When faced with the task of finding an image for a comp, I usually head on over to Flickr. The problem is that I inevitably get side-tracked by all the shiny, shiny pictures. So it’s time to focus on specific pools of photos. Today, I came across 2 really great ones, Masters of the Words and Tattoos of Words Only. Both have excellent examples of something that I spend(waste) hours looking at; something we all take for granted – Type. I am fascinated by how every piece of type for a sign, product or even tattoo has some kind of story behind it and both of these Flickr pools do a great job of collecting those stories.
Some of my favorites are ( “Expert Metal & Leather Work“, “I must“, “WHEREVER I MAY ROAM“, and “finally“)
Chop Shop is horrified to release the first of 3 collection tee designs that will feature MONSTERS. weScare features 59 icons of celebrated Fantasy and Horror creatures with several of them gnashing their terrible teeth. References are wide ranging from film, television, animation, video games, comic books, rock history, children’s literature, toys, gaming and one from kustom kulture (let me Google that for you). Read More…
Every once in a while I’ll come by some product that I must email out to the entire studio and beg them to get it for the office. I think I may have just stumbled upon such a product. Behold, Lime Robot Love Soap by LoveLeeSoaps.
The soap is made from glyerin and shea butter and has the scent of lime and weighs in at 4 ounces. At only $4, this is a total geek bargain.
Also, if you’re feeling especially geeky, check out the hot dog soap or one of my favs Gnome Soap. Or if you’re feeling super duper geeky, just make your own soap.
The recurring discussion as of late is about hyperlinks opening in new windows (seriously, we actually sit around arguing about this stuff. NERDS!). Some people like that behavior, some people don’t. And some of us believe that it is less about our preference, but what is best for all users of a website. Read More…
If you were ever curious about how many haikus you could get written just by offering some free t-shirts… we have the answer. Our tee design weRobot managed to inspire 862 different haikus written about robots on toplessrobot.com. One fellow named Glitchy Goblin actually went out of his way to pen 70 all by himself and within his 70 – he actually had one written for each of the 51 that appear in our design. Now for the winners. Read More…
Together again and touring, Phish asked the Chopping Block design a concert poster for their Jones Beach show. Playing off the art deco aesthetic of the Jones Beach of yesteryear, we came up with a poster which is selling like hotcakes. Well, hotcakes or maybe more like special brownies. Read More…
I met Bill Gates once… and I didn’t ask him the one question I wanted to. The newly introduced “Bing” logotype (and Armin’s post about it at underconsideration.com) is yet another reminder that I dropped the ball. With the amount of money and time spent building and branding their updated search experience, bing.com, how can Microsoft punctuate their work with a logotype this embarrassing? Freshman design students learn why it’s bad form to scale letterforms, worst case is that those four characters could have been redrawn – was there no designer in the room?
In 1997, I was an intern at Microsoft, there were around 250 developer interns and 7 designers (this being a pretty telling statistic). The well planned summer of intern festivities included dinner with Mr. Gates. No, not at his new house (it was still under construction), but the old one. After 6 weeks on the job, with a few design successes under my belt and checked into the products, and a few trips to the campus Microsoft store (which was a never ending circus of horrendous graphic design) I was eager and excited to meet the man, shake his hand and ask him one question… Read More…
Something popped up in our mailboxes last week from numerous friends. Apparently They Might Be Giants has taken to sponsoring Little League teams and are using our “No!” tshirt designs as uniforms. Have to say its nice to see a design we executed pop up everywhere from supermarket shelves to a friend’s personal CD collection. But we never expected to see a crowd of brightly uniformed jr. baseball enthusiasts suited up in our tshirt design we executed in support of the CD release.
The giant “No!” bubble on each kid’s chest makes a pretty awesome logo for a team. It must be pretty comical watching a bunch of rugrats circle bases emblazoned with this defiant “No!” on their chests. Pretty quickly, it stops being about the Giants’ children’s album and being more about dinner with no dessert and multiple time-outs.
This tee is still available at They Might Be Giants online shop if you are so inclined. However, participation in a Baseball team is entirely optional.
A few years back the studio designed and developed the HTML and Flash Web Photo Galleries (WPG) that shipped within Adobe Photoshop CS2, CS3 and are optionally available for CS4. Despite the development constraints of the older WPG export engine, the galleries did (and still do) get a fair amount of use. I still see them in use, and get a few emails per week asking for customization and/or feature enhancement.
The release of Flash Player 10 unfortunately breaks the JavaScript Flash Player detect that was initially included in the Flash WPG templates. We prepared updated templates and instructions on how to update already published galleries a few months ago. Up until now, I have been responding to every email inquiry, but posting them here should better serve the masses. Read More…
Just in case you didn’t have enough to do at work today or you are scanning the classifieds in your parent’s basement… we thought we would share some of our connect-the-dots activities with you. Read More…
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