My son Jeff, also a designer, sat through the whole thing last night--again...

"Then you rolled a layer of sticky, melted wax on the back of the sheet of type and cut THAT out with a X-acto knife and positioned it on a board using a T-square. After you burnished THAT down, you took the finished mechanical to the darkroom and the folks there stuck it in a vacuum board at the end of a giant bellows camera..." And so on.

That was kind of him.

(He'll find lots of that stuff in The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies http://www.forgottenartsupplies.com )

Be well,

Chuck

My new car is testament to how much of a media experience driving a car has become. Two cameras show blind spots, multiple text screens show vehicle stats, organize entertainment, offer directions via maps and voice commands, APP support, even a plug for HDMI-and, oh yeah, there's that little thing about driving.

Here's an interesting study that looks at typeface characteristics and "glance time". (We're going to need self-driving cars because there's just going to be too much to read and watch.)

Thanks to Jessica Jones for pointing us to it.

From MIT, reported by Gizmodo: This Typeface Makes You a More Alert Driver By Distracting You Less...

Here > http://gizmodo.com/this-typeface-makes-you-a-safer-driver-by-distracting-y-1560109806

Here is an Abstract and the actual paper: Assessing the impact of typeface design in a text-rich automotive user interface...

Here > http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00140139.2014.940000

When I saw this wonderful piece of fine art recently, I thought, "Wow, that would make a wonderful logo."

A three-dimensional object as a logo-why not? You could photograph the object from various angles and drop it out of a white background-as shown here. You could plant it inside all your marketing photographs. Include it in images of people who work for the company. Use it as a promotional tool and so on, the possibilities seem endless.

In order to trademark it, you could license an existing object from the maker, modify an existing object by adding something to it that changes its meaning, commission the creation of an object from scratch by an illustrator or sculptor, and so on.

I can only think of one other example of this right off: the troll used by Travelocity-but it isn't their logo. Why haven't I seen more organizations use objects as logos?

The piece I saw was an elephant sculpted by William Sweetlove titled "Cloned Red Father Elephant"...

Here > https://www.gkm.se/sweetlove/0911/800/Cloned_red_father_Elephant.jpg

More of Sweetlove's work...

Here > https://www.gkm.se/william-sweetlove/

The Paris-based illustration and graphic arts studio Violaine & Jeremy is the territory of Violaine Orsoni and Jeremy Schneider. Schneider's pencil work is beautiful/quirky and their collaborative designs are fresh and interesting.

The posters for the National Orchestra of Lorraine Illustrated stopped me in my tracks.

Example 1...

Here > http://violaineetjeremy.fr/#/works/onl

Example 2...

Here > https://www.behance.net/gallery/7551225/Tickets-de-mtro-for-AMI

Example 3...

Here > https://www.behance.net/gallery/9721791/EOS-label-albums

Barbara Majsa of hypeandhyper.com interviewed the team here...

Here > http://hypeandhyper.com/en/az-elet-csak-ugy-hozta/

Roman Mars, host of "99% Invisible, a tiny radio show" points us to the often sad state of city flags and leads us through, "the five basic principles of flag design and shows why he believes they can be applied to just about anything."

(That's our Richmond, Virginia city flag below. It features a silhouette of a person navigating a James River bateau-a river craft from the 1700s.)

Thanks to Wayne Belvin for pointing us to it.

Roman Mars: "Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you've never noticed"...

Here > https://www.ted.com/talks/roman_mars_why_city_flags_may_be_the_worst_designed_thing_you_ve_never_noticed

He describes his radio show, "99% Invisible, as a tiny radio show about design, architecture and the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world"...

Here > http://99percentinvisible.org/

A list of 99% Invisible Radio Episodes...

Here > http://romanmars.com/radio/

Got you interested in vexillology? Flags of the World (FOTW) offers 58,000 pages about flags and more than 115,000 images of flags of countries, organizations, states, territories, districts and cities, past and present....

Here > http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/index.html

Regarding the idea of the 80-20 rule--the Pareto principle. As I have understood it, it poses that (for example) 80% of business sales come from 20% of the businesses clients.

I'm sorry, I have never understood why that is stated with such confidence. Do people who deny design in the universe somehow believe the design is a force in a subset of the universe?!

Anyway, when I saw it in a press release recently, I took a minute to look it up. The Wikipedia entry on the Pareto principle includes this passage:

"The term 80-20 is only a shorthand for the general principle at work. In individual cases, the distribution could just as well be, say, 80-10 or 80-30. There is no need for the two numbers to add up to the number 100, (as they are measures of different things, e.g., 'number of customers' vs 'amount spent'). However, each case in which they do not add up to 100%, is equivalent to one in which they do; for example, as noted above, the "64-4 law" (in which the two numbers do not add up to 100%) is equivalent to the "80-20 law" (in which they do add up to 100%). Thus, specifying two percentages independently does not lead to a broader class of distributions than what one gets by specifying the larger one and letting the smaller one be its complement relative to 100%. Thus, there is only one degree of freedom in the choice of that parameter."

My head's going to explode. The only thing I'm clear about now is that this rule of thumb (that I so easily swallowed all these years) means something different than I thought it did.

Illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, printers-virtually all those associated with commercial imagery-have experienced a massive shift from paper to pixels in the last 30 years. But I sense we are seeing the beginnings of some settling back to legacy media as the dust settles and we recognize that digital screens are not necessarily the best hammer for every nail. (Especially considering the fact that, in most cases, digital erases any semblance of privacy.)

When you dig into how photographic and illustrative media have been used in the past, you can begin to conjure up some of the ways it might be modernized to work in the future.

Whether it's a conical mirror anamorphose, a lithophane transparency, or a myriorama picture-card, I think you'll find this amazing collection offered by Richard Balzer and Brian Duffy is a wonderful catalyst for ideas.

Example 1: A circle panorama...

Here > http://www.dickbalzer.com/typo3temp/pics/0e75c90b2d.jpg

Example 2: Shadow work...

Here > http://www.dickbalzer.com/typo3temp/pics/473ff8670f.jpg

Example 3: A phenakistoscope...

Here > http://cdn3.sbnation.com/assets/3456243/tumblr_mrcplcnsSa1r9jbwno1_500.gif

The Richard Blazer Collection website...

Here > http://www.dickbalzer.com/

Balzer's blog...

Here > http://dickbalzer.blogspot.com/

From Wired: These Incredible Animated GIFs Are More Than 150 Years Old...

Here > http://www.wired.com/2013/12/these-150-year-old-gifs-are-insane/

A video composed with works from the collection...

Here > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVjKJuAWtmc

It wasn't too many years ago that the extent of custom promotional products was to have your logo printed on a coffee mug or a tote bag. The digital age has certainly changed that.

Customizing and branding products is easier and, in many cases, more affordable than ever before. Republic Bike offers some compelling examples.

An example of a branded bike made for Nike...

Here > http://www.republicbike.com/images/republic_gallery_socrates_02.jpg

The bike above is a Socrates Cargo Bike, one of Republic's Promotional and Marketing models...

Here > http://www.republicbike.com/promotional_bikes.asp

They also brand bikes for hotels...

Here > http://www.republicbike.com/bikes_for_hotels.asp

You can design your own here...

Here > http://www.republicbike.com/build_socrates.asp

The Republic Bike blog shows many more examples of how clients are using bikes to brand their businesses...

Here > http://www.republicbike.com/blog.asp