitting it down the middle with a chainsaw. More here.

Interesting article in the NY Times magazine about true virality. Now we’ve got real, published, proof of what we’ve all been hinting at re: viral marketing and stuff: you can infected by the behaviors, actions, and even sub-conscious thoughts of others.

Here’s a taste:

Between one immediate peer and another, some contagious behaviors — like smoking — seem pretty commonsensical. If lots of people around you are smoking, there’s going to be peer pressure for you to start, whereas if nobody’s smoking, you’ll be more likely to stop. But the simple peer-pressure explanation doesn’t work as well with happiness or obesity: we don’t often urge people around us to eat more or implore them to be happier. (In any case, simply telling someone to be happier or unhappier isn’t likely to work.) Instead, Christakis and Fowler hypothesize that these behaviors spread partly through the subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior. Scientists have been documenting this phenomenon; for example, experiments have shown that if a person is seated next to someone who’s eating more, he will eat more, too, unwittingly calibrating his sense of what constitutes a normal meal.

Yup, you hippies out there have been saying this for a while: we’re all connected, man. Right you are.

Check out Converse’s latest campaign for their mass customizeable shoes. Made by Anomaly of course.

Maybe this stuff is made of clay or maybe, since she’s a character designer, Meredith Dittmar makes super awesome computerey work. Either way, it’s damn beautiful.

Check out Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova’s super amazing and beautiful sand illustrations of the the Ukrainian political/cultural climate. Wow.

Found at popeater.

When I left for my honeymoon, we had just finished another restaurant project, but it hadn’t opened yet. And since I was traveling, I missed the opening party, so it’s super gratifying to come back and find it open and looking good and getting all kinds of good reviews. It’s called Starbelly (no, not after the sneetches, but it’s a nice reference all the same) and if you’re in SF, you should get lunch or brunch or beers there. Maybe we’ll see eachother.

(Disclaimer: we did not take these photos, we only designed the restaurant.)

Hey peoplez. So I’m back from Turkey and actually feel rested and excited to get to do the work I do.

So I thought I’d mention an obvious tip for reviving creativity that always deserves mention: take a fucking vacation. I mean a real one: Not a weekend in the woods. Not a day off. I mean go somewhere for a few weeks and do not think about what you do for a living. Spend your time—I don’t know, say—jumping off boats into the Aegean Sea, or walking 4 stories down into ancient underground cities.

Give your mind a rest. Yes, I know you love your work, and that the balance between it and the rest of your life is good, because they’re so integrated that work doesn’t even feel like work at all. But do it anyway. I promise, you’ll come back into your work super energized, super grateful for the privilege of doing what you do, and super psyched to get back to it.

Okay Peoplez,

So I know it’s been slow here for the past few weeks. Sorry about that. But you’ll be happy to know that I’m getting married tomorrow and then going honeymooning. After which I’ll be all recharged and ready to give you the awesomest shit ever. See youse here soon.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

thanks shawn!

At Language in Common, we don’t usually work an 8-hour day. I mean, sometimes we’re in the office for eight hours. But we don’t force our process around an arbitrary schedule. Because as most of you know, you can’t actually, truly, I mean really, be creative for eight straight hours. It’s important to have as much time as possible in which to harness whatever creativity makes its way into your day, but riding it all day long, each day? No way.

So we break up our day into two workable chunks. There’s a morning session and an afternoon session. And those go as long as they go.

Problem is, since we’re small, and mine and axel’s roles are completely blurred (basically, we share a brain) we spend a bunch of time in meetings. And meetings fuck up the whole two-creative-sessions-a-day thing.

Paul Graham’s got a kick-ass article about how much meetings suck right here. He makes a great distinction between the schedule of someone who makes things and the schedule of someone who manages things. Axel and I are both. Which is yet another reason why meetings muck us up so good. Here’s a taste:

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

We don’t have a solid solution to this really, other than to do our best to avoid meetings that seem useless (read: 90% of them) and try to be extra clear with our clients and collaborators about the dangers of reckless meeting setting. Anyone got any good ways to solve this?

So apparently I’m way behind when it comes to internet memes. This piece (which is actually quite brilliant) is part of a meme called rickrolling, in which users share clips related to the ever awesome 80’s one-hit wonder, Rick Astley. Amazing.

Yup, Wired editor, Chris Anderson (who wrote the Long Tail) has a new book out. It’s called Free. What’s awesome about it is this review by Malcolm Gladwell.

A few days ago I had a conversation with a client about the state of his communications. I was arguing for a certain visual language: a little glossier, a little colder, a little more overtly monied. By that I mean that I was arguing for a design that actually looked designed. I know this flies in opposition to the current fashion of invisible design, but it seemed like the market we were playing in required a little slickness. The client makes high-end luxury stuff, stuff that I felt needed a designed presence.

But when I told him (again) that we should rethink the graphic presentation of his site, he kinda went off. “You’re wrong!” he said. “You’re standards are just too high!” Now, that may be true. I care a whole lot about what things look like. But then he went on to illustrate how the site has been functioning quite well to generate leads for his business. It was all true. His logic was sound. He was, in fact, getting tons of interest from this ugly-ass site.

Which begs this scary question: if design is meant to incite action, does it really matter if it’s pretty?

I want this. And I want a jetpack too. But mostly I want to know if the Autonobile, by design studio Mike and Maaike, is actually make-able, if it can be made to be safe and affordable. And if they can send me one as payment for posting it on this here inspiration feed.

Found here.

So it’s obvious that designers (and that’s design with a big D, the kind that includes strategy, words, idea-making, and need finding) influence behavior. That’s the job. Some call it User-Centered Design. Here’s an interesting piece about it from the folks at frog design. And here’s a little taste:

the role of design is not just ease of use but invisibility. In other words, the design should fit so well with user needs and expectations that it “dissolves into behavior.” The user is unaware of the choices the designer has made. In fact, the user should be unaware of the existence of the designer at all.

I know, it’s a little dry. But good stuff, nonetheless.

Here’s the link. And here’s a snippet:

Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers,and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But forthe first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

Right?