You are here: Home
› Art

Art

Ground Control to Major Kelly [Three Best Things 5/17/10 - 5/23/10]

Posted by Jason on Sun, 05/23/2010 - 7:52pm

THING 1: Help me help my friend in DC from MetaFilter. An internet forum takes on the Russian mob… no, that’s literally what happened. The dad in Taken could’ve saved a whole lot of trouble if he’d simply paid the $5 MeFi registration fee.
THING 2: New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Forget It by the Onion. This is exactly what you think it is, and you will not regret reading it.
THING 3: I knew it was coming, and it still got me. That means it’s like a dry heave, but in a good way:

Bonus Thing

The perfect soundtrack for old footage of NASA missions? Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” chopped & screwed. This video simultaneously makes no sense and is the most fitting depiction I’ve ever seen of everything about outer space. The glory and horror and striving and solitude — who would’ve ever guessed we’d need an American Idol to soundtrack space travel?

I’ve watched this thing every day this week. I could hammer out 10 pages on it by tomorrow night, but I’ll spare you that if you at least watch it through the 1:53 mark.

Point-Counterpoint Edition [Three Best Things 3/29/10 - 4/4/10]

Posted by Jason on Sun, 04/04/2010 - 8:09pm


Dispute Point Counterpoint A Word, If I May
1. iPads: How Many Should You Have Bought by Now? Gina Trapani says you should return the one you already bought and wait for the next generation. Cory Doctorow says you should buy one if you hate children. Nick Sweeney says you should buy one for your dad. John Gruber says you should buy one for each teenager who lives on your block. I’m with Dave Winer: the iPad is a really, really cool toy.
2. We Should Hate Duke Basketball Even More Than We Already Do, Shouldn’t We? Andrew Sharp lays out the case for rooting against Duke until the end of time. UNC fan Will Blythe stares into the abyss, and the Krzyzewski stares back. Spencer Hall trolls Earth by recommending we all learn to stop worrying and love Duke. Stewart Mandal gets all Atlas Shrugged on us (Coach K is Coach K). Stories need villains; college basketball needs Duke. The black hat fits, Dookies, so wear it like you stole it inherited it.
3. Manly Man of the Week? Tattooed, ‘stached long-haul truckers who like to knit sweaters in their downtime. Counterpoint? I repeat: “Tattooed, ‘stached long-haul truckers who like to knit sweaters in their downtime.”

What Graffiti Will Look Like in 100 Years [Three Best Things 3/8/10 - 3/14/10]

Posted by Jason on Sun, 03/14/2010 - 8:45pm

QUICK LIST THIS WEEK BUSY BUSY BUSY

  • Thing: Attention Is the Real Resource by John Gruber. Should publishers offer full posts or teasers in their RSS feeds? Somehow it’s still up for debate. Our stance is that “Click for more after the jump” sounds the same as “Goodbye” to most readers. Gruber: “A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.”
  • Thing: What May Happen in the Next 100 Years by Ladies’ Home Journal, 1900. Someone dug up a IN THE YEAR 2000 list of predictions that’s… actually really close to right, from the Internet to air travel to agricultural genetic engineering. (Not the intricacies of each, of course, but the effects. Also I would link to the blog this came from, but that blog’s been removed by Blogger for SPAMMIN’.)
  • Thing: REVERSE GRAFFITI: South African Artists Tag Walls By Scrubbing Them Clean by Inhabitat. Self-explanatory:


Via Inhabitat

Unrelated Video: Spring Is Pretty Much Here, Tusas

In honor of another winter’s passing, it’s time to pay respects to all those who tried to have a phone conversation on a frozen lake and kept getting corralled by stunt bikers. Take it away, Tusas on ice:

A List of Branding Style Guides: Corporate, Academic and Government Brand Manual/Logo Guideline Examples

Posted by Jason on Fri, 02/19/2010 - 1:46am

We’re about to pitch the creation of a branding style guide to one of our clients. I was putting together an example list of style guides used by well-known companies, planning to include the list in our proposal. But it seemed smarter to expand it into a gigantic list and post it here, so we can reuse it — and you can benefit from it too.

First: What’s a branding style guide? It’s a document meant to ensure an organization’s members are all on the same page as far as official logos, logo usage, colors, fonts, stationery, images, and so on go. It’s good for any organization of any size to think about what messages its print and web materials convey, and then to make sure the whole team stays on message.

Second: Why look at a brand guide made for somebody else’s company? Besides our own reasons for making this list (SEE PARAGRAPH 1), you can learn a ton about branding, design, and identity by studying the materials that guide successful brands.

ONWARD.

A Short List

Just want to see five or so decent style guides, mostly made by organizations you’ve heard of?

The Long List

ABANDON ALL HOPE OF NOT SEEING BRANDING GUIDES, YE WHO KEEP READING. I went for variety and tried to limit the rest of this list just to organizations that most people have heard of. But it’s still the longest curated list of branding style guides on the entire internet… that I know of at least.

Corporate Branding Style Guides (US-based)

Subscribe to the ENGINE Blog, run by ENGINE Industries.

Corporate Branding Style Guides (Non-US-based)

Academic Branding Style Guides

Note: To keep the list from getting absurd, I left out all sorts of perfectly good style guides. But for this category alone, I had to exclude many dozens and dozens. Institutions of higher learning: you people really brand your faces off.

Government Branding Style Guides

Group/Nonprofit/Open-source/ASSORTED Branding Style Guides

Sports Branding Style Guides

Content Management System Branding Style Guides

BONUS BRANDING!!! BRANDING BONUS!!!

Subscribe to the ENGINE Blog, run by ENGINE Industries.

A Drupal-Powered Monthly Art Contest Site -- MayTheBestArtWin.com

Posted by Jason on Wed, 12/16/2009 - 3:30pm

You read that right! Our new Drupal-powered monthly art contest site: MayTheBestArtWin.com.

AddToAny

Share/Save