Can the hundred dollar bill get any uglier?

redesign:related brings us the U.S. Government’s latest treatment of Benjamin Franklin’s favorite unit of currency, the one hundred dollar bill.

new 100 dollar bill redesign

Judge for yourself whether the new look is a good or a bad thing, but I've put my vote in the title of this post.

Design with flair — on the Web!

A startup called Typekit allows freedom to design with any font you want online &mdash as long as you own the font itself. How groovy is that? Finally, we are free! No more Verdana, Arial... headaches, heartbreak.

via Slate.com

Obama logos ideas that weren’t chosen

The title says it all. Just reposting “Obama logos ideas that weren’t chosen” from Logo Design Love.

In the end, I think they chose the right one.

via Daring Fireball

UCDA Campus Violence Poster Project

The University & College Designers Association (UCDA) is running an auction of works created for their Campus Violence Poster Project. The project is a response to the shootings at Northern Illinois University, Louisiana Technical College, and Virginia Tech University.

As Michelle summarized: “some are kinda interesting, difficult subject.” You can see for yourself at UCDA’s Flickr page on the project, and you can bid on the posters via eBay.

More Olympics?

Have you heard all you want to hear about the Beijing Olympics? Are you Phelpsed out? Does the thought of hearing Bob Costas’ make alliterations with Usain Bolt’s name make your head feel like it’s going to explode? Then don’t worry, this Olympic post from COLOURlovers—“Design and Branding Trends: Olympic Games”—has nothing to do with synchronized diving, beach volleyball, or two-minute, human-interest mini-dramas on athletes overcoming adversity.

via popurls

IN, OUT, UP, DOWN

Okay, you just have to see this one: Axel Peemoeller - Eureka Carpark Melbourne.

via Daring Fireball

Desktop Wallpaper + Calendar = Crazy delicious!

What have you got on your computer desktop? The default image that shipped with the computer? Bo-ring! Pictures of your kids at Lake Mazonga? Bo-ring! …to other people, at least. A mural of unicorns fighting the undead in a lake of fire? Bo—, wait, that actually sounds kind of neat.

In any event, while these examples may not all be that boring, how many of them are useful? Smashing Magazine has a passel of freely downloadable desktop wallpapers that are both incredibly not-boring and incredibly useful.

Okay, maybe “incredibly” is overstating it a bit, but they are cool designs/art, and they do feature monthly calendars.

Click over to Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: July 2008 to be not-bored.

via popurls

PDFs! For designers! Online!

Exclamation point! Okay, maybe that’s a bit more excitement than warranted for yet another ‘list’ post. But, Positive Space Blog’s “30 Essential PDF Documents Every Designer Should Download” is actually worthy of exclamation points.

Well, maybe just one.

Anyway, the 31 (!) PDFs are divided into 5 categories: Resources; Web Development & Programming; Presenations; Freelancing & Income; and PDF Collections.

Enjoy.

via popurls

Beautiful Brochures and Booklets

Smashing Magazine brings us pretty pictures of brochure and booklet designs. Enjoy.

via popurls

GoLive has GoneDead

Do you use GoLive? Probably not, but if so, then it’s time to start using something different. The demise of Adobe’s GoLive (finally) has been widely reported, but for the brief scoop read Macworld’s “Adobe discontinues GoLive.”

via various

Blog recommendation: mStonerblog

I recently returned from the UCDA Design Summit, which was held in Denver, CO, this year.

One of the presenters, Doug Gapinski, the design director at mStoner, spoke about "Branding and Education" ("If your institution was a person, what would the qualities and characteristics of that person be?" Hmmm...) and "User Experience Fundamentals" ("Are your audiences having intuitive and satisfying experiences when dealing with your brand?").

At the end of his presentation, he told us he would post to mStoner's blog and ask us to provide feedback on his talk there.

I just checked out their blog and believe there may be a treasure of relative musings useful for us here at Berkeley. So, check out the blog when you get a chance.

—

Oh, by the way, I went to the new wing of the Denver Art Museum (above), which was designed by Daniel Libeskind. I went on an architectural tour before wandering through the floors on my own. The building has no 90% angles; I was amazed by how they solved the problem of hanging art in such a space. Check it out if you're ever in the "mile-high city."

Design Police Directives

This is a bit dry. But, perhaps because I work for the police department and I am the designer, and have been calling myself the Design Police... it seemed like it was my duty to post this.

The Design Police Directives

Imagine you're Art Directing a new piece and are reviewing the draft. You could use these red tags to markup the doc. Not that you would. But do you ever think that sometimes a strict voice of authority is what you need to keep your design on track?

(Clicking gets multiple downloads of a PDF version of what you see when you click through the pages. That's a bit annoying. Stay with Next and Previous. Who knows what the address form is for.)

Design, Spin, and “Greenwashing”

via e-mail from Roland

Have we gone wrong, design people? The New York Times’ article, Be It Ever So Homespun, There’s Nothing Like Spin muses on the design analog of what Michael Pollan described as “supermarket pastoral”—dressing up industrially-produced certified organic foods with green meadows and happy cows so we can feel good about our food choices. And here I thought we were only supposed to use the power of design for good.

Ignore, for the moment, the debate about the benefits (or not) of Big Organic vs. the accessibility (or not) of Sustainable Agriculture. Instead, check out the There’s Nothing Like Spin article to see how design influences the hearts and minds of supermarket shoppers.

Okay, back to my Natural Cheetos.

40% of us feel fine. 1,217 feel weird.

Pam Pfiffner at Creative Pro blogs about her design epiphany while visiting Adobe , where she gets synchronistically clued into a site called weefeelfine.org. Maybe it's the introspection of fall, but I feel compelled to look at the wriggling data points about feelings, or at least poke around to see all the ways the designer is presenting the data.

This beguiling site is “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.” The site searches the blogosphere for instances of the words “I feel” or “I am feeling” and tracks the emotion attached to that phrase. The information is saved into a database that parses such information as location, age, and gender. Through a visual interface, site visitors can explore what people are feeling at any moment all over the world. Click on a dot representing a blog post and the “emotional” words in that blog posting appear. For example: “I feel like I don’t know how to have fun anymore.” Click those words and you’ll be taken to that person’s blog for more context.

Paul Rand said…

via Daring Fireball

I’m not familiar with The One Club, but I am familiar with Paul Rand. If you’re not familiar with Paul Rand (and you should be), you can read about him at Wikipedia.

If you’d rather see and hear about Paul Rand, though, you can watch this video created for Paul Rand’s induction into The One Club Hall of Fame.

Singin Along Cause I'm So Design Gangsta

A quick and nerdy deliverable for you courtesy of Kyle Webster and You Tube. I really can't get the tune out of my head.

youtube.com/watch?v=yJexyQT0l1c

"Press Check!" "CMYKaaaaaay!"

Friday Movie Matinee

Here’s a little Friday movie-viewing pleasure for you, Copy Goes Here. (Yes, this is design-related.)

Love The Tufte

via New York Magazine via popurls

I like to think of Edward Tufte as simply The Tufte. I don’t do this to demean him (‘The Tufte’ being aurally akin to ‘The Hoff’); it’s more of an expression of “He’s the man.” Again, in a positive sense, not in a socio-oppressive sense. Okay, that’s too much explanation.

Anyway, if you’d like to read more about The Tufte, his charts, his fans, why he thinks PowerPoint is evil, etc., head on over to Beautiful Evidence at New York Magazine.

UPDATE: And, as Kathryn pointed out, Tufte is coming to town.

50 Logo Design Tutorials

via del.icio.us via popurls

I’m not suggesting we go all willy-nilly making logos. On the contrary, I think the UC Seal, Berkeley signature, and University Oldstyle typeface are the only key elements we need to represent virtually anything related to the campus (yeah, yeah, send all complaints, flames, etc. to calixton@[thatplaceweallworkat].edu). But, it’s good to see how other creative-types do their work, what their process is, etc.

E Logo Design has compiled a list of “Top 50 Logo Design Tutorials” on their site. Some of the logos are great. Some of the logos are hideous. Some of the logos aren’t actually logos. Same for the tutorials (great, hideous, not tutorials, etc.). But, why just sit here and read about the list? Judge for yourself.

Last of the CS3 reviews?

Are these the last of the Macworld reviews of CS3 products? I’ve actually lost count. In any case, read up on Fireworks CS3 and Contribute CS3 for Mac OS X. (If you know of reviews on the Windows version, put ’em in the comments.)