From Danish photographer Peter Funch comes this incredible gallery of photos - where he has staked out NYC street corners for two weeks taking photos of passersby from the exact same spot. THEN, combing through the images, he photoshopped together same-ish pedestrians to create some pretty fantastic composite images. Check out the "Babel Tales" photo series here.

CNN compiled a pretty awesome gallery of photos taken from the NASA Earth Observatory Library (like the one below of cloud streaks across the Caspian Sea). Check out the full gallery here.

Ok - these photos totally blew my mind when I first saw them. Smashing Magazine has put together a phenomenal gallery of examples of tilt shift photography (a photography technique where real objects look like miniatures). A few of my favorites are below (especially the Grand Central one - my favorite building in NYC!).

This is such a cool project that has the goal of representing all 50 states through photography... the website for The 50 States Project says it best:

The 50 States Project has brought together 50 photographers from across the USA.

Each photographer lives in one of the 50 States and during the year long project each photographer will represent the State where they live. Every two months each photographer will be sent an assignment by e-mail, they then have two months to produce one image in response. The images must represent both their style and the State in which they live.

The first assignment, ("People"), was sent on 2nd January 2009. The second, ("Habitat"), was sent on 1st March 2009. The remaining 4 assignments will be announced on 1st May, 1st July, 1st September and 1st November 2009 respectively.

By the end of the project there will be 300 images which hopefully represent the talent of the photographers involved and have something to say about the USA today. Check out the photos from the first assignment ("People"), here.

We hear a lot about how the communications community is changing and we see more and more interactive applications, streaming media and social interactions, but services that specialize in entertainment seem to grow faster than the sector as a whole. This growth is definitely led by online video, but it isn't just about watching. Users now want to interact with video. Check out "BigStage". BigStage's software was originally funded by the CIA, which wanted 3-D computer models of suspects' faces to match against images in a database. The company's commercial customers take three digital pictures of themselves and upload them to BigStage's servers, and in about 50 seconds, they have a digital avatar that they can insert into videos or photos. Users will be able to post the ­videos to their ­Facebook pages or e-mail them to friends; eventually, they should also be able to purchase brand-name virtual accessories for their digital selves.

Yesterday, Twitter launched a redesigned homepage, which shows a shift in focus towards search (rather than specific users, as the old homepage highlighted). It seems that this new homepage could be a recognition, on Twitter’s part, of how users have shaped the microblogging platform - it’s now the place where you can find up-to-the-minute information on what’s happening NOW (rather than depending on search engines that are increasingly appearing to post more dated content, dependant on the slower nature of crawling the web and indexing content). Just look at the trends to see what people are talking about right this second (um…M&Ms and William Shatner? Really?). So does this poise Twitter to take on the search behemoths of Google and bing? Only time will tell…

I am a member of AIGA!! (The Professional Association for Design)
I got an invitation for the exhibition, " 50 books/50 covers of 2007". Since I am designing the 4corners new book i felt these book covers might help me to get inspiration.

This exhibition showcases selections from the “AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers” competition, which aims to identify the 50 best-designed books and book covers of the year. Selections were made by a distinguished jury and become part of the AIGA Design Archives, where images, full credits, project statements and jurors' comments for all selections are available.

Gallery hours:

Monday through Thursday: 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
Friday: 11:00 a.m–5:00 p.m.

And now some great eye candy to go along with your daily stalking of Twitter: Visible Tweets. Just check out what it did to the 4C tweets: By the way, are you following the 4C team on Twitter? If not - you should! @4cornersdesign

Last Saturday ,  there was an opening of a group exhibition featuring commissioned works by 130 something artists at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in Chelsea.

I didn't want to go because it was storming like crazy!!  However, the gallery was packed with so many people.

All the artists got a 7” x 5” wooden panel, and those artworks created a single continuous work. I liked some paintings a lot. But some were just crappy things and the price were like $600....?!  I don't know what Art is!

At least, I got free beer-.

http://jonathanlevinegallery.com/?method=Exhibit.ExhibitDescription&ExhibitID=FB86C9CC-19DB-5802-E0C4211518300C5B

Rebranding & overhauling their corporate images that is... from Starbucks to AT&T – and Walmart is the latest to jump on that bandwagon.

Check out this Businessweek article on corporate rebranding.

Seeing as how the Obama campaign embraced technology so much on the trail, it only makes sense the the team would do the same for his Presidency. Enter the White House blog, along with a fresh redesign of the White House website. The redesign launched almost at the exact time as the President's swearing in - and the blog posts are already rolling in. Check out the blog here.

Stumbled across this post in Logo Design Love which displays some of the contendors for the Obama presidential campaign logos. Some examples...

And my personal favorite:

Check out the rest here.

Here is the new logo for the President's economic recovery programs - what do you think?

Definitely a bit of a different feel from the recovery/economic logos of our nation's past:
The National Recovery Association

The WPA

I'm officially obsessed with Wordle. The concept is simple - paste in a bunch of text (the example above is the Gettysburg Address) and Wordle spits out a pretty word cloud with emphasis determined by the frequency of words in the text. Play around with the font, color, and layout, and turn your words into works of art.

This morning I came across a really fascinating article covering the debate over inexpensive online logo & "branding" companies by Doug Bartow (id29) via the Under Consideration design discussion blog Speak Up.

It highlights the ongoing debate of accessibility of design for all (income brackets) versus "...the devaluation of the design process altogether, particularly in brand development and identity design, which many consider the pinnacle of our field." – by cheapening the proverbial playing field.

In his field study of this issue, Doug commissions 4 different online companies to come up with logo options for a fictitious project and then analyzes and critiques the results. It is a good exploration of what you really get from these types of logo chop shops.

The Challenge: Hire four online logo design companies, give them the same visual identity problem to solve, then critique the results.

Take a look here.

Need to decompress a bit from sitting and staring at your computer for hours on end? Check out thisissand.com for a fun way to do it - reminiscent of those sand art crafts projects we all did as kids. Pick your colors and just click to create mountains of colored sand. Be careful though, this one is addicting...

(from CNN) Ever wonder what information Google knows about you? With a click or two, now you can find out. Google released a feature Thursday that lets users see and control data that the Web giant has collected about them. Called Google Dashboard, the service provides an online summary of a user's Google files -- Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa photos and so on -- by collecting pre-existing privacy controls in one place. More »

"Even the smallest changes can make a huge difference in performance!" 10 Best Practices: 1. Use Headlines, Subheadings and Breadcrumb navigation to show shoppers where they are. 2. Make sure contact information and a phone number are visible above the fold and easy for shoppers to see. 3. Keep the site search function above the fold and in plain view so shoppers can query the catalog anytime. 4. Consider adding a search by category refinement into the site search for easier access to site sections. 5. Allow shoppers to show a designated number of items per page anytime with a “show per page” sort option. 6. Show related products and cross sell before the checkout process and after items have been added to the cart. 7. Allow shoppers to add items to their cart before making them register for an account. 8. Make sure shoppers can easily access their cart contents and that it can easily be modified or adjusted. 9. Use “add to cart buttons” with larger font, that are easy to see and consider different wording like “proceed to checkout.” 10. Allow shoppers to add items to a wishlist using appropriate wording like “add to wishlist” rather than “buy now.” We could actually go on and on, but we will save that for the next entry. Cheers

The designs for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing have been revealed, called "Fuwa" (below). It's being reported in the WSJ that even the mascots' designer doesn't want to take responsibility if these don't go down in history as iconic Olympic mascots.

Not that the Fuwa have been the only controversial mascots; since its inception at the Munich games in 1972, the Olympic mascot has always been a source of debate (more mascots below after the jump). The article goes on to state how the Fuwa may be the result of "Too Many Chefs" syndrome and a bureaucratic backlog, a challenge in trying to create an iconic image representing 1.3 billion people and their history - the five Fuwa were pared down from over 1,000 sketches submitted by the artist.

Not sure what I think about them...any thoughts?

Continue reading to see some other mascots from past Olympics...

The first Olympic mascot - Waldi (Munich 1972)

Cobi (Barcelona 1992)

Izzy (Atlanta 1996)

Syd, Ollie, and Millie (Sydney 2000)

Athena and Phevos (Athens 2004)