Dubbed Clever Little Bag, this unit of awesomeness is not only topless, missing a large portion of wasteful cardboard, cut out of one piece of material which goes together like a puzzle, and comes hidden in a closable, reusable bag which will mostly certainly become my new lunch bag; but its also saves a few (20) million megajoules of electricity, 8,500 tons of paper, 1 million litres of oil, 500,000 litres of diesel, and 275 tons of plastic. And it looks pretty, coming in a bright red color, with big fat fonts and excellent icons.

It was designed by Yves Béhar for Puma in 2010, and finally started hitting pretty much everywhere in North America in 2011. Since then, it has won the GOOD DESIGN award, as well as the Core77 design awards.

This beautify designed book cover belongs to an equally interesting book. I haven’t read it, so I’ll not say much about it. But I did want to bring to your attention the incredible detail that went in to this design, particularly the subtle imagery of protesters cleverly masked inside of the typography. It’s edgy and smart, and Kelli Anderson deserves a pat on the back.

For more information on the book, be sure to check out the Verso website. It’s also currently on sale for $8 at Amazon.

So get trendy, people. Ditch your boring old Bauhaus red, and convert to Tangerine Tango.

We are in a very strange place right now. A place where everything is turning into an application, and nothing is static or empty. We’re no longer completely disconnected from the things we use on the web, or the way we interact with devices. It’s a good place to be. But it comes with some downsides, especially in the area of old habits.

Perhaps one of the most recent demonstrations of this would be Apple’s natural scrolling which they just “introduced” with the release of OS X Lion. It’s getting a pretty bad rap, and a lot of people are complaining about it. Which I think is very strange, but I completely understand. We just aren’t thinking about it properly. While it was technically just introduced, we’ve been using it for years. On our iPhones, iPods, iPads, Android OS phones and tablets, and various other touch based hardware. Does it make more sense on a mobile device? Sure. But that’s only because we weren’t already in the habit of using a scroll wheel on our phones (I don’t want to hear about how your old Blackberry had a scroll ball on it).

So how do we break the habit and realize that we’re now finally using scrolling the correct way? Simple. Stop looking at the scroll bar. Apple got rid of them for a reason, and it wasn’t just to confuse you. If you think about how you use a scroll wheel for a minute, you’ll realize that when you roll the wheel down, the scroll bar goes down. Likewise if you roll the wheel up, the scroll bar goes up. Why doesn’t this actually make any sense? Well, when you roll the wheel down, the scrollbar goes down… but the content goes up. You’re interacting with the scrollbar, and nothing else. Nowadays we’re interacting with the content, which is how it should be. We don’t need to be interacting with scroll bars and weird little esoteric wheels in the middle of our stone age mice. We touch the content now, and the content reacts to that touch.

Once you stop looking at the scroll bar, it will begin to makes sense. You’re no longer touching a disconnected piece of hardware, you’re touching the content itself as it were the physical object. Thus, when you pull your fingers down, the content goes down. When you push your fingers up, the content goes up. Left, right, etc. I know that you’re still staring at that scroll bar right now going “no, no, wait a minute” but I promise. It makes sense.

If you still think I’m insane and Apple is just out to piss you off, then do this simple little affirming experiment:

1. Put a piece of paper on the desk

2. Put your index and middle finger on the peice of paper

3. Pull it towards you

Done.

That’s right. I just made a Tony! Toni! Toné! reference.

There are times (from no fault of my own, mind you), where I come across extremely strange and mystical things. And some times they turn out to be awesomely inspiring. Today contained one of those times.

Thanks to my friend Nate, my eyes befell upon a real gem of unexpected inspiration: Kirby. Yes, Kirby; that weird-ass pink blob of a Nintendo game from the early 90′s. Apparently they have continued the obviously unstoppable legacy of Kirby in the form of a new Wii game, called Epic Yarn. Now the Wii game itself is not what I’m actually talking about. What I am talking about though, is the freakin’ awesome execution of the Kirby characters, as well as the overall good example it sets of how to use layers of texture on the web.

Here are some highlights

While you’re checking out kirbykirbykirby.com to see it’s textured awesomeness, make sure you watch the acid inspired storyline video. You’ll have nightmares of turning into yarn for nights to come.

Now normally I don’t post things that aren’t design related in some way. But Andy Levitt, founder of HealthTalker sent this article to me today. And being that I’m 100% for animal-friendly workplaces, I thought I should share it. Everywhere.

Now I (like most people), am of the mind that your dog should go everywhere with you. Including work – provided of course that you don’t work at a restaurant, or a hospital, or something like that. Most of the agencies I’ve worked at/with have allowed dogs, and it’s kind of a common (almost expected) thing amongst creative environments to see a pooch or two roaming around. Some of the larger companies in this article have really taken it to another level, having upwards to 10 dogs hanging out and keeping everyone happy and relaxed. I’m super stoked about how much traction it’s gaining, and even more stoked that big articles about it are getting into places like Business Insider.

So if you’re one of the decreasing number of people who runs a business and doesn’t allow dogs, I suggest you read this Business Insider article and change your ways.

I’m excited to report that I have successfully received my Google Music invite and got it rolling. Currently it’s automatically uploading my iTunes library, including playlists and album art. As you would expect from Google, the UI is form over function, and leaves much to be [aesthetically] desired.

But c’mon. Having all of your playlists available and up-to-date from any machine on the web… Who the hell cares what it looks like?

Cassette tape insert cards: We’ve all had them. We’ve also all ignored them. And We’ve also all throw them away, drew on them, put stickers all over them, set them on fire, and got annoyed at them every time they slipped out and wouldn’t go back in correctly unless you used the tape to push it down.

But I’m confident in saying that we haven’t done, is enjoyed them as pretty sweet design pieces with some awesome typography.

Well guess what folks, the time has come. This guy Jubu (mostly because of his awesomeness I assume), released a pretty rad set of 84 scanned cassette tape inserts on flickr.

I don’t know if anyone was paying attention, but idsgn had a fun little April fools joke for us this year. It was a slick new font family; Sonoran, and was going to replace Helvetica as the go-to hipster font. Obviously, this was not true (duh, no font can be more hipster than Helvetica).

But I love font family sample graphics. I think they’re sexy. So even though this is actually Arial, it’s still awesome.