John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

Inside Jerry Seinfeld's apartment

When Jerry and the gang sat down to watch TV on Seinfeld (a tricky proposition, as that couch could never sit all four of the main cast), we all knew there was a wall behind the unseen television set, correct? 

Here's something that makes us redefine the phrase "television set" altogether, and it's just one of a series. Behold, the plans for Jerry's modest but well-used Upper West Side apartment from Seinfeld. 

The sketch is by a Spanish artist Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde, who goes by the nickname Nikneuk, and who specializes in taking the homes shown on television shows and movies (from I Love Lucy to Up to the Big Bang Theory.) 

You can tour his portfolio here. 

One of his popular pieces is a creation of the neighbouring apartments on Friends, which fuels the debate on how, exactly, Monica and Rachel were able to afford a spread like that in the West Village on the salaries of a starting (and sometimes unemployed) cook and a coffee shop employee. Ah, television! 

Big words all over that movie poster

Why do some movie posters ring a bell, even if we've never heard of the title before? Because, quite likely, we've seen the look of that poster before. Have a glance at this collection:

That's just the start.

There are more sets and collections here; I bet you'll get a kick out of the ways that designers tap into what you're already familiar with as they try to see you an unseen movie.

 

If milk was packaged like wine

This is a student project that would appear to be about packaging milk as wine, but it's really not about milk, but rather Milk, as in Harvey Milk. There are reasons for the subtle design choices you see above. You can read about it here. 

How to get lucky

This is a keen way of thinking about luck, and especially the lucky. A variation of this saying has been attributed many times to Samuel Goldwyn, the film producer. 

It was produced by Studio Muti. 

Irony, ripoffs and sidewalk vendors

We had an interesting experience yesterday on Fifth Avenue as we were walking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The stretch of "museum mile" near Central Park not only connects several museums but is notably home to a variety of street vendors who will gladly sell you cheap reproductions of famous paintings, photographs and magazine covers. 

Here's the story. 

We saw one vendor who sold a variety of parodies of the "Hope" poster featuring Barack Obama. Some were funny, so I took my phone to take a snap. The vendor got aggressive. "Hey, hey, hey! This is my work!" he yelled at us, protecting his $5 products with his arms. 

Now, of course, I found this instantly ironic. I pointed to the reproduction of the "original" Hope design, the one made by Shepard Fairey during the 2008 U.S. election campaign. "You made this? You actually own the copyright and trademark on this image?" I asked. 

Well, that made him a little, um, upset. "Get outta here!!" he screamed. We left, and couldn't help but laugh. 

Let's review the case: the fellow was not only appropriating the design of someone else (and, as someone reminded me later, Fairey himself ran into trouble because he used a copyrighted photograph owned by someone else), but a host of copyrights, including the owners of characters such as Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin. 

Moreover, it's not like the fellow had come up with something remotely original. Parodies of the Hope design are rampant, and you you can easily make one yourself on the internet, right here for instance. 

The lesson for our son, apart from those involving intellectual property and fair use, moreso pointed to a particular type of vendor: the raging idiot. 

Scrappy

It's been curious watching the faux-vintage theme run its course, with modern products, ideas and persons given a retro-minded makeover in the style of, say, advertising from the 30s or propaganda posters from the Second World War.

The above is one of the originals, and part of this gallery.

 

Guess which section of the bookstore this is?

OK, the section headers on top do give it away, but have you ever noticed just how many gardening books have green covers and/or spines? Altogether, they kind of blur together, and I found myself drawn to the books that didn't have green plastered all over. 

Rethinking Raiders

From Minimalist Movie Posters, another way of thinking about the first Indiana Jones adventure.

Gardened house

As I get older, I find myself more and more interested in architecture. Not in an entirely serious way; websites and blogs about buildings and their design are often just something I like to look at while I'm eating toast. The thing is, to get into the viral stream of things, there often has to be something eye-popping, which means you're often presented with the unusual or exotic or improbable. 

This is from a post on Architecture Linked of what's called Sky Garden House, designed by a firm in Singapore. The hook for the post is how the design makes use of natural elements and incorporates grass, shrubs and living things into the overall package.     

After you click on this link, you'll see that the look of the house really depends on the angle where the picture is taken.

What's inside is pretty cool: check out the staircases here.

The only cigarette lighter I'd ever want

The thing, of course, is that it's not a lighter at all, but a USB. It's part of this collection of curious USB designs.

The view at chez Twitter

I'm not surprised to see that the walls at the offices of Twitter happen to look a bit like one of Twitter's best-known visual themes.

The pic is part of a collection of interesting workspaces, and I have to say that Twitter's home base is among the more mundane.     

Pi clock

If you need pi to tell time, this is the clock for you. As seen here.

Shower faucet controls: ideal and reality

I saw this here, and it made me think about hotel faucets in particular: why is much of the range so uncomfortable?

Square eggs

Very clever. Saw this on designersgotoheaven, one of the Tumblr feeds I follow. [You can catch up with my own Tumblr feed right here.]

The Beemer goes Batman

At the Geneva Motor Show today, BMW unveiled this forward-looking concept design, which looks kind of like what I would think Batman might like to drive. (Or just Bruce Wayne, perhaps.)

And that's only the exterior. Get a load of what would be on the inside:

Instead of traditional instruments and warning lights, the BMW of the future will display key information in a three dimensional head-up display in the direct sight line of the driver, eliminating the need for his eyes to re-focus on dials inside the cabin.

Check out more in the Telegraph.

Not quite in the lighting budget

Martha and I have been keeping an eye out for a decent floor lamp, for the living room. We have some lamps, for sure, but in one key spot we don't really want to have to use critical space with an end table whose main purpose would be to hold said lamp. A floor lamp would give us the light we need, without making much of a footprint.

The problem? The kinds we like are bloody expensive.

Here's a case example. I landed on Danskdesign, which sells very nice European furniture and household products. The portfolio of floor lamps had lots of possibilities ... until I converted the currency to U.S. currency and saw that the economy models sell for about $700.

Oh well. Back to keeping an eye out for that elusive stylish bargoon.

 

Movie novelizations that never happened

When I started buying my own books in the Seventies, a lot of what I was picking up were used copies of paperbacks that had been published in the Sixties (it makes sense; I was a kid trying to stretch the book-buying power of my paper route income). Thus, the style of this set of purported mid-Sixties novelizations of movies that had not yet been made was familiar, and the humour is spot-on.

Red and blue don't make orange

Colour mixing humour, as it were. From the archives of Myapokalips.

 

 

Souped-up shopping carts (by way of VW)

Volkswagen had a bit of a ride last year with a viral web hit about fun, a staircase, music and human behaviour. (I blogged about it here.)

This summer, the theme is "fast lane," and a series of videos like the one below. As with the stairs, the brand - let alone the product - is practically immaterial.

Which, I assume, is the point of how the branding in this campaign works.

Maybe Tyler Brûlé is on to something

 

A few weeks ago, I parted with £75 (or about Cdn $120, I think) for a subscription to Monocle, the British-based magazine that comes out about 10 times a year. It costs about as much to buy it here in St. John's, but I figure this way I'll get in closer to when it comes out. It's an unusual magazine, that covers industries as diverse as retail fashion and defence contracting, and while parts of it leave me cold, I find myself reading it deeply for an hour or so at a time.

Usually, the attraction of getting a subscription is that you can get a bargoon, often a small fraction of newsstand price.

Monocle doesn't go down that route, and in fact seems to boast that it charges you what it costs to make it. (The magazine is a favourite with a lot of designers because it uses multiple paper stocks, and put a lot of emphasis on its stylish presentation ... not to mention a dead-serious attention to the design industry itself in its reporting.) 

This is all well and good, but there's been a brutal worldwide recession, and Monocle - which depends on advertising from the luxury brands it often covers - would seem to be in trouble, like practically every other magazine.

But that doesn't appear to be the case.

Here's a bit from a recent piece in Bloomberg's BusinessWeek about the magazine and its Canadian-born founder and editor-in-chief, TylerBrûlé, he of the extra accents (his father didn't use either of the accents in Brule).

The latest edition of Monocle is a fat book of a magazine that challenges just about every piece of received wisdom about what works in media these days, starting with the notion that this is no time to start a new print publication. Now three years old, Monocle boasts a global circulation nearing 150,000, a 35 percent annual increase at a time when magazine sales are supposed to be going in the other direction, and a rising subscription base of 16,000. If that sounds small, consider that these individuals pay $150 for 10 issues, a 50 percent premium over the newsstand price.

Monocle has launched an interesting spinoff this summer: a newspaper, another product known for its declining and thinning ranks worldwide. There's only one edition, and it's being marketed at the Mediterranean summer crowd, or, as likely, those who wish they were among that number. I haven't seen or felt, the issue, and I use the word "felt" because Monocle decided to use a type of paper stock that is far more pliable and longlasting than conventional newsprint. It's also, by necessity, more expensive.

There you have it: the newspaper as luxury good. I happen to think there's some logic in that concept, incidentally, for all newspapers, even though I would propose a different tact that what Monocle is doing this summer. Rather than trying, often in vain, to herd in would-be readers that will never buy the product, or produce giveaway products that simply go straight to recycling (if that), publishers should consider tailoring their product to the audience that will stick with the published word and will pay what's required for it.

Anyway, I'll be going back to my latest Monocle later today, to pick up where I left off on a thought-provoking piece on making cities more human-sized and inviting. I don't like everything in and about Monocle, and I stick by a column I wrote last fall on Brûlé's foolish thinking on social media, but for what I'm paying for it - and for book-quality pieces on such a wide range of issues - it's a good deal indeed.

The serif gets shot

I Sans the Serif ... get it? Catnip for font freaks, journalists, designers and, perhaps, Bob Marley fans given to puns. The above T-shirt design was spotted here. It's not the only I saw online this week:

This one was seen here.

You've gained that retro feeling

Helvetica was created in the 1950s, and although it took a while to go mainstream, it's a go-to font for that retro feeling. Sometimes, a bit too easily, as this bit of comic advice suggests. The slide has been making the rounds on design blogs; I found it here.

Are You Happy? (The workflow)

I love this. Especially the option for those who really don't want to be happy, thanks. As seen here.

Use your illusion, magnetically

I saw this just now on BoingBoing: an awesome bit of design and construction, all meant to fool the eye.

A sign of character

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, March 25, 2010. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

We have a mixed bag this week, starting with a local photo blog that is not updated often, but which is deserving of your attention. Later on, we’ll revisit some childhood memories, turn YouTube videos into MP3s, and eavesdrop on some healthy venting from designers and journalists.

 

St. John’s Character Collection
Sporadically updated as it is, this set of photographs is really something. Robert Young, every now and again, adds a picture and some comments to a set of images of folks who make St. John’s what it is. In February, he marked the passing of Bill (“Moon Man”) Sweeney; at other times, he’s added images of folks you see around the city. I wish Robert would add more … and maybe pursue a more ambitious project. The idea is that good.

Young Me Now Me
Surely you have a picture of yourself as a child that captures all the exuberance or awkwardness or poignancy or innocence (or, just maybe, all of these things at once) of your younger self. Ze Frank, who has had some great online success with off-the-wall ideas, has a wonderful feature called Young Me Now Me, in which participants take a photo of themselves, more or less matching the pose of a childhood snap. Some are spot on, some don’t seem at all similar, and a few might take your breath away.

Dirpy


Ever seen, say, a concert performance on YouTube that you liked so much, you wanted to listen to it later on your iPod? Dirpy is the tool for you. It converts a YouTube video to an MP3, suitable for loading up on the player of your choice. A caveat: you may well be cheating a copyright law or two here. Another caveat: remember that the audio quality in many YouTube videos is, well, hideous.

Clients From Hell
This site has been making the rounds lately among some self-employed folks and creative types I know, and they’ve been laughing – often out loud – with recognition. The idea is that professionals (designers, web developers, writers) send in horror stories of working with clients who just don’t get it. Take the designer who informed the client that the small, out-of-focus pic supplied simply would not work for a professional campaign, and was told the client was disappointed in their skills. Even outsiders will find this funny … and perhaps a few clients would benefit from reading the tales, too.

Overheard in the Newsroom
In a similar vein, but closer to my profession, Overheard in the Newsroom publishes anonymously submitted tidbits, almost always verbatim exchanges that make you laugh or cringe, or both. An example: “Editor: ‘Kiddo, you can’t pitch stories like you’re already in love with them.’ Intern: 'Sorry. I forgot that enthusiasm is a no-go in this place.' "

Dilbert Mashups
Yes, Scott Adams had hit the nail on the head a thousand times or more, as chronicles the petty insults and idiocies of contemporary office life … but couldn’t you (yes, you, with all of your wit and pain and woe) do a better job? That is, sort of, the point behind Dilbert Mashups, in which the official site asks readers to take an existing strip, and put their own personal spin on it.

10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling
From The Oatmeal, a tipsheet on good grammar (e.g., how to know the difference between They’re, Their and There) that is also great to look at. Feel free to share with your friend and colleagues; after all, they may better accept spelling advice when it comes with a smile attached.

John Gushue is a writer in St. John's, and works with CBC News. John is on Twitter right here.