18 March 09
A little over a year ago My Chemical Romance lead singer Gerard Way made his first foray into comic books with The Umbrella Academy. His writing was pretty good, but the surrealistic world that he creates is very entertaining. The artwork by the relatively unknown Gabriel Bá is reminiscent of Hellboy’s Mike Mignola, yet clearly has a voice of its own. The stunningly designed and painted covers tie everything up in a nice neat graphical package not seen enough in comics.
This book got a bit too much hype, likely due to Gerard’s rock and roll following. But it’s definitely worth a read. The first run can be picked up in graphic novel form. The new series The Umbrella Academy: Dallas hit the stands this past November. I long ago stopped buying single issue comics, so I’ll have to wait for the trade paperback on this one.
Take a visit to The Heart Attack Grill in Chandler, Arizona where an authentic customer experience is served up every day. You won’t find Jared from Subway dining here.
This great piece of industrial design managed to fly beneath the radar for some time - beneath mine at least. Last summer Dell launched their stylish and environmentally conscious Studio Hybrid. Designed by San Francisco-based New Deal Design this is one of the first non-Mac computers that I’d actually consider putting in my living room - or anywhere for that matter.
13 March 09
Last week the news media and the blogosphere were all abuzz about Skittles new “website”. The quotations are around “website” because it really isn’t a website, it’s a widget that sits on top of a series of non-Skittles sites - a siteless site. The widget points you to various social sites around the web, most notably Twitter, where you can see the communities comments about Skittles in real, unedited -time. Critics have declared this everything from “breakthrough” to “idiotic”. But all seem to agree that this won’t sell more Skittles.
What interested me through this whole affair was the headlines and abstracts that were popping up in Google News as I searched for “Skittles” last week. A large majority of the stories mentioned the name of the agency “Moderista!”. Modernista! was not however the agency that created this experience, it was Agency.com. Modernista! was mentioned because they used this same siteless approach to their very own website which launched a year earlier.
While most of the chatter focused on this brave move by Skittles, all of the subtext felt like the creative wind was knocked out of Agency.com’s sails in “adapting” this concept. Maybe the Agency.com folks felt that enough time had past or that the Modernista! audience was too industry-inside for anyone to care. In any case I wonder if Modernista’s phones might be ringing more than Agency.com’s this week.
10 March 09
Typically Apple’s reputation for innovative design is associated with industrial designer Jonathan Ive. Oft overlooked however is the design of the Mac’s operating system. Cordell Ratzlaff led the team at Apple that developed the design and interaction model for OS X. He’s interviewed in the book Designing Interactions about this and his other exploits at Apple. You can view an excerpt of a video that’s included on a DVD here.