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Another joyous fold-out from the masters of the minor attraction Herb Lester. This time it's the lesser spotted hot spots of my favourite city. So good they named it, well, once, then named the state the same thing so it sounds kind of silly. But we love it anyway. This particular Herbism is illustrated by ace New Yorkan illustrator Jim Datz. Datz is brilliant, you can see his other works here. And staffle up your copy of the Lester square (rectangle really) here.
I know, I know. "Whatever happened to Plot Watch?", I hear you all ask. It was great, wasn't it? All that digging and planting and growing. The plucking, oh the plucking! And the podding and the trimming; there was lots of trimming. Then there was the weeding and more of that digging. There was plenty of harvesting and eating too of course. That was the best bit. That and the sausages.
Well, after two years of plot management up in the hills, we've decided to bring it all in-house, for a simpler life. Back to square one you might think, but it's actually back to square's five (ehum). Five hand-crafted raised beds to be precise, each a 1.8m square.
A chicken inspects my handiwork.
We all take loads of photos don't we? Some are quite good. Lots of them are rubbish. I really like the rubbish ones. They're my favourite ones. Clearing the camera of digital debris, I found these from when we had all that snow. They're rubbish. The top one's my favourite. The last one's the rubbishest.
We're buzzing at Thought Collective right now.Wednesday saw us presenting first stage visuals for the user interface and print editions of The Zimbabwean. It's been an exciting process to date but there's still a whole pile of work to be done. You can read more about it on the TC blog and catch a glimpse of the print version too.
Written and lavishly illustrated by a whoop of designers on the spot, with their designer ears to the ground and their designer eyes on the ball, Graphic USA is a visual tour de whatsit of what the cool kids do when they're in this town or that. Al's heading Stateside pretty soon so I'm giving him the book to put it through it's paces. But even if your not heading that way, or the other, it's still a pleasure to flick through.
More about it on the CR blog.
Photograph: Shane McInnes/TheWorldsRarestBirds
This image appeared in the Guardian (online) yesterday and for some reason it's kind of haunting me; I can't get it out of my head. The photo won the "Critically Endangered or Extinct in the Wild" category in an international photography competition run in support of the conservation project BirdLife International. The bird itself is a Kakapo, a big flightless parrot and one of the world's rarest of our feathered friends; there's believed to be only 124 alive today. Which is pretty awesome and terribly sad. And I think that's why the image is so haunting. It's also an amazing picture. See more Kakapo here.
Was asking The Internet about Constructivism, for an idea I was helping someone else with. And I happened upon these Honda ads on Monoscope. By W+K London, from a few years back. Brilliant.
Ampersand loving Janine brought her new, and pretty amazing, Gemma Correll letterpress print into Thought Collective this week. It's pretty amazing. (Oh, I've said that already). Still, it is.
I bought Khoi Vinh's book at the tail end of 2010, knowing that one of the first projects I'd be involved in at Thought Collective would be the redesign of The Zimbabwean newspaper (paper, web and pad). Although a well respected and often quoted (notably by the Guardian) voice for change in the troubled country, to date its design and production has been done on something of a shoe-string. Paper editions are printed in both the UK and South Africa (then shipped into Zim), and the online version is published from England. Currently, its design doesn't live up to what it deserves to be.
So far I've been mostly thinking about the web. So I've been wire-framing. OK, I know a thing or two about grids (for print) but on- (and for that matter off-) line a newspaper is a very particular kettle of fish. So I thought, that man Vinh, he's been through this, he must know his stuff, I'll read his book.
I'm glad I did. Living up to its name, Khoi's book did one really great thing for me: It took what I know and it put it in the right order so I could apply it to the task in hand with something close to confidence. Bundled with other learnings accumulated in both recent and bygone times (I'm knocking on a bit you know) Ordering Disorder helped me swiftly fit it all together - and rather neatly too.
The outcome appears to be a pretty robust and flexible grid system. I guess only thorough testing will tell me if it's up to the mark but so far, it seems to be good.
If you haven't read the book, I think I should tell you a bit more. For one thing, please don't misunderstand what I'm saying here; it's not a step-by-step guide to designing an online newspaper. Far from it. It's actually a fairly lightweight overview of designing for web with a grid. And when I say "lightweight", upon reflection I reckon most of the learning is done about a third of the way through. And the latter two thirds basically coasts you through the application of the established system. Although Vinh, helpfully, goes to lengths to outline the development of grid systems for graphic design, his writing is pretty snappy and the text is bordering on skimpy - there's loads of big white gaps in the book. That might sound a bit critical but actually all that made for a, thankfully, swift read; I've a lot to do and no time for a heavy-going volume.
The basic pages are wired. Tomorrow, I'm whizzing through them with Ryan, who's going to build the back-end publishing system. Meanwhile, Al is beavering away on the print format (looks like we'll be using Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Sentinel for that with Whitney in support).
Applaudable (high res) mappery on Footprint today. Visualized by Reinier de Graaf and Laura Baird from OMA's design research studio AMO. Definitely worth downloading the full, 256 page (17mb), WWF/ECOFYS/OMA report from the ECOFYS website.