tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72930142595302667412008-08-13T08:59:28.260-05:00Fight.Boredom features design critiques, creative industry editorials, media and product reviews, interactive features, and the latest news from the Cloudjammer Creative Network. We're always looking for good and bad design everywhere – logos, websites, music, marketing, film, and literature – ready to editorialize and critique matters of like, dislike, and general obsession to better equip you for the battle against boredom.The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comBlogger142125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-61086166435104956852008-07-28T16:21:00.007-05:002008-08-13T08:59:28.294-05:002008-08-13T08:59:28.294-05:00

While recently using AIGA's invaluable Design Archive for some project research, I stumbled across The New York Times' fantastic info graphic,"In Perspective: America's Conflicts." This visualization succinctly and effectively compares the cost, in lives and dollars, of America's twentieth century conflicts – World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and both Gulf conflicts. The charts likewise

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-46076359331695164362008-06-30T21:35:00.002-05:002008-07-07T09:31:23.740-05:002008-07-07T09:31:23.740-05:00

The following posting is intended for satirical purposes only and is based upon an coincidence of linguistics and marketing. No relationship between Home Depot and Al-Qaeda is suggested. Back when I took Arabic language courses at UGA in pursuit of my masters thesis, a casual conversation with one of the Arabic program's professors strayed from issues of political and religious import toward

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-73772425962377776282008-06-23T21:53:00.005-05:002008-07-07T09:29:38.896-05:002008-07-07T09:29:38.896-05:00

On the surface, the following video represents 20/20's attempt to correct a long overdue omission – the historical lack of reporting on graphic design on America's longest-running and most-watched news magazine show. But let the sudden appearance of Comic Sans be your first clue that this "clip" from 20/20 is a parody. In this case, a piece of satirical reporting produced by John Stossel at the

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-71323347157808813072008-06-13T10:21:00.005-05:002008-06-13T10:50:52.280-05:002008-06-13T10:50:52.280-05:00

Just in time for Father's day, we were reminded of Beam Global Wine & Spirits and BBDO Energy's new advertising campaign for Canadian Club: "Damn Right Your Dad Drank It." Canadian Club's campaign works a familiar theme once employed by Oldsmobile, though from an opposing tack. While Oldsmobile tried to distance itself from its aging audience with the poorly-conceived "It's Not Your Father's

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-50021740422774181172008-06-02T16:14:00.001-05:002008-07-07T09:28:45.497-05:002008-07-07T09:28:45.497-05:00

There is a secret transatlantic tunnel running between New York and London ... and it has lain undisturbed for a hundred years. Now recently completed, this tunnel forms the backbone of an extraordinary optical device allowing people on one side of the world to see the other. Behold the Telectroscope – an incredible public art project by British artist Paul St George that is designed to provide a

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-42950157211187136482008-05-19T20:51:00.002-05:002008-07-07T09:24:53.093-05:002008-07-07T09:24:53.093-05:00

Great progress has been made, in recent years, to standardize users' online experience across various browsers. Perhaps nowhere has this trend been seen more than in the widespread standardization of CSS rendering in nearly all major browsers (including the new, more-standards-compliant Internet Explorer 7). The same can not be said of HTML rendering in email. Despite encouraging desktop clients

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-72865242013056981132008-05-12T13:26:00.022-05:002008-05-13T17:16:48.483-05:002008-05-13T17:16:48.483-05:00

On April 2, 2008, The United Kingdom decided to change its currency. Not to the Euro ... heavens no! But the august pound sterling – the third-most-common, and forth-most-traded currency in the world – is getting a long overdue face lift. And the new coinage is a graphic dream: an integrated series of seven coins that work individually, as a collective whole, and reinforce the kingdom's royal

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-79564735215512383962008-05-05T13:33:00.001-05:002008-05-13T14:50:56.680-05:002008-05-13T14:50:56.680-05:00

It's amazing that Domino's villanous, red suited Noid (created by Group 243 and animated by Will Vinton Studios) and rapper/clock aficionado Flavor Flav coexisted in the 1980s and early 1990s without this brand hybridization coming to light: This is the sort of thing that happens when graphic designers have idle hands and an unhealthy affinity for trademark infringement. Enjoy! FB

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-52820007420304850882008-04-28T12:22:00.001-05:002008-05-13T14:50:16.496-05:002008-05-13T14:50:16.496-05:00

Think you are pretty good at identifying typefaces? We thought we were. But we were recently shamed by our 23/34 score on Kari Pätilä's Rather Difficult Font Game over at the Say It Ain't Slow blog. Currently the game challenges you with 34 typefaces to identify but the word is out that this may soon expand to an even larger collection of fonts. For our part, every designer we know (well, aside

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-63280385496239608152008-04-21T20:03:00.006-05:002008-05-13T13:22:31.138-05:002008-05-13T13:22:31.138-05:00

A friend of ours, Carl London, recently brought a great new service to our attention: CNN recently launched a tool that enables users to purchase recent news article titles on t-shirts. This beta service was quietly released today with the sudden appearance of little shirt icons next to the video icons on their homepage. But you better hurry because the wearable headlines are only available as

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-33381551011060138202008-04-14T09:05:00.002-05:002008-05-13T13:19:37.621-05:002008-05-13T13:19:37.621-05:00

We've long had an interest in the way photography and visual editorials can affect the way the public perceives news and conflict. So we took special interest in the way the press and the public marked this past March's bittersweet anniversary of the Iraq War. Most remembrances and acknowledgments focused on the 3,990 American troops that have been killed, and 29,395 that have been wounded, in

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-86143701228357192992008-04-07T10:23:00.006-05:002008-04-08T20:54:26.389-05:002008-04-08T20:54:26.389-05:00

We love fonts – that's no secret. So we were thrilled when Newsweek recently ran an excellent article on the emerging role of fonts in celebrity marketing and campaign politics. Author Jessica Bennett points out that "America has developed a geeky obsession with fonts, the latest instance of our sophistication about design." Alongside her discussion of Beyonce and Bjork's celebrity typography,

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-76945800153966296442008-03-24T14:57:00.004-05:002008-03-27T18:10:03.826-05:002008-03-27T18:10:03.826-05:00

StarWars.com's Expanded Universe blog recently showcased a number of scenes from the original Marvel comic and the much later Media Works magna editions of the original Star Wars trilogy. It reveals both a striking contrast in how different cultures approach the material in a graphically illustrated form and how different artists either suffered or benefited from a sophisticated familiarity with

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-42211066477567601772008-03-17T11:56:00.002-05:002008-03-19T09:18:02.986-05:002008-03-19T09:18:02.986-05:00

There are plenty of ways to embed documents into webpages. But when it comes to replicating the look and feel of a magazine or book, most digital efforts fall flat or complicate the interface. Thank goodness there's Issuu. Issuu lets you upload a PDF and then flip through it seamlessly on a dedicated Webpage or in a small embedded widget. Issuu's media viewer, which presents the content like a

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-47608587397050514442008-02-18T12:42:00.003-05:002008-02-19T12:07:18.159-05:002008-02-19T12:07:18.159-05:00

Over the last several years, Al Jazeera has become one of the world's most widely recognized brands, its calligraphic logo decorating not only its own news broadcasts but also those of every Western network that replays their much coveted footage. But the logo itself remains a bit of a mystery to many Western viewers unfamiliar with the Arabic script and the language's calligraphic tradition.

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-79614756848549019332008-02-11T23:28:00.001-05:002008-02-13T15:23:17.630-05:002008-02-13T15:23:17.630-05:00

It's no secret that I've got pretty strong opinions about creative business – particularly about the many ways designers hurt themselves and the industry by not knowing or following good business practices. In the past, I've written about designers selling their services for pocket change. But I was recently asked to produce some work on spec and, in refusing, I realized that a far more insidious

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-14236757723839254152008-02-04T12:19:00.000-05:002008-02-04T13:52:22.715-05:002008-02-04T13:52:22.715-05:00

Some light fare this week: Recently Lifehacker brought to our attention a hilarious series of Photoshop "tutorials" by a pseudonymous screencaster, Donnie Hoyle. In addition to saying that you suck at Photoshop (or Photardshop), he currently offers a quintet of funny, Dane Cook-ish tutorials with some adult themes and language. But his marital strife and personal failings are our pleasure. We

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-81726431358991854072008-01-28T07:04:00.000-05:002008-01-28T13:33:27.107-05:002008-01-28T13:33:27.107-05:00

I love good informative design. It's a difficult task to combine information, entertainment, and good design. But thanks to the on-going writers' strike, and our NetFlix account's associated vigorous workout, we recently stumbled across a surprising and impactful combination of these elements in the inventive three-minute opening sequence for Peter Berg's The Kingdom. Observers frequently notice

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-84958108507645499802008-01-21T17:39:00.000-05:002008-01-23T15:31:45.945-05:002008-01-23T15:31:45.945-05:00

Helvetica is a movie about a font. A whole 90 minute movie about one, single font. A font that you use – and see – every day. It's a movie that throws around terms like typography, kerning, leading... But the film's not just for graphic design buffs. Really. It's a genuinely interesting and well made film that opens your eyes to, well, the words and letters all around us. The words and letters

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-31569576995863390872008-01-15T22:43:00.000-05:002008-01-17T09:56:03.928-05:002008-01-17T09:56:03.928-05:00

Earlier today a colleague directed me to a fascinating Gizmodo article connecting Braun's industrial design from the 1960s to Apple's industrial design of today. The article centered on the similarities in the respective design philosophies of Braun's Dieter Rams and Apple's Jonathan Ive and the eerie similarities between a number of the companies' products – such as that of the Braun T3 pocket

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-91430110460460721632008-01-10T07:47:00.000-05:002008-01-10T23:50:12.863-05:002008-01-10T23:50:12.863-05:00

I just was just reminded (cause I needed it) of rsizr, a great little image resizing tool online that's based on seam carving technology rather than the basic scale and distort methods we normally use in Photoshop. As most of us know, when you resize an image using traditional tools, you make everything in it smaller. But with rsizr, a Flash, browser-based application that lets you resize JPG,

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-22682932829541496362007-12-28T22:50:00.000-05:002007-12-28T23:43:20.071-05:002007-12-28T23:43:20.071-05:00

I've recently been either blessed or cursed to work on a number of websites that make use of the PNG file format. They're small, they look great, and they support full transparency with variable opacity. Problem is: Not all browsers support them. For those not familiar with this type of image, The Portable Network Graphic (PNG) image format was developed in the 1990s by the World Wide Web

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-46193400053574589202007-12-26T09:16:00.000-05:002007-12-26T21:51:02.489-05:002007-12-26T21:51:02.489-05:00

(originally posted on PoorMartin.com) Taking a break from all this baby talk to mention something else that really interests me... There are a number of great translation websites that can help you speak exotic languages. Perhaps you've used online translators like Babelfish (a fantastic, and functional, homage to Douglas Adams' useful little ear swimmers) or Systranet. Maybe you've even plugged

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-23833393807420556492007-12-20T22:52:00.000-05:002007-12-26T14:28:54.061-05:002007-12-26T14:28:54.061-05:00

It's that time of year again. In addition to the usual litany of New Years retrospectives, Google has released its annual report (of sorts) on the way we search. The 2007 Zeitgeist – a German word they've borrowed to describe "the spirit of time", the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era. At least that corner of the era we find through Google. Google measures our search

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7293014259530266741.post-22476189914193046572007-11-06T23:00:00.000-05:002007-11-08T07:04:10.627-05:002007-11-08T07:04:10.627-05:00

We recently stumbled across two entertaining diversions that screamed to be shared: Make My Logo Bigger Cream For every designer that has struggled against clients who hate white space, swoon for starbursts, and love big, fluorescent logos, the satirical infomercial for Make My Logo Bigger Cream (and its associated products) will ring painfully true. We found that every designer and developer

The Cloudjammer Creative Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09612693084668892716noreply@blogger.com