ACDC Vs Iron Man 2 – Architectural Projection Mapping on Rochester Castle from seeper on Vimeo.

It’s called Architectural Projection Mapping. This one is done by a Seeper, an interactive arts and technology collective, but there are many other companies doing similar projects. From what I have read, this is more popular in Europe but is now spreading to the U.S. Can’t wait to see one of these on a building near me! Lots of potential here.

Here are a few more examples:

3D Projection Mapping from anema on Vimeo.

The LightLine of Gotham from seeper on Vimeo.

KraftWork from seeper on Vimeo.

I did a little research to see if the R-ball is still treated this way in other forms of the logo and it turns out that they now have a new logo all together.

Yikes. What happened?

In 2007, the logo was “updated”. According to the press release—“The traditional logo is the foundation for the new one, a more symmetrical ellipse enhanced with gold and blue curved swishes signifying food and treats. The DQ lettering also has been updated to a font that is more current, adding greater personality.”

Updated? Swooshes? Food and treats? Really? Bold italic slab-serif? Really? I like that the logo is now more symmetrical, but it has lost all its soul and NOW, it looks dated. They should have gone all the way and added a gradient and a drop shadow while they were “updating.”

I think a better strategy would have been to fine-tune the old logo by adjusting the letter spacing and either emphasizing or correcting the asymmetry of the background shape. Perhaps update the collateral by basing it off the fine-tuned logo would have been money better spent.

Imagine this scenario. You created the logo for your company. Months of research, sketches, critiques and revisions. It was perfect and functional. Nothing was there that did not need to be there. It had been in use for years with no issues and then all of a sudden, you need to add the letters “HD” to it. What do you do? The logo was perfect without it. If you add to it does it become not perfect? Not an easy design task.

Something to think about next time you see a logo with an HD tacked on. Does it integrate well with the logo or does it feel tacked on? Here is a list of a few examples of some that work well and some that definitely do not.

Also, when standard definition is obsolete, will the HD add-ons be dropped or should all TV channel logos from here on out be designed initially with the letters HD? Hmmm. Maybe the HD could be dropped and SD added?

This site allows you to “automatically match fonts based on typographical metrics, optimize the font bundles for their intended purpose, and deliver rock solid CSS for those fonts and their fallbacks to copy & paste”. Basically, you can go to this site and choose from 45 fonts (that are free and licensed for online use) to use for your headlines, body copy, decorative and monospaced needs. As you choose your font for each category, sample text in a window to the right updates to show you how it will look as copy. It only displays fonts that would be appropriate to use together so you don’t end up with, say, two similar sans serifs like Droid Sans as your headline font and Fontin Sans as your body copy font. This makes it really nice for me as a designer.

What makes it nice for web developers is that after you have chosen all your fonts, or your “fontstack”, you can conveniently download the font files and put them into a directory in your website then copy the CSS code to your stylesheets folder and link it from your website. Awesome, eh?

AND, each font stack has a back-up stack for those using browsers that don’t support @font-face.

P.S. Iron Maiden rules

I grew up falling asleep listening to the games on my dad’s old battery powered transistor radio. As a kid, beside my dad, my idols were Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Ken Griffey Sr., George Foster and Dave Concepción. I followed them all through grade school and most of high school, going to a few games but always listening on the radio to the announcers Marty Brenneman and Joe Nuxhall. As skateboarding began to take over my life, baseball faded and the last thing I remember paying attention to was them being in 1st place from the beginning of the season to the end of the season in 1990 and then sweeping the As in the World Series.

I totally forgot all about baseball until 2002. I had been living here in Portland, OR for a few years and my brother, a die-hard reds fan for all of his life who was living in Flagstaff AZ, mentioned that he had been listening to Reds games on-line. I “borrowed” his password and logged into MLB.com Gameday audio and was immediately taken back to my childhood and hometown of Dayton, OH. The audio I was listening to in real time was of the same two announcers, Marty Brenneman and Joe Nuxhall, and from the same radio station, 700 WLW that I had grown up listening to. I felt like I was a kid again. It really took me back.

Vintage Marty and Joe

Since then, I have been following the Reds and listening to almost all the Reds games religiously. Joe Nuxhall passed away a few years ago but Marty, the hall of famer, is still broadcasting and is hilarious to listen to. It is amazing the amount of work I can get done in 3 hours when I tune everything else out and just listen to the game.

Anyway, since I returned to following the Reds in 2002, they have not had a winning season. It was hard to be a Reds fan because they seemed to always lose and never finished the season over.500. That is until this year. It has been so exciting to follow them and listen to their come-from-behind, 2-out rallies and win most of their games. They clinched the National League Central Division last Tuesday and are now headed to the playoffs. I would love to see them go all the way and win the World Series but that is a long shot. But you never know. You honestly never know what you will see when you watch a baseball game.

Go Reds.

Here is what the old Image Search looked like:

old search

Here’s what’s new in the refreshed design of Google Images:

• Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.

new search

• Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we’ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don’t lose track of where you are.
• Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.
• A hover pane that appears when you mouse over a given thumbnail image, giving you a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as “Similar images.”

hover pane

• Once you click on an image, you’re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it. Click anywhere outside the image, and you’re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.
• Optimized keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It’s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.

I had been thinking of doing this to my monitor(s) here at Zoom for a while when I ran across this article at Smashing Magazine detailing the process and showing some really cool applications. And not just to your monitor or laptop but also your PSP or phone as well. Here are a few that really caught my eye.

You can find a Transparent Screens Flicker Group here and a tutorial for creating your own here.

The old logo on the left has been simplified by eliminating the bevels, gradients and hi-lights and the curves are a little more graceful. The letters in HIGH LIFE are cleaned up, thinner and more readable. It is also just a one color logo now.

Old Lucy on the left is also more simplified and now wears hearts instead of diamonds.

One nice detail of the packaging occurs when you set multiple sized cans sitting next to each other.

Overall, the updated look is definitely a breath of fresh air with many great details and graphics working together.

Cheers.

While doing a quick bit of research for this post, I ran across a few other Snuggie-like products. Behold the Peekaru and the Lippi Selk’Bag.