John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

Movie poster makeovers

Movie buffs love picking apart the variations between an original film and a remake; design buffs turn their eyes to other things, like the posters. Six Revisions, a design blog I follow, compared a slew of posters used to sell different versions of films, including Scarface, above.

Abounds of the Baskerville, and other top fonts

Font geeks - and you know who you are - will appreciate this collection of influential typefaces. 

How turning a staircase into a piano gets people off an escalator

I saw this Swedish video on a friend's Facebook feed today. It shows how a clever (but likely expensive) approach to design changed people's behaviour.

A thought on luxuries and necessities

"Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities."
- Frank Lloyd Wright

A T-shirt that shows how less is more

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe continues to have a profound effect on architecture, design and how we live, whether we know his name and how to pronounce it. We can thank Mies for not only one of the best, shortest aphorisms of all time - less is more - but also for that chestnut, "God is in the details." I found this T-shirt here, on a site that features T-shirts all about architecture. For a bit more on Mies, click on the excerpt from a 2003 BBC documentary below.

A cover is born

On Wired, that is. Quite a bit of thinking goes into most magazine covers, perhaps more than is needed to sell an issue to a curious newsstand linger-on.

Scott Dadich, the creative director of the magazine, walks us through the process, in which details rule, images are rendered and even fictional characters get their own photo shoots. Dadich reveals some details, including the prep that went into the Martha Stewart cover for the magazine's how-to issue; yes, that is a real cake posing as a Wii console. (Here's a sample of Wired's cover archive, at least up until last year.) 

Saint Tokig, patron saint of self-assembled furniture

This is Saint Tokig. You won't find him in the Lives of the Saints; he was created, with tongue firmly in cheek, by folks rooting for an Ikea store that had been poised to open in Ohio. A tokig, if you're curious, is the Ikea word for a salad spinner. You'll notice the saint is adorned in Swedish hues of blue and yellow, and is equipped with both a schematic and a handy-dandy tool.

Here's the fan site (Ikea is that kind of store, you know, that can actually inspire fans) and here's the merch page associated with it. 

The vision of Beggars Banquet: Tom Wilkes, RIP

Beggars Banquet is not even my favourite Rolling Stones album cover, but I've always admired it: gritty, dirty, bang-on for hitting the adolescent rock fan (of whatever age) square in the face ... and no doubt pissing off some parents to boot.

The death of Tom Wilkes, 69, who created this and other rock album covers, reminds me of something that is often not obvious with Beggars Banquet, among many other items in my record collection: it was designed. Every rotten, Trainspotting-esque element in the shot is there, not by accident. Says veteran Rolling Stone magazine writer David Fricke: "The magic and the sort of importance of album design was to be able to catch the eye, to try and get a sense of what the music and the personalities were inside and also make you want to buy it."

You can read that comment, and more about Tom Wilkes, here. Look also for some Rolling Stone links on album covers that matter.

And, really, why shouldn't your chicken coop have that Ikea feeling?

Just because they're chickens doesn't mean they shouldn't live amid clean Scandinavian lines. From Make:

The rampaging success of the Fail Whale

The Fail Whale - the cheery image Twitter uses to appease users when things aren't working (which is not that uncommon) - didn't just come from the ether. It was designed, by Australian Yiying Lu. The Sydney Morning Herald has more.