On April 25th the New York Street Advertising Takeover (NYSAT) organized artists to reclaim 120 billboards that illegally operate in New York City.
The move battles the overabundance of advertising and branded messaging that over-saturates the city.
via The Groundswell Collective
Great spot from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for Sprint: Anthem. I like how they slip in a plug for the Palm Pre at the end. The spot pushes you to a beautiful site with more data visualization. How accurate is the data? Who cares.
Great presentation here from Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. This was from Mix 09 a few weeks back. Silverlight is needed to view.
Bill does a great job articulating the value of experience in the context of design. Like myself, he’s also really big on the value and role of sketching during the design process. He’s even written a book about it.
Allegedly, he’s been brought on to Microsoft to elevate the role of design in the company culture. I have yet to ping a few of my old Microsoft clients to hear their take on this.
The presentation is 20 minutes, but well worth it.
I checked out a few minutes of Scott Guthrie’s presentation which immediately follows. There was a demo of Microsoft’s Expression Web SuperPreview - which had some cool features for cross-browser programming.
As an aside, I love how Bill’s site is completely, and I’m sure intentionally, stripped-down.
Source: Presentation Zen
I learned yesterday of the passing of a great friend, Jimi Black. As one of my first design mentors, I wanted to remember all of the great things about this strange, bizarre, and awesome guiding light that hugely influenced and shaped who am I today.
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.