Link Banana

Designing the News has a pretty clever idea for advertising: using pictograms. Admittedly, part of the reason I like it is it reminds me of a childhood “activity books.”

(via Magnetbox)

In the category of “news so weird there seems to be a moral obligation to convey it,” Victoria’s Secret is accused of having stolen the design for a bra from a Long Island paralegal, Katerina Plew.

“The first time I thought of it I was getting ready for a christening,” Ms. Plew said in a telephone interview from her home in Selden, N.Y. “It was an idea that just popped into my head in — don’t know — like March of ’99.”

The bra, with its various hooks and eyelets, is something like the Micronaut of the undergarment world. By a complicated set of maneuvers, it can be worn in as many as 100 different ways.

Which, of course, made it a highly prized commodity to underwear purveyors. In 2006, Ms. Plew said she had arranged to meet with designers from Victoria’s Secret. But without warning and on the very day it was set to have occurred, the designers canceled her appointment, she contends.

This week’s oddly cool charts are provided by Matt Mason and Nicholas Feldon for We Tell Stories. In a beautifully presented (but sometimes confusing) set of grids, they argue that life today is full of many kinds of problems but that there’s a great possibility for as many kinds of solutions.

(via Snarkmarket)

I’ve been fiddling with the site recently. You may have noticed. Mostly it means that I’ve made most things a tad smaller and thus more compact. Thanks to that, I’ve taken the opportunity to increase the number of posts visible on the front page. Currently, that only means there are 15 (up from 10) but I may increase it more.

The other thing is that now when I forget the link on a post — something I do far too often — the title text will be visibly different (as is intentionally the case with this one). Hopefully this means that such errors will be corrected much faster, but I can make no guarantees.

If you ever notice anything that’s broken or wrong or just requires commentary, please use this form.

I’m not that big a fan of art museums, but I think I’d have to go the new exhibit “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the MoMA were I anywhere nearby. Two would-be highlights are victimless leather:

“I FELT cruel when I turned it off,” says Paola Antonelli, senior curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The “it” in question is a tiny coat that has been grown in a test tube using cells around a biodegradable polymer structure. The coat had flourished to such an extent that its “life support” system had to be switched off to stop it getting too big.

And this:

Most entertainingly, however, the exhibition illustrates this theme with a screen-based system that projects silhouettes of visitors and then mutates them into sci-fi monsters. This is hugely popular with children (and journalists) and if nothing else would make a perfect executive toy.

The UK’s Royal Mint does it right:

As you can see [by clicking the title link], the Shield of the Royal Arms has been given a contemporary treatment and its whole has been cleverly split among all six denominations from the 1p to the 50p, with the £1 coin displaying the heraldic element in its entirety. This is the first time that a single design has been used across a range of United Kingdom coins.

(via kottke)

I’d already mentioned the BBC redesign when I came across a charming chronicling of opinions about it.

But I thought it was more fun to give the last word to Ed, who didn’t just dislike the new design, but found it: “Very insulting!”

(via preoccupations)

They meet in the zeroHouse.

(via Magnetbox)

I’m fascinated by typography even though I don’t understand a thing about it. This link includes a visual of the following:

They speak the arm (of, say, an E), the crotch (of an M), which could further be described as an acute crotch or an obtuse crotch, the ear (of some g’s), which might be a flat ear or a floppy ear, the eye (of an e), the leg (of a k), the shoulder (of an n), the tail (of a j or a Q), and the spine (of an S).

Wake Up Later put together a sequence of what a number of high profile websites used to look like. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but I’m a real sucker for this stuff.

(via kottke)

Related: Ben Tesch’s Magnetbox is nine today, and has a compilation of how it used to look.

Click the link. I dare you not to laugh.

Also, click on the picture there for information about it.

Portfolio has a pretty neat showcase of the five dollar bill through history, including the newest iteration. They also have some of those compulsary notes about its security features.

(via Daring Fireball)

Casulo is, without question, the most compact set of furniture I’ve ever seen. In a reasonably sized box they’ve fit: a desk, a bed, a bureau, a stool, a shelving unit, two seating-height boxes, and a small chest of drawers. You must give it at least seven seconds.

(via Gizmodo)

These are probably the most innovative and attractive attic stairs ever made. To take up less depth (I think that’s what I’d call that dimension) these stair are off-set from each other. It’s much harder to describe than to see.

(via Boing Boing)