Ten Great Moments In Internet History

This just in from the Utah Web Services site:
Most of us would never know that the 1957 launch of Sputnik would lead us to the Internet. Most of those reading, are probably already thinking. INCORRECT! However, it was the fear of the Soviets that led Dwight D. Eisenhower to develop ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) which would assemble of some of the greatest minds in the United States and eventually create the first internet. This teams first project was to put the first US Satellite into orbit and they accomplished the task in just 18 months. Afterwards, ARPA turned its attention to the need for improved military communications in 1962, with a focus on computer networking. By 1968, ARPA brought a lot of its research contracts to the university level, pulling them from the private sector. Many breakthroughs occured in this time period but none more than:

1. The Creation of the ARPANET



For the rest of the Top Ten, click here.

Via Coudal, of course.

The Actual Definition of Cute

Feist on Sesame Street:


From Pitchfork: When Amanda Petrusich interviewed Feist for Pitchfork.tv, the singer mentioned appearing in an upcoming episode of the children's television perennial "Sesame Street". The episode is due to run in August, but her musical performance of a modified "1234" has hit YouTube, and it's pretty sweet.

Via the always sexy Dorothy Surrenders,who likes it despite the fact the "Steve Jobs played this song to death."

Radiohead Does It Again

Radiohead debuts a laser-shot video, done completely without cameras:



Radiohead's latest video, for the track "House of Cards" from the In Rainbows album, uses real time 3D recording instead of cameras, utilizing highly technical structured light and Lidar laser-enhanced scanners to model lead singer Thom Yorke and provide an otherworldly narrative accompaniment to the song.

Blip Boutique creative director and Zoo director James Frost took Creativity Magazine through the exceedingly complex, innovative process, which used on-set engineers and technology support instead of a film crew and required massive amounts of rendering and the sculpting of mountains of data in post--not to mention 64 lasers (on the Lidar system alone). Read on past our interview with Frost for behind-the-scenes footage and to visit the video's interactive component, hosted by Google in it's developer area, code.google.com. Radiohead is encouraging fans to use the 3D data of Yorke's head and make their own videos using the point cloud data and Processing.

Click here for the entire article and an interview with James Frost.

My New Book Has Arrived: The Essential Principles of Graphic Design

My new book is out! The title is Essential Principles of Graphic Design and it is published by Rotovision, and distributed in the U.S. by the generous folks at HOW Books. It is a book of 35 case studies by some of the world's greatest designers, and it features a look at how they work and come up with ideas. Essentially, it is both a visual and verbal journey of a project from concept to creation. It also includes basic primers to the principles of Graphic Design, written by experts in each discipline. Some of the designers included are Stephen Doyle, Marian Bantjes, Fabian Monheim, Peter Buchanan-Smith, Vault 49, Yves Behar, Hillman Curtis, Jacob Trollback and many, many more (full list, and examples of some of the images and spreads are below). The magnificent Rodrigo Corral (naturally) designed the interior and he set the entire book in the typeface Chronicle, gorgeously created by Hoefler & Frere-Jones.


Zetter Hotel identity created by Fabian Monheim


Sprint Identity exploratory by Lippincott, Creative Director Connie Birdsall


Examples of the breadth of the exploratory of the grammy award winning CD cover design for Wilco's "A Ghost Is Born" by Peter Buchanan-Smith


Images by Brian Rea & Nicholas Blechman for VM World 2007


Sketches for a Shakespeare Poster for Columbia University by Luba Lukova


Sketches for the title for the 2007 Society of Typographic Aficionado's Annual Competition by Marian Bantjes


Sketches for the cover of McSweeney's 23 by Andrea Dezso


Front page of the proposal for the design of Herman Miller's magazine SEE from Bill Cahan, Cahan & Associates


Sketches by Chris Bolton for a Helsinki Museum Exhibit


Final Identity for the MTV Video Music Awards Brasil in 2005

Here It Comes

The Dark Knight film poster, in all its strange, bittersweet, crazy glory.

Boys and the Subway

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

The brilliant editor of Print Magazine, Joyce Kaye, pointed me to this illustrated story by Christoph Niemann in the New York Times. It is about his sons love affair with the New York City Subway system, and it is absolutely wonderful.

Clay Felker 1925-2008

Legendary journalist and founding editor of New York Magazine died yesterday. From Kurt Anderson's poignant, wonderful column: "Clay Felker’s own rock stardom as a media pioneer endures. It doesn’t matter that he did his great, seminal work way back when. So did Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney. During the seventies and eighties, the Times (and much of the rest of mainstream media) thoroughly Felkerized itself. Practically every species of insidery, smart-ass Web journalism carries bits of his DNA. He permanently transformed his white-hot corner of the world. And on these very pages, fresh chapters of his novel about the city are still being published every week."