Many of my favorite TV commercials use the Incongruity technique to create something that not only strikes your funny bone but makes you remember the advertised product/service. (Again, see Old Spice Man: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.)

Remember “Think outside the box”? Today, you wouldn’t think of using that phrase with your clients, but you could offer to come up with something “crazy fresh.”

The next time you’re thinking up a new ad, design, or pitch, or even a new way of styling a photo shoot, think about how you might use the Incongruity Theory of Humor in your own work to create something memorable—something that “sticks.”

Something viral this way comes? (with apologies to Wm. Shakespeare)

So it seems the iPhone being a whole 4 years sense it showed it’s face first, is now old enough to have a history of the iPhone infographic. I will admit it’s not that great to look at but it is inspiring and mind boggling when you look at how things have progressed.

Infographic Artist Matt Kursmark

In my hunt around the web for something interesting I found an awesome designer. I don’t know this person at all but I thought they had some great work. Well the above infographic is interesting it’s not that easy on the eyes, the below is much more elegant. And if you goes to his website there is a lot that is nice and easy on the eyes.

Transportation via Bicycle

This is an older one but a goodie. This is more of your class infographic, lots of data, good looking and very interesting.

Meet my back up:

Pro athletes, epically in the Olympics, listen to music to get ready for that big race, throw, lift, game… ect. And I figure if it works for paid athletes then it should work for me. I have three key types of ‘musical moods’ that help me out when I am feeling the lag ’slash’ I don’t want to work feeling.

The Zone Out »

These are tunes I listen to when I want to listen to music but really I need noise to help me fade away in to brain land. It keeps me from snapping back into the real world. I listen to ambient tunes and music without much in the way of lyrics. M83, Imogen Heap, the garden state sound track group, explosions in the sky.

The Motivators »
Indie Rock, Rock Rock, Hip-hop and Ratatat (rock and hip-hop are broad genres well Ratatat is a group just to be clear).Honestly listen to drugs by Ratata it’s amazing. Motivators are songs I listen to often late at night when I need to keep going and I can blast away without anyone calling me… because you are all asleep :)

Vinyle Anything »

Sometimes feeling cool, keeps me cool. If I come in to work early and my eyes are half open coffee kicks my brain… but vinyl. Vinyl kicks my soul. I can throw on something new in the old formate like Fleet Foxes, or Death Cab for Cutie or Ben Harper maybe and things just start to seem… warmer up.

My advance know your musical moods, and use them wisely :)

Enter a couple of paragraphs of your writing and let the “I Write Like” analyzer tell you which famous writer your prose resembles. Try it now! It even gives you the code for a “badge” you can post on your blog or Facebook or wherever.

Then, for more information about how the statistical analyzer works, read the interview with creator Dmitry Chestnykh.

(I entered the lyrics to the Beatles’ song “Give Peace a Chance” and it said I write like James Joyce!)

Now maybe no one would notice, but all those small details mean the difference between a “B grade” website and an “A grade website”. The thing I am finding tho is the closer you get to being  100% done with a website the long and hard things seem to be. I would go so far as to say that the first 89% of a project is about equal to the last 11% of project in terms of effort or time.

This kind of art takes time, organization and dedication.

Kevin Cornell one of my new favorite illustrators has a website that is great example of what that extra 11% looks like. THE WEBSITE (you will also find Kevin’s work all over AlistApart.com)

This is the screen I landed on after making a PayPal purchase from Kevin’s store.

This type of customer care and detail in web design is inspiring to me. The thank you screen has a custom illustration and humor, even tho I have already bought a product. This kind of foresight and effort is noticed.

What makes Kevin’s  site is it’s attention to detail, which is something that take a lot of time, and to me means that someone cared a lot about there work, and about there customers. So kudos to that extra 11%.

**Look for Kevin’s art on the walls of the MAC soon.

Sites Sighted :
Kevin Cornells the Illustrator »
A list Apart.com »

Prompted by an outcry over the use of Papyrus for the subtitles in the movie AVATAR, this article from last week’s BBC News Magazine online relates the passions—pro and con—that were provoked. Various other heinous examples of crimes against typography are included.

In 2009, the Swedish retail giant IKEA changed its signature typeface from Futura to Verdana—a font that had been created by Microsoft specifically for screen display.

As in other cases, widespread outrage ensued, with bloggers and tweeters madly weighing in:

“On Aug. 26, Romanian design consultant Marius Ursache started an online petition to get Ikea to change its mind. That night, Verdana was already a trending topic on Twitter, drawing more tweets than even Ted Kennedy.”

It must be noted that some opinionators were more sympathetic.

While typography has a rich history that goes back to the earliest written forms, new typefaces are always arriving on the market, making it tempting for designers to stray from the classic choices. And, sometimes, with good reason. Depending on the target audience and the branding message, it may be perfectly reasonable to select one of the very latest typefaces, especially if it can be effective across a wide variety of corporate needs—website, business cards, magazine and billboard advertising, price tags, serial number labels, Hi My Name Is badges, exterior and interior signage … the list goes on.

I found some great Best and Worst lists. Here’s one that I particularly like because it includes my favorite two Worst examples—#2 and #3, where companies invested in a logo redesign when what they really needed was an overhaul in corporate practices.

If your scroll wheel (or your two-finger touchpad action) is in good shape and you have an extra half hour, check out these collections from Smashing Magazine, an online resource for web design.

• 80 gorgeous typefaces for professional design, in no particular order, based upon suggestions from designers and web developers all over the world (scroll past the well known fonts at the top of the list to see more unusual examples later in the list)
• 60 effective typefaces for corporate design, offering a much quirkier selection than the first list
• 30 new typefaces for corporate design—just what it says: new typefaces

I saved the best for last, but this one isn’t strictly typography. If you have read this far, you may be interested in two visually engaging articles on Writing Systems And Calligraphy Of The World. Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here. My bet is, you’ve never seen such an array of writing samples from so many historical language roots and from virtually every corner of the world.

Calligraphy from illuminated Armenian Gospel manuscript

(Bonus points if you noticed which typeface I used in the numbers in my thumbnail illustration at the top.)

He used 300 million tweets in real time to map mood in a kind of heat map fashion.
Well I am not sure what this means its interesting to look at.

There does seem to be more and more of these large data aggregation and I am skeptic of how much I should read into it. Check out the video and a few other posts below.

» Article on New Scientist

» Article on Fast Company Blog

» Alan Mislove

Ok so Nike+ is an amazing little bit of technology that I have been using. No, it’s not that new, but there website is! Basically it’s a tool to track your runs, one part in or on your shoes and the other a watch you strap on a add on for your iPod/iPhone. I use the watch which has a removable USB port.

I love user experience

I went for a run a few days ago and I ran the fastest mile I have yet to run using nike+. I plugged in my usb watch, it loaded the workout, pulled up the website but before showing me my run data a video pops up, a famous run tells me “I know fast when I see it, congratulation on your fastest mile yet” the screen closes, and well its kind of cheese its kind of awesome to. The site is easy to use and it feels… fun and fast.

A Little History

Last year I ran a marathon (hardest thing I’ve ever done) and a half marathon, much nicer : ). During this time I was running with my iPhone and tracking with GPS, running 16 miles well holding and iPhone is not so great. Nike+ is small and well it’s not GPS the benefit is when its cloudy nike+ still works, and its very light.

Design is what makes the product

I’ll just say that the nike+ site has “top shelf” design and interface, take a look.

Anyways I am not a fast running, but I love it so if any one wants to go on a jog let me know. Currently using this new website to train for a 10K!

the quote read

“My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned to myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the claims that shackle the spirit.”
– Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

After musing on this for a bit and finding it rings true in much art. I.E. painting is amazing because it’s confined to paint, so when people make painting look real or surreal it’s amazing they do it, because they are in the box of painting.

Then I came upon this awesome article. It’s a short story about a 15 year old  kid who created an iPhone app which Apple ( you know the huge billion dollar profit company… maybe you’ve heard of them or maybe you live on an island)… sorry so Apple thought this app was just simple flash light app, which in all fairness it seemed to be. In reality it was an internet tethering app that allowed users to by pass AT&T’s change of $20/mo and use an iPhone as a modem making this function free! Read full story here.

Every day the limits of technology and nature try to hold us back but through imagination and creativity we keep figuring out ways to work within the limits to do things we didn’t think were possible, to do things that seemed out side the box when in fact they were not.

What have you done lately that’s amazing the box your in?

It’s a robot that changes shape so you can see what a shirt will look like on you…

Or it’s crazy! I mean come on if you are going to stay at home to try on shirts over the internet chances are you are not wearing a shirt and you don’t leave the house enough to need a shirt.

However, someone did have and idea and a vision and was able to take it from idea to fruition and that’s pretty awesome.

Check out the full story »