Blitz Magazine

A copy of this magazine arrived in my mailbox this week. It's subtitle is "on the business of media communication." Interesting read.

Fork meets knife...

The Knork

Holiday street art

Seen on the street in Chile - a rendering of the Madonna and child done entirely in Postit Notes - www.woostercollective.com/2006/12/mecanismos_postit_jesus_christ_in_chile.html

World AIDS Day / Day Without Art

December 1 is World AIDS Day and in the art world is observed by many galleries as "A Day Without Art." Galleries will shut or will drap art with black cloth or will have special information about World AIDS Day.

If, like me, you've lost someone to this horrible disease, take a minute to remember today.

'Tis the Season

Some new Christmas tunes have recently been added to my iTunes - Sarah MacLaclan's Wintersong is an interesting compiliation of old favourites and some surprises - she covers the Charlie Brown Christmas tune "Christmas Time is Here."

I've also downloaded a compilation by various obscure - or at least obscure to me - artists (and some not so obscure like BNL) called "Do you Hear What I Hear" - Venus Hum do "Silver Bells" and The Format cover Berle Ives' "Holly, Jolly Christmas".

And I found my favourite Christmas tune of all time - Bing Crosby and David Bowie doing "Little Drummer Boy / Peace on Earth." Christmas isn't complete without this one for me! Such a bizarre pairing.

Check out iTunes to find all of these. Let me know if you find something that you love and would be a great addition to my Christmas collection.

Adobe Creative Suite podcast

Subscribe for free via iTunes - http://creativesuitepodcast.com/

For those of us who want to get more out of Creative Suite.

Adobe Kuler - a cool tool for choosing colour

Adobe Kuler is "an interactive web-based app that whips up snazzy themes in a matter of seconds." Check it out here. Free at the moment but in Beta format.

Thanks to Katie for bringing this one to my attention.

Five years of the iPod...

iPod turns five today. Talk about the little machine that transformed how we listen to, buy and share music.

MacWorld has extensive coverage.

Has nothing to do with design...

...but I liked this. For the dog lovers among us.

THE BREATH OF A DOG"
BY
Stanley Coren, PhD, FRSC

"There is one sound that dogs make which I have not included in my discussion of Doggish vocalizations. I didn't include it because it is an automatic sound, which probably was not intended by either evolution of the gods to be communication at all, but it has come to mean something to me. It is the sound of dogs breathing.

At night, when I lie down to sleep, my old dog Wiz lies on the bed beside me while Odin lies on a cedar chip pillow on the floor close by my head. Just across the room, my puppy, Dancer, who is not quite fully house-trained, sleeps in his wire kennel. In the quiet and the darkness, sounds are amplified. I can hear the low, slow breathing of the big black dog, the short breaths of the orange puppy, and the occasional sniffle and snore of the old white dog. As I listen to those soft sounds, I think of some earlier man, lying in a cave or rude shelter, resting on a bed of hides or straw. It was a hostile, dangerous world. Weapons were primitive, resources often sparse, and there were menacing things that moved in the night. That long-gone ancestor also had dogs who lay beside him as he tried to sleep. His dogs breathed these same sounds and these sounds had meaning. They were not merely part of the language of nature - they were the sounds of safety and comfort, a recitation of the dog's eternal contract with humans.

"I am here with you," the dog's breath said. "We will face this life together. There is no beast or intruder that can steal up on you undetected because I am here, and I will be your eyes and ears. No harm will come to you because I am at your side to warn you, and to defend you if need be.

"We will hunt together tomorrow. We will herd together tomorrow. We will share sunshine tomorrow. We will explore this world together. We will play together, even though neither of us is any longer a child.

"If luck turns bad, then when you grieve, I will comfort you. You will never need to be alone again. I promise this. As your dog, I will sing this promise to you, and whisper it to you at night, every night, with my breath."

I can hear these words in my dogs' soft sounds of breathing, and just like my ancient ancestor, I understand these words and I am comforted. In my heart I know that if the language of dogs were so limited that this was the only message they could send, it would still be enough."

-StanleyCoren
How to Speak Dog

Just back from the the 36th Annual UCDA Conference...

Conference was in Austin this year - an odd city. A little hippy, a little blues, a little gospel, a little straitlaced. Interesting mix.

Good conference overall. Some disappointments. The keynote, Elliott Earls, was barely coherent and went on for far too long. Most of us were clueless as to his point. If he had one. Which I doubt.

One session that was supposed to be on branding turned out to be about how to just throw away all your branding and do whatever you want.

Great sessions on typography, graphic standards manuals and redefining creativity. The latter presenter also provided links to some really fun sites:

thebar.com Only open to US residents of legal drinking age - 90210 works just fine for your zip code...
coke.com Check out the Coke Show.
youtube.com - great fun if you haven't already checked out this site

And a couple of extra Austin sites to check out:

Austin City Limits - The ACL festival was on while I was there. I didn't get to check anything out but it sure takes over the city.
Stubbs BBQ - Home of the Stubbs Gospel Brunch. Good fun and good food. The house band was amazing. I swear the drummer was about 12 - couldn't see him over his cymbals!
Barton Creek Square - I did some serious damage here...

Craftster.org

Billed as a site for people "who have crafty urges, but who are not excited by cross stitched bunnies and crocheted toilet paper cozies", craftster.org definitely has some interesting ideas for off-the-garden-path crafting. Makes my crocheted wire and bead necklace look like child's play.

Tolerate Mornings

Folger's newest TV commercial is a tad creepy. Check it out here.

And now I have that blasted song stuck in my head...

I'm a liberal (lower case "l") and proud of it....

I've really disliked American writer Ann Coulter since I saw her on the 5th Estate telling the CBC interviewer that she thought Canadians were a bunch of liberal wimps. What an idiot. Rarely has someone actually made me want to reach through a TV screen and smack them. She'd written a book called "How to talk to a liberal if you really have to." There was a great moment on that 5th Estate piece where she argued with the interviewer about whether or not Canadian troops were ever in Vietnam - they weren't but you couldn't tell her that. He managed to momentarily upset her self-aggrandizement. It was a lovely moment.

Anyway, she's now written a new book in which she critisized some of the 911 widows. Yeah - apparently they are "enjoying" their husbands' death. Here's a bit from CNN. It's been all over the news.

So, is she an idiot or simply really good at marketing...

Honda choir

J-L, our choir director, put me on to the "music" from the new Honda Civic UK commercial. It's prett cool. Check it out here. Click on Watch and then Watch the Film. (SKIP the intro first... if I've said it once, I've said it a dozen times - "If you need to say 'skip intro', you should have just skipped the intro... thanks, Trevor.)

Designer's Toolbox

This is an interesting site with some good reference stuff for designers - or anyone who's interested to know what the standard size of envelopes are or how to convert fractions to decimals.

Designer's Toolbox

White bald guys CAN dance....

Here's proof. Long video but it's funny!

Evolution of Dance

Answer to one of the 20 questions

Someone asked me who the heck Christine Collister was - she was one of those I listed as a favourite singer in my answers to the 20 Questions.

Here's a link to her website. Check out the audio files.

And before you ask, here's a link to Julia Fordham's site...

Keelaghan? He's a local guy. His site's here.

And finally, Drew Womack.

Webby Award winners announced

In an earlier Weekly Orange post, I gave you a link to the list of finalists for the Webby Awards. Well - they've picked the winners. See if you agree with the judges!

Urban legends - Gotta love 'em

Or not. If you ever get sent something and you find yourself pondering "I wonder if that could be true", check out Snopes.com first. They document all the common Internet urban legends and hoaxes. Here's the Top 25 list. Any of these look familiar?

Word of the week - May 8

Kerri wins last week's word of the week because she's the only one to post a guess! I think it's time to move on to a new game...

I'll let you know when I've come up with something.

In the meantime, last week's word was "fustian" and it means:

fustian \FUHS-chuhn\, noun:
1. A kind of coarse twilled cotton or cotton and linen stuff, including corduroy, velveteen, etc.
2. An inflated style of writing or speech; pompous or pretentious language.

adjective:
1. Made of fustian.
2. Pompous; ridiculously inflated; bombastic.

Too bad really...I had a good word for this week...

Summer Mix

If you're looking for some summer time music mixes, Veer has just the thing. You can also suggest your own summer mix. I think I like the "Best Night of Our Lives" mix the best. Pretty much it's the soundtrack from my highschool days...

The Saddest Thing I Own

Get your kleenex ready. This site is devoted to people posting messages about the saddest things they own. Not to be read while depressed or while it's raining.

Word of the week - May 1

So - no action on the Word of the Week for last week, aside from Kristina who broke the rules by looking "brummagen" up in the dictionary. I think I stumped you! That or you're already bored by the exercise in which case you need to visit I am Bored - see post below - for some inspiration.

For the record, brummagen means:

Cheap and showy, tawdry; also, spurious, counterfeit.

This week's word - and I expect lots of activity on this one - is fustian. It can be either a noun or an adjective.

Good luck!

Massive Change

Went to a really interesting lecture earlier this week. The speaker was Bruce Mau - introduced as "arguably Canada's best designer." Don't know about that, but he was very thought provoking.

I've added a new saying to my "is this a hill I want to die on?" - "What do I need to get over this hill." Love it!

Mau worked with his studio and a series of grad students to produce an exhibition called "Massive Change" that ran at the Vancouver Art Gallery back in 2004. Hard to distill eactly what the exhibit was about down to a sentence so check out the website.

"Now that we can do anything, what will we do?"

A bit too "Utopia building"? You tell me.

Bored?

I love the name of this site - I Am Bored. An entire site dedicated to stupid things to do when you're bored.

Like Punch the Ice, for instance....

Got you stumped?

What? No guesses about this week's word of the week - brummagem.

Come on people, peel off your apple skin and see what you can come up with!

Rick Mercer Report

I'm a fan of the Rick Mercer Report - I loved the season finale of a couple of weeks ago that had Rick and Jan Arden riding a bull. Or his report prior to the Turin Olympics - brave man tried the bobsled, luge and ski jumping. Funny stuff.

I appreciate his irreverant take on the current state of Canadian politics. Sometimes you just have to laugh.

Check out his website and make sure you visit the Photo Challenge page. I may just have to rev up the PhotoShop and submit myself something myself.

Word of the Week - April 24

Congrats to Nicole for coming closest to the correct definition of "choler" - it sort of does mean "hot under the collar." The actual definition is:

noun: In medieval science or medicine - one of the four bodily humors, identified with bile, believed to be associated with a peevish or irascible temperment.



THIS WEEK'S WORD IS....

brummagem - it's an adjective. Good luck!

Magscapes

Magnet receptive wallpaper - really. So you can put up the wallpaper and then buy magnets to "accessorize". I'm not entirely sure why you'd want to do that but it does look pretty neat.

MagScapes

Naked and Angry

No - not me! It's a line of very cool ties for your guy. Brought to you by the folks from SkinnyCorp. Also responsible for Threadless. The idea is that designers can submit their own t-shirt designs and the best ones actually get made.

Kristina - I think you should submit the "I'm Awesome" t-shirt...

Webby Awards

The nominations are in for the 2006 Webby Awards - awards for the best of the web. Way too much Flash for my taste but there are some interesting sites to check out.

Word of the Week - April 17

Thanks to everyone for participating last week. Some inventive suggestions for 'stripling". A stripling is actually a young man just heading out on an adventure. But you were close...

This week's word is "choler". As usual, please add your suggested definitions as a comment. Would it help if I told you it was a noun?

Word of the Week - April 10

Make sure you check last week's post to see what people came up with for "real estate" - check the comments section.

Kristina wins most inventive for her highly hyphenated entry. Rita wins "least likely to actually answer the question", and the rest tie for "best use of resource materials" for checking dictionaries, WikiPedia, etc. (That's cheating, by the way, but we'll let it slide since this was the inaugural attempt at this game.)

OK - this week's word is:

stripling

Let's see what you can come up with! Please post your answers by adding a comment - you'll see "# comments" in orange (naturally!) after this post. Click on that and you'll be taken to a page where you can add your comment. Do it anonymously, with your Blogger username (if you have one) or sign up for a usename and take it from there!

Good luck!

BoKlok

Now you can get a house to go with all that IKEA furniture. BoKlok is a house in a box - flat packed and ready to assemble. This is apparently big in Sweden and the UK where they suffer from a lack of mass construction. Given the boom in Calgary, could BoKlok be coming here?

Stamping fanatics unite

Here's a site for those stamp/card making fanatics amongst us. This one was brought to my attention by my good friend and soon-to-be-former-sister-in-law (trying saying that one three times fast!) who is definitely a stampfan.

www.splitcoaststampers.com

Reality TV t-shirts

Pre-pixelated t-shirts - just in case you ever decide to go on a reality TV show. (Heaven help you...)

Museum of Bad Art

I'd forgotten that this existed. This is truly bad art - so bad it's funny. Enjoy!

Word of the week

Ever look at a word or phrase and think - what the heck does that mean? Time to have a little fun. Each week I'll post a word or phrase that either must have interesting etymology or is just plain peculiar. Then you post your best guess at what the word or phrase actually means. Or, be creative and see if you can come up with a plausible but completely wrong answer to throw us all off track. If you have suggestions for the "Word of the week", please email me.

OK - this week's question is, "why is it called 'real estate'?"

We've had two people weigh in with their answers so far:

Kerri:
real (adj.)
1448, "relating to things" (esp. property), from O.Fr. reel, from L.L. realis "actual," from L. res "matter, thing," of unknown origin. Meaning "genuine" is recorded from 1559; that of "actually existing" is attested from 1597; sense of "unaffected, no-nonsense" is from 1847. Real estate is first recorded 1666 and retains the oldest Eng. sense of the word; Realistic "true to reality" (in art, etc.) is from 1856; meaning "having a practical view of life" is attested from 1862. Noun phrase real time is from 1953; get real, usually an interjection, was U.S. college slang in 1960s, reached wide popularity c.1987.

Lynzey:
Because it's a tangible (real) inheritance within a person's will (estate).

Obviously, these two are vying to see who can come up with the right answer. Let's see some creative alternatives!

Stirring Culture lecture series

This lecture series has been sponsored by ACAD. The last in the series is coming up on April 26 - Bruce Mau of Bruce Mau Design. I posted a link to his "Incomplete Manifesto" back in the early days of this blog. He should be interesting - he's a bit of a rebel in the design world. Tickets are free if you pick them up at ACAD or the Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts.

Photography exhibit

Here's a submission from Kerri. She tells me that this exhibit cost an obscene though undisclosed amount of money. Looks really interesting!

Ryerson's Black Star Historical

MEDIUM Design Group

These folks have some seriously funky footwear - and a bag created especially for creative professionals. Love the external cable routing.

I think Kristina will particularly appreciate the Abstract Expressionist shoes.

NO-SPEC

New website devoted entirely to trying to elminate spec work from the design industry. Given my recent tussle with AUPE over their "little" logo competition project, this seems timely.

Read on and spread the word!

Oh-oh! She's spawning again...

Martha Stewart is about to launch yet another new magazine. Blueprint supposedly will have you "design your life." Why do I envision a bunch of Stepford Wives with bad, blond haircuts? (My Mun always wonders why Martha, with all her money, has such bad haircuts.)

Of course, I had to write away for my free premier issue.... Like there wasn't enough pressure before - now I'm actually going to have to design my life! I need a nap.

Bjorn Borg's new website

Remember him? Tennis player from the 70s? Recently sold off his Wimbolden trophy to raise some much needed cash?

This is his new website for his line of clothing.

All I have to say is why are there Ken dolls?

Conceptual Crochet

That's not something you hear everyday...

This is some seriously twisted crochet, no pun intended. (Site is in German. That might explain a whole lot...)

Getting up on my soapbox now

My turn to rant a little. Union members were sent an email earlier this week inviting them to participate in a "contest" to "design" a new logo for the AUPE chapter. This doesn't make me happy. Contests like this devalue the work of professional designers - inviting any Tom, Dick or Harry with a computer to create your visual identity is an insult to the profession.

I've sent an email voicing my dismay over this - including a snippit from the GDC website that outlines why professional designers are prohibited from entering such contests due to our code of ethics - and I'm wondering if I'll get any response.

I mean - you wouldn't conduct a contest to find out who has the best idea of how to do your hip replacement surgery, now would you?! Feel free to show your support by writing Shirley Maki back - she's the one who sent out the original email on behalf of the union.

Argh!

Canadian advertising at its best

We have Kristina to thank for this one...

Build your own world

This can get a little twisted - but it's fun!

Check out Veer's latest offering - Build your own world.

Make sure you post your creation so we can all see!

Advertising Design Goodness

OK this is fun - An entire blog devoted to ads and design - Advertising Design Goodness. Included are some commercials in video format. Check out the Starburst one. Funny!

Candy magazine

Here's an interesting e-zine. (BIG files, though, so think twice about downloading any of the issues if you have a slow connection. The link below is fine.) Lots of really cool photos, spreads, etc. Out of Ireland.

Candy e-zine

WARNING - Some adult content so just be sure who's looking over your shoulder when you look at this!

Need a RSS reader?

If you're in the market for a RSS reader, I really like Google Reader. Easy to use, nice interface, etc.

Ink blot wallpaper

In case you want something wacky for your desktop wallpapper.... I think they're quite interesting, actually.

Stock photography

Here's another stock photography site with cheap images -
It's sort of like iStockphoto.com.
Fotolia.com. It's easy to sign up for a free account. Enjoy!

Trivia anyone?

Here's a little something I got from my dad. it's the Chilly Beach Great Canadian Trivia Shootout. I got 8 out of 10.

Good luck!

Superbowl ads

If you want to watch the ads from this year's Super Bowl, they're available here. The ads are the best part of the entire thing as far as I'm concerned. Just happy I didn't have to actually watch the broadcast to see them. The only thing more boring than Canadian football, is American football. I even think curling is more interesting...

Frank and Gordon

If you haven't already seen the new ads for Bell, you're in for a treat. The new spokes"models" are two beavers named Frank and Gordon. Really funny stuff. Check out their website and be sure to sign the petition calling for a National Beaver's Day. I think they have a point about the groundhog thing.

New look for iStockphoto

iStockphoto has redesigned their site - check it out!

Draw a pig?

This came out of a discussion that's been swirling about the UCDA email list for the last few days - what is appropriate in a job interview when hiring creative talent? Someone suggested having the candidates draw a pig and it turns out you can do this online. It's actually a personality test. Good luck!

Wish I'd had access to this earlier...

MacInTouch's Mac Justification reader report page has a detailed, factual discussion about using MAC's vs. PC's in the publishing world, with helpful facts, resources and arguments to respond to any evil anti-MAC IT initiatives. Enjoyable.

New website

I just finished working on a new home page for my godson who is a local singer/songwriter. Plans are to eventually integrate the rest of the pages into this template.

Take a look - davesimpsonmusic.com - and listen to some of the songs. Isn't he a cutie?

Colour scheme tool

If you want an easy way to explore colour combinations - for use on the web, in print or even on your walls! - check out the Color Scheme Tool from Steel Dolphin. Neat tool!