I created this image in 2006 to illustrate a blog post I ended up not writing. I released the image on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. That means anyone is free to use it, but they must credit me.
Simple.
William Powell AM yesterday criticised the Welsh Government for spending £7,625 on a new logo. He unearthed this scandalous factoid by submitting a FOI request asking for “All available information relating to the design/development costs of any logo/symbol/emblems for the new Natural Resources Wales body.”
The Welsh Government responded, as they were obliged to:
The total costs for agreeing the brief for the logo creation, developing and refining creative routes and developing basic visual style were £7,625.
Mr. Powell describes the logo as “an unimpressive multicolored [sic] hexagon” and that he finds it “deeply disappointing and scandalous that the Welsh Government is willing to spend £7,625 of public money on designing a new logo for Natural Resources Wales.” He concludes:
The Welsh Government must learn to be responsible with the public money it spends. While Natural Resources Wales obviously needs a logo, it is simply unacceptable to be spending over seven and a half thousand pounds on it. Given the remit of Natural Resources Wales I regret that more work wasn’t done to engage schools across Wales in the logo’s design.
Warning: I’ve cranked the geek up to 11 for this uber-nostalgic post.
Buried Shadow (1999)
I have fond memories from those days of hanging out at the (now defunct) Babylon 5 Modellers Guild [b5mg.com] and the LightWave Group [lwg3d.org] (which evolved into the still-active Foundation 3D forums). Scifi-Art.com was another great community — I remember really liking their site design.
All this nostalgia got me digging around my old hard drives for more retro LightWave renders of mine.
You can click on the small images below for a closer look. Not that I didn’t create any of these models myself, but the compositions, lighting and backgrounds were all my own work. Also, if you zoom in on that shot of Starfuries engaged in combat, you’ll see some of my own wing art designs. (Yes, that is Daffy Duck!)
An andorpersand
Flavorwire recently posted a roundup of interesting real punctuation marks (an article that seems to have been cribbed from an older mental_floss post actually). Most of these are the creations of Hervé Bazin who proposed new exclamation and question mark variations to signify acclamation, certainty, doubt, love and others.
Hervé Bazin’s proposed punctuation marks for acclamation, certainty, doubt and love
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On the lighter side, College Humor has recently invented eight new punctuation marks (that it thinks) we desperately need.
The mockwotation marks are my absolute favourites. I would do away with the actual quotation mark elements and just keep the wavy hands.
Similarly, I wonder if there could be a fun use for an air quotes / scare quotes punctuation mark? I would use them to distance myself from some awful turn of phrase by indicating that it’s not something I would usually say.
YouTube has just announced the imminent rollout of a new layout design for channel pages. Using YouTube’s own guidelines I’ve created a handy template that channel owners can use to create their new artwork.
Learn more and update your channel at youtube.com/onechannel
(via Boing Boing)
Courier Prime is a free and open source monospaced typeface by Alan Dague-Greene. It’s an improved Courier, designed to be ‘less blobby’ with a bolder bold and real italics.
Since the beginning, screenplays have been written in Courier. Its uniformity allows filmmakers to make handy comparisons and estimates, such as 1 page = 1 minute of screen time.
But there’s no reason Courier has to look terrible. We set out to make the best damn Courier ever.
Most infographics on the web consist of generic graphics backed up with (lots of) poorly researched text.
When done well these informational graphics use charts, diagrams and illustrations to make complex ideas easier to comprehend. At their best the results can be quite illuminating.
Randall Munroe has produced more than a few great infographics for xkcd. His infographics can be broken down into three rough categories:
For this post I’ve compiled the more informative types. There’s a list of some (but not all) of xkcd’s novelty graphs and charts at the end of this post.
Up Goer Five is one of Randall Munroe’s more famous recent xkcd infographics in which he attempts to describe the workings of a Saturn V rocket using only most commonly used 1,000 words in the English language. Here’s just a part of it:
Inspired by this, The Up-Goer Five Text Editor is a fun tool (created by Theo Sanderson) that restricts the user to just the same 1,000 words. Anything not in that tiny dictionary will be given familiar squiggly red underlines.
The Up-Goer Five Text Editor
Scientists have been trying to explain the work they do using only this reduced language. Here’s the work of a paleontologist summarised:
I study tracks, trails, places where animals make homes, and shit, both new and old, and figure out how animals do these things.
Tony Martin, paleontologist
Some of these passages come across as quite patronising (“We burn dead black stuff so that we can build things, power our houses and make our cars go.”), but some of the better ones are quite poetic. io9 has a beautiful description of Saturn:
There is a world that goes around the sun, ten times farther away from the sun than the world we live on. This world is really big – about ten times as wide as our world – and most of it is thick air pulled tight together. It has big beautiful rings around it, made of many pieces of ice.
A loving upgoerfive intro to Saturn and some of its moons, by Rachel Klippenstein
WordPress.com has produced some cool-looking reports for users, summing up blog activity for 2012. It’s really just a pretty stats page, but it’s very well done with CSS animated fireworks, parallax effects and colourful graphics. You can see the complete report for halfblog.net here.
Here’s the summary it provided:
19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 130,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
In 2012, there were 133 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 657 posts. There were 306 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 91 MB. That’s about 6 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was September 24th with 754 views. The most popular post that day was Minimalistic iPhone 5 wallpapers.
Update: 
As I mentioned previously on this blog, I’ve signed up a photographer for a fun project called Content: A Magazine in a Day, which is going to be taking place at the School of Journalism this Saturday as a part of the Cardiff Design Festival.
Since then a loose theme has been announced: Cycling – a theme that is running through many of the Design Festival events.
I’ve no idea who I’ll be working with or what direction the magazine will take, and I assume that’s the idea. Personally, I just hope the rain takes a break as I’ll be making use of my bike.
From Neo Mammalian Studios:
Our sarcastic tribute to those infographic designers who insist on doing it wrong…repeatedly and unashamedly.
For the eighth Cardiff Design Festival this October, Plastik Magazine are looking for writers, designers, illustrators and photographers to make a magazine in a day.
This gorgeous and surreal animation is the fourth in the Bendito Machine series.
Bendito Machine IV – Fuel the Machines, by Jossie Malis
Now Jossie is running a Kickstarter campaign to continue the series and make a computer game.
This story begins six years ago when I, tired from all the global cretinism, decided to create a universal fable about human conflicts and enigmatic mystifying eyes that watch everything. After some months devoted to materializing this idea, the short film Bendito Machine premiered at festivals all over the world, receiving support that exceeded all my expectations. What I originally envisioned as a therapy to channel all that accumulated displeasure, turned out to be (thanks to the friendly welcome of the Internet world) the seed of an uncommon animation series which has occupied quite a sizeable part of my last six years.
Zombie Apocalypse Now In A Minute is a Cardiff-set webcomic documenting the rise of the undead in Wales. Inspired by Shaun of the Dead and the feel of a post-match Cardiff, the story follows the adventures of Keith, an overweight, sarcastic bartender who attempts to hide out in the castle.
The webcomic is the work of Jamie McGowan who himself runs a bar in Cardiff, which has no doubt provided him with plenty of inspiration. The artwork is stylish and imaginative, and captures Cardiff perfectly.
So you’ve found an image you want to use as a Twitter avatar, and good news, it’s Creative Commons licensed so the owner is clearly happy for you to use it!
But how do you provide credit for a Twitter avatar? Continue reading
I made this stylised miniature football pitch a while ago to be used in an iOS game, but I ended up not being involved in that. Shame really, as I had a lot of neat ideas for different directions the game could have gone.
I was quite happy with how it came out though, especially the textures. Continue reading
Ian Lurie demolishes crap infographics:
OK everyone. Take a deep, freaking breath. I can’t sneeze right now without spraying germs on someone’s attempt at a data-driven work of art.
Here’s why the poster you paid someone $400 to make isn’t an infographic:
- Lack of clarity. Infographics should ease and speed the consumption of information. If you take something you can express in 25 words and turn it into 1000 x 3000 pixels of eye-watering garbage, it’s not an infographic. It’s a waste of paper.
- Lack of data. Infographics used to communicate data. Like this. Now, apparently, I can turn a fax machine manual into a poster and get it posted to 55 different infographics directories. Retch.
- Low information density. An infographic is more effective than words describing the same subject. Otherwise it’s art. Which is cool and all. But it’s not an infographic.
- Lack of flow. An infographic should lead me from introduction to conclusion, somehow. It should help me solve or understand a problem. If it doesn’t, it’s a graphic, minus the info. This Visually piece is a great example of infographic flow.
Stephanie Pereira is Kickstarter’s Director of Art Programs, and in this diagram she illustrates the elements of a Kickstarter project. Even if you don’t use Kickstarter to raise money, there’s a lot to take from their model.
(by @happeness / via @austinkleon) Continue reading
I didn’t notice when it got approved, but I just spotted that my book icon is now available on The Noun Project.
It’s CC0 licensed, and comes with and without a bookmark.
