My new podcast, The Magnetic Eye, is a series of interviews with artists and designers. The first episode is a chat with graphic artist and pornographic filmmaker Steak Mtn. Listen to the episode online at themagneticeye.com or on iTunes here. I hope you enjoy!

I designed a new brand identity for We Act Radio, a progressive AM radio station in Washington, D.C. The identity includes an acronymn (above) and a full logo (below). The lightning in the full logo is intended to appear differently every time you see it; here I have included three different lightning strikes in a short animation.

The staff at We Act Radio sought a bold identity that expressed action and motion; their goal is to motivate audiences to make change. After throwing obvious, cliched solutions out the window (the raised fist being the most predictable), I decided to use lightning as an elemental representation of action. Its other associations include electricity, power, and ideas. The effect is very bold and dramatic, just like We Act Radio’s personality.

I was amused by this dopey customer service interface that I encountered while setting up a customized PayPal account for a client. Sarah is more faux-bot than robot (she’s a mere jpeg slapped over a FAQ algorithm) but at least she has hopes and dreams. Nonetheless, she’s easily stumped. Just ask her “Why do doves cry?” and she will connect you with a bona fide human.

Over the weekend, I went to a baseball game at the Mets’ new stadium, Citi Field. Paula Scher’s Citibank logo (famously sketched on a napkin during a client meeting) is in gargantuan scale on the facade of the stadium. The tentacles of advertising have greatly extended their reach since the last time I was at a ballgame – it seems that even the sponsorships are sponsored these days. The stadium walls are a busy collage of ads – some of them animated digital billboards. The announcers on the Budweiser Jumbotron announced the winner of the PNC bank baseball quiz (an audience member held up her prize – a PNC bank travel mug – and forced a half-smile). On the stadium’s television screens, one logo swept over another – “This! Brought to you by that!” Now that all stadiums seem to have brand names instead of name names, we joked that the next logical step would be to rename the players themselves: Carlos Gatorade at first base, Ryan Delta Airlines at shortstop, and so on.

The subway ad seems like a no-brainer now that I think about it – ad execs must’ve been clamoring for a shot at that enormous, moving billboard for years. But who let them have it? The cash-strapped MTA? Being forced to endure ads taller than I am when the G train (finally) pulls up is invasive, abrasive, and obnoxious. I hope that the public does not become too complacent about the ever-expanding role of advertising in our lives. We have voices when it comes to this kind of thing, and social media has proven to be especially powerful in expressing our backlash against it.

“Crushinator started last year at Fourth of July because I wanted to do a [Google Doodle] animation for Rube Goldberg in tandem with the Fourth of July. I didn’t want to use Flash but I animated the Rube Goldberg device in Flash and I asked Marcin if there was a way that we could do it with sprites… What he did was he built – on a bus ride home in like 45 minutes – he built a program using JavaScript, CSS3, and Canvas. He took the individual frames and exported them from Flash… and he analyzed each frame to find what the minimum rectangle size was from frame to frame, and then isolated those pixels, and then reassembled them into one long horizontal sprite, and captured the data of the location of them… and then repeated the div onto itself to create the illusion of animation. It’s really just one big sprited div that just goes from place to place to place.”