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MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

via worldwide wall.

So you may have noticed that there’s been much less writing and opinionating on this here inspiration feed than there used to be. There are a lot of reasons for the lull, but they’re not as remarkable as the way we reacted to it. We beat ourselves up for not doing more, started feeling like suckers and losers and impotent dullards.

That was pointless.

Now that the lull has passed, we think we learned something. We realized that we forgot to listen to an old piece of wisdom we trot out every now and again: Everything happens in seasons.

Everything—moods, business, ideas, even happiness—comes in seasons and swells. It all waxes and wanes, ebbs and flows, Jekylls and Hydes. And you can’t force it. You can’t freak out. That just makes things harder. So ride that shit out, and enjoy what the day brings you, even if it’s a little rain. Use the slow seasons to rest, to go easy on yourself. Do a project that’s just for fun, work shorter days, and give more time to your friends and family. Get drunk on a Wednesday afternoon. Fuck it. Really. Everything is just as it should be.

this is the sky bridge in langkawi, malaysia, a stunning cable-stayed bridge which actually curves around the single support column from which it’s suspended, 687 metres above sea level. completed in october 2004, the structure relies on an 87 metre high support column to hold the weight of the deck, this weight distributed through 8 load balancing cables attached to its head.

more at deputy-dog.

I love that sometimes, the lore of a city turns out to be true and that all the mystery we thought lacking in our lives becomes present again. Here’s what I mean:

The lost rivers of Manhattan are real; hundreds of streams and whole wetlands were paved over and filled so that the roots of buildings could safely grow. But whether or not you could ever fish in them – this whole thing sounds like Dr. Seuss to me – is the subject of a post on the also defunct blog, Empire Zone. There, a commenter informs us that fishing for eyeless carp in the underground cisterns of Istanbul is something of a national past-time.

Thanks to bldg blog for this one.

Sega’s new game, Condemned 2, is so dark and nasty that they built a site filled with ponies and hearts and rainbows so you can offset the evil.

Over at the brilliant Signal vs. Noise, there’s an interesting post on some rather unknown but super insightful communications theory. Here it is, verbatim:

Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. He has studied, among other things, readability of texts, organizations and communication within them, and the general theory of communication. His laws of communication are the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws.

* If communication can fail, it will.
* If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
* There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
* The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.

And I particularly like his observation that anytime there are two people conversing, there are actually six people in the conversation:

1. Who you think you are
2. Who you think the other person is
3. Who you think the other person thinks you are
4. Who the other person thinks he/she is
5. Who the other person thinks you are
6. Who the other person thinks you think he/she is

Read more about Osmo and his theories on communication here.

Seriously, this video is the dope! From three legged leg, of course. Check the video here.

So we were asked to design the name, logo, interior, website, and experience for a new restaurant here in San Francisco’s Mission District. Super fucking fun.

It’s called Beretta, and they serve up gourmet pizzas and fancy-ass cocktails you won’t find anywhere else, except for maybe a Hemingway novel. We’re psyched they’re blowing up.

Oh yeah, and they’re open late too. If yer in SF, go give ‘em some love.

And just in case yer new around here: Jim Coudal runs the brilliant and playful Chicago design studio known as Coudal Partners.

via boingboing.

This is fuckin smart. I’d love to see it implemented.

And I can’t help but take this idea even further: what if we combined location-aware technology like RFID or GPS with a networked database of images so that the figures in red were drawn to look like the driver’s loved ones? Yikes!

via notcot.

On the very very slight chance you don’t already know about the torture—I mean, “interrogation”—technique called waterboarding. Launched by Amnesty International. Created by a firm called Drugstore. Wow.

Ok, so we just learned something that might help young freelancers and the people who hire them:

Design students are used to thinking of their assignments as homework. Homework is something you do on your own. And asking for the teacher’s help is not really the way the game is played—it’s seen as a sign of weakness. Beyond that, success is measured differently, and failure is sort of acceptable, even welcome as part of the process. If a student does a crappy job, the teacher awards the student a crappy grade, and that’s how things are supposed to work. Everyone walks away feeling like things turned out the way they should have.

Unfortunately, young designers often keep that mentality for a long time, even after they’ve left the classroom.

Here’s what I wish I would have said to the young freelancer we just hired:

“This isn’t homework. This isn’t a test. By giving you this assignment, I am entrusting you to manage two of my precious resources—time and money. I need you to be responsible about that. If you find that you are stumbling, that you are spending my time and money and nothing is happening, I need you to alert me, so that I can help. If you are able to see your weaknesses and ask for help, everything will be fine and I will respect you and most likely reward you. I am not interested in giving you an F for crappy work. If you show up at deadline with nothing useful, I’m fucked. And giving you a scolding is not going to help me.

The difference is that design teachers don’t really care if you get an F. But if you fail at a work assignment, it hurts my business.”

Check out the awesomeness of this old Atari game packaging. Note the amazing copy too. There’s a whole bunch more here.

Check out what happens when ferrofluid (iron particles suspended in liquid) is put in a magnetic field (like an MRI). Make sure you watch the second half!!!

What do those shapes look like to you?

This is the “preliminary traverse map of the primary landing site.” Er, I mean, this is the path Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took on their very first walk on the moon, overlaid on a soccer field. If you wanna see which path Buzz walked vs which path Neil took, all the details can be found on NASA’s website. Pretty cool, eh?

Found at the super awesome Strange Maps.

Recently, we blogged our dismay at discovering that design students today don’t really know what design means today. That blog post generated a lot of conversation around what “communication design” means, and this made us realize that a definitive definition might be useful.

So let’s break it down:

Communication = creation of shared meaning.

Design = a structured way of using creativity to accomplish a strategic result.

So:

Communication design is the practice of creating strategic meaning. And that meaning can be shared through words, images, and experiences.

When the goal is to get a new idea adopted, or to change people’s behavior, or to get people emotionally invested, there’s a whole bunch of shit involved in getting it right. You’ve got to think about the content of your communication, the styling of it, and the method of delivery. In other words, you want to make sure you’ve really thought about what you need to say, how best to say it, and what medium will be most effective. This is what communication designers do.

We’ve talked before about design as a process for solving problems, not an end product. ideasonideas’s got another good way to talk about it.

Here’s a little sample:

This kind of design forces us to see ourselves as intermediaries, who facilitate defined outcomes. To do this, we consider and weigh business, marketing, communications (and other) challenges, and work to resolve them through design. The end-result doesn’t have to look good, even though it might, but it absolutely must work.

Right?

So Nokia’s pushing their new N-Gage software with this pretty cool, musta-taken-forever-to-make, stop-action movie/game. You’ll like that it’s pong (one of the first computer games I ever played, only with people as the game pieces. You may not like that it’s a lot of work for very little payoff.

Still, free content is a great way to build reputation and get people to like you. It’s just that the intro movie to this thing is way cooler than the game itself. Of course, that could be because it’s pong, which is fun only when you’re really really stoned.

The good people at the Small Planet Institute—who helped us spread the word about replate—have launched a new website to help reduce climate change by offering help and info about how we can easily change our food, shopping, and eating habits. Go check it out.