Illustration: Jacob Thomas

"You work for the small design firm Deco Zone, doing illustrations for magazines such as Forbes, The New Yorker, Boys Life, Vibe and other publications, as well as commercial work for L'Oreal, Bath & Body Works, and other corporate clients. On a typical illustration job, how much guidance are you given in terms of the magazine or company's vision for the project? Is there ever a clash between your design ideas and theirs?
It varies a great deal. Some clients will tell me word for word what they need done and others simply say "I need this, this is the budget, here’s the deadline, here’s the story, GO!" Followed by a starter pistol sound effect." Read more...

MOMA: Design and the Elastic Mind

Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration.
Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. This Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition.

Lexus Missing H ad

H Is for Help!What's wrong with the new Lexus H ads.
By Seth Stevenson
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2008, at 11:19 AM ET

The Spot: Children in a classroom recite the alphabet. When they reach H, they fizzle into an awkward silence. Subsequent scenes show us a typewriter with a blank where the H key should be, the Yahoo logo spelled Ya oo, and the famous "Hollywood" sign missing its first letter. The ad concludes by showing us the H as it reappears on the back of a Lexus automobile. An announcer says: "The power of h. The Lexus hybrids." (Click here to watch the ad.)

Loremo: The 'Low Resistance Mobile'

The idea is deceptively simple. Forget about fancy batteries, regenerative braking, and alternative fuels. Instead, make a car that's elegant in its minimalism and efficiency. The Loremo's German designers revisited the basics — engine efficiency, low weight, and minimal drag — to create a car that offers fuel-efficiency in the neighborhood of 130 to 150 miles per gallon. The Loremo is likely to dazzle drivers not with its acceleration, but with its ability to drive from New York to L.A. with only three stops at the pump. Read more...

Magazine Covers

Animal Magnetism by Jessica Helfand

A magazine is that rare publication in which you're actually expected to judge a book by its cover. This explains why a good magazine cover — like a good book jacket or, say, a poster — benefits enormously from a great, central, visual idea, which is one reason why portraits are so ideally suited to covers. This is perhaps particularly true of fashion and lifestyle magazines — things like Vanity Fair and Vogue — publications that typically enlist a celebrity's likeness to help sell magazines.

With such an unbeaten formula for success, clearly the barnyard is the next logical step. Read more...

Color Control Freak ’08 - Pantone Seminar

Sponsored by X-Rite, HP, Pantone, and Eizo, this one day interactive seminar exposes a new level of design freedom by unleashing color opportunity and building confidence in its reproduction. Miami, 3/18/2008, 9am - 5pm

Capture, Create, Calibrate, Communicate
Using a best practices approach, this educational session will show attendees how to control color in the design process using the latest technology and tools including advanced instrumentation, software, and applications specifically designed for color selection and sharing.

What You’ll Learn
# The latest tools and features to improve color selection and it’s usage in the design process
# Measurement device color selection
# Building influence with spot colors and their control
# Color accurate comps and proofs including soft proofing
# Proper color output – Confidence in screen to print matching
# Applying color management in Adobe CS2 & CS3

Disneyland Will Go Back to the Future

Decades after it closed the House of the Future, the Anaheim theme park will once again take a crack at predicting what tomorrow’s home might look like.

By Gillian Flaccus, Associated Press

"The $15 million home is a collaboration of The Walt Disney Co., Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., software maker LifeWare and homebuilder Taylor Morrison."