As of this post, The Donut Project is no longer. It has served us well as a place to share awesome stuff with each other and our readers. We have a small but loyal group of followers who’ve made running this site more fun than I imagined it could be.

This site will remain here as an archive of sorts, joining the internet graveyard of blogs from the past. We’ll take our twitter account with us, changing the username by the end of the week. Follow @theXXth to keep up with us in the future.

I really should thank our contributors for helping with the site, especially those there from the beginning: co-founders Sharon & Krystle, along with Danielle who came up with the name over pizza in a Cleveland apartment. And of course anyone who sent us content to post, left a comment, @ reply’d us, pimped our desktop wallpapers, or helped us in any way. It’s been fun.

I hope you’ll join us on The Twentieth as we try to add to the conversation and find our voice.

Cheers,
Ricky Salsberry

I came across this great informative/hilarious video on typography from Erik Spiekermann circa 1980s. The intro song and his grocery shopping attire might be ridiculous, but the content is still great.

Industry City Distillery serves as a nexus for opportunity science, art, and industry. This collaborative effort is the work of five individuals looking to make something better. It just so happens their product is vodka and not the “well” stuff you’ve been drinking at your local watering hole. The City Foundry’s 6000sqft space holds not only the distillery but everything needed to improve their process while growing their business, including a machine shop, a biological research lab, a design studio and onsite printing press, a business office, and a public space for tasting and events.

Check out the website and find out where to get your own bottle.

This amazing desk was created by the Dublin ad agency, Boys & Girls, for their entry/reception area. After seeing their intriguing boardroom table (topped by legos), Marketing Magazine wrote that in comparison “the reception is small and routine.” When they heard the negative feedback, they decided to bring that same creative touch to their reception desk.

The most fascinating thing about the desk is how it is held up. If you’ve seen it already, you probably thought, like I did, that the balloons were fake and were simply bolted to the ceiling. If you read into it on their site, you’ll see that they’re actually filled with a special helium/hydrogen hybrid gas so that they are indeed floating.

Here’s to hoping they have another boring work space to transform into something crazy.

Take a look at the rest of the images

I stumbled across this video of a speech Adam from “Mythbusters” gave a couple of days ago and found it really fun and exciting. The only way to learn, is to fuck up. The only way to fuck up, is to try. Enjoy!

This stop motion animation from Dan Mackenzie perfectly captures the creative imagination of a child at play. What makes it so fun is how easy it is to relate to your own childhood and how you could effortlessly turn every day objects into something as radical as the tools of a mad scientist. You may not have realized it, but what you were doing while you let your imagination run was honing your creative skills. It is important that as we grow older we do not lose those skills and the ease to turn the mundane into the magical.

This article from Andy Russell at Fast Company explains how the creative play we experience as a child can help us be more innovative as we grow older. “These divergent thinking skills, practiced and honed through years of imaginative play in childhood, lie at the heart of our creative abilities as adults.” However, Russell points out in his article, there is a larger discussion to be had: As technology improves and childs play moves from the unconstrained to the finely constructed, are children missing out on the free-thinking skills that they develop when they are young? Check out the article and see how one toy company is incorporating imagination, collaboration, and communication in its digital toys.

Smoke Don’t Smoke just released a compilation titled ‘Dopewave Is Real’. They say

Dopewave is an experiment in genre creation. Birthed out of a new group of young producers creating electronic sounds, that are simultaneously like nothing, and like everything you’ve ever heard. They reside primarily on SoundCloud, forcing us to become foragers among the clouds in constant search for that perfectly shaped sound. They are sounds that could attract several genres, from disco to trap, ambient to hip-hop, shoegaze to post-dub, and on and on. New sounds need new identifiers.

Give it a listen. Some great summer jams on there.

Also, the new Japandroids album just came out which is pretty great. Go listen to that too.

This is a film about John Baldessari, you should watch it. You can read more about him here or here.

A beautiful new video from Pentagram celebrating their 40th Anniversary. Enjoy!

Familytree is a small creative studio that got its start in 2008. Over the last few years their posters have been popping up in familiar places like, PRINT, Apartment Therapy, and Under Consideration FPO

I also came across this awesome process video of Alex Pearson in action. Combining rich textures and colors he cranks out a beautiful 1950s style illustration loaded with detail.

Get more Familytree

An odd coincidence that this is being posted the day Facebook goes public. Rob Sheridan designed the album art for the Social Network, and many other films you may have seen, and I’m pretty floored with how he went about it. He and Trent Reznor, one of the composers for the film, wanted to make the album art similar to the movie but also “wanted to make it weird”.

An early idea I had was to digitally corrupt the images we had from the film, combining a “glitch art” visual aesthetic I’ve always been interested in with a metaphor for digital images shared on Facebook, the corruption they’re susceptible to, and the corruption portrayed in the film. This idea resonated with Trent, so I began experimenting with different ways to destroy the publicity stills Sony had sent me.

Rob went into the source code of each image in a plain text editor, like Text Edit, and copied pasted and deleted code to create the effects seen. By manipulating the code of the images by hand he was paying homage to the hacker mentality at Facebook. Its the perfect marriage of concept and execution.

See more from the Social Network and more of his work.

Writing for a blog is no easy task, especially if you’re putting in the extra effort to write about something you believe in, something organic. If you’re a regular to The Donut Project, you’ve probably noticed an increase in posting over the past few months.

The Donut Project is about opportunity, serving up ideas and bringing to light new possibilities. That being said we welcome a new batch of talented guest contributors, young creatives, aspiring to inspire others and find their own voice in a larger ongoing conversation of inspiration, design, and opinion.

We’re excited to introduce Casey Sandala, Jason Richburg, Eric Courtney, and Todd Wendorff, each bringing their own fresh perspective to our blog, broadening our voice in the design community.

Stay tuned.