In case you haven't seen this yet - this takeoff of Behind the Music - Behind the Typeface - Cooper Black - is brilliant.

Funny, informative and an interesting way to present the background and lineage of a typeface.

Really nice article about Herbert Bayer's World Geo-Graphic Atlas designed for the Container Corporation of America in 1953 and the exquisite information design he did for it over on Boxes and Arrows this week. Accompanying that is a piece about designing maps from a very pragmatic point of view.

I have always enjoyed the writing of Paul Ford of Ftrain.com
Today he offers a really interesting piece as a future vision of the Semantic web and how it could be working several years from now. This is a piece of fiction, but the ideas and path he leads the reader down sound very true and familiar. Worth a read to think about the possibilities. (His sidebar of related links offer an excellent primer to the ideas of the Semantic web) In some ways this work of fiction, explains what the Semantic Web is and could be in a clearer way than anything else I had read about the concept before.

Large collection of tiny stickers. The banana sticker is a mini poster, a typographic wonder and a major design challenge. This collection is really fun.

Found these the other day. Kind of a neat idea - distill the major facts and stats of some of our most influential designers into trading cards - a la baseball cards. These first ones are mostly type designers - Eric Gill, Stanley Morison, Beatrice Warde - and book designers. Longer biographies are on the website.

The concept is cool and I am interested to see who they are going to add next. It's a nice quick way to learn about folks that left important legacies that we can learn from. Learning can be fun.

I recall the AIGA chapter in Boston created a set of trading cards for their designer members in the early 90's. I still have them.

I wrote up a lengthy review/overview of the summit for Boxes and Arrows. So it won't be on this site - but do go over there and check it out and leave comments if you wish.

One of the show and tells at the AIGA Summit this past weekend was by Julia Whitney from WGBH in Boston. This project is a companion to the 6 hour miniseries broadcast that ran this year. The interactive, web piece is a fusion of web and flash and video (currently the entire 6 hours of video is online). It is beautifully designed - both in form and in content. The scale of the project is impressive and the piece that stood out most to me is the Time Map that tracks the economic landscape across time and geography.
The window and it's settings (say you choose 1950) talk to the other windows as you select to view a report about the country. The time is contextual to your settings in the Time Map and all the information is based on that. They pulled this together for 41 countries across 90 span of time.

This is a rich and interesting site, not only for its content which is interesting, but for the techniques used to create paths and collections of information for people who may want to come at this information in different ways.

NetDiver has links to some really interesting sites. I spent a couple of hours perusing through several of them last night:

• Maple
• graphix.at
• digitalica
• arkmedia

Is it just me, or is there something so wrong with needing Help to navigate a Table of Contents?
The Microsoft Library has an extensive help page to explain how the Table of Contents works. It seems to me that this is one area that should be self evident.

I will be attending the fifth annual AIGA Experience Design summit next week in Las Vegas. Should prove to be entertaining - especially since a bunch of us are going to see the Cirque de Soleil. Will you be there?