‘m sure like most people, I came to know of Dan McPharlin’s work through his meticulously crafted paper models of classic patch synths and reel-to-reel tape recorders. But what I never seem to hear anyone really talking about is his illustrative work. After being exposed to Dan’s illustrations via his flickr feed, I find myself drifting off on any number of nostalgic experiences of me as a kid, and my collection of classic Del Rey & Bantam book cover designs for Ray Bradbury & Jack McKinney publications. Seeing Dan’s work evokes such a timeless and familiar experience for me that I can’t help but wonder what his childhood was like as a kid, and what his inspirations were / are.

One of my personal favorites is his work for Pretty Lights – Making Up A Changing Mind (see top image). Thanks for your beautiful work, Dan. You’re definitely an inspiration.

hoy. We’ve been working on a new PSA (Public Service Announcement) series that communicates important issues in a simple manner. If you were a product of the 80s like us, then you’re probably familiar with the PBS show Reading Rainbow and its important role in encouraging children to read. And if you weren’t born under a rock, you’ve probably also heard the proverb, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Suffice to say, this print is a marriage of the two. Some of the designs from the series may end up on shirts, too. We’ll be selling this and other goodies on our online shop, The Color Bureau (always followed by a launching soon). More to come, so check back often.

assimo Vignelli is known for designing many things. In following Adolf Loos‘ dictum, Vignelli believed that a designer should be able to design everything from “the spoon to the city.” Vignelli was one of seven designers that founded one of the most successful agencies in the 60s called Unimark International. Soon after Unimark dissolved, he co-founded another agency with his wife Lella under the name Vignelli Associates where he still works today. His body of work extends beyond graphic design to package design, furniture design, and most notably, the design of the New York City subway signage with Bob Noorda. Vignelli’s style adheres to the modern tradition which embraces minimalism, geometric forms, and grid-based design.

This isn’t anything new, but last January, Vignelli released a free ebook called The Vignelli Canon that can be downloaded from his website. From what I’ve noticed, minimalism, typography and grid-based design seems to be more popular than ever. With new designers constantly emerging, I thought it’d be appropriate to re-introduce the book as a must-read. Vignelli said his intent was not to reduce design to a bunch of rules despite his highly opinionated advisories, so if you are a designer just starting out, take the Canon with a grain of salt.

The book is divided into two sections, The Intangibles, and The Tangibles. The first involves ideas such as semantics, syntactics, pragmatics, and discipline. The second discusses things like paper sizes, grids, typefaces, and layouts. The Tangibles section is filled with a lot of helpful information, and emphasizes the importance in grid-based design. If you are looking for a more in-depth study on grids, I’d recommend visiting The Grid System, a resource put together by Antonio Carusone of AisleOne.

Overall, the canon is a nice ebook to keep around, particularly if you’re a student. If you’re interested in reading more Vignelli, I’d suggest Vignelli From A to Z, or Lella and Massimo Vignelli.

n contemporary design, we seem to be moving backwards in order to move forward. We live in a decade that is constantly seeking inspiration from the past, and Hulger phones certainly represents that idea. These fashionable phones are throwbacks to everything between the 20s to the 80s with a technological twist. Oh, landlines are so last century, which is why Hulger phones connect to your mobile phone or VoIP services, allowing you to return to an analog time without actually being obsolete.

Hulger has been around for a decade now, originally releasing prototypes under the name Pokia. “Pokia became Hulger, named after the founder’s grandfather, Mr. Holger, a stern Danish lawyer with an inspiring relationship to the things around him. Mr. Holger chose his objects and technologies well, you see. They stuck by him all his life, punctuating big and little moments along his lifeline, helping him along with his daily rituals. Holger’s favourite object, a battered, but beautiful leather chair, propelled the ambition to create timeless technologies which wouldn’t date: which would wear in, not wear out.” Hulger sees mobile phones as cultural artifacts, timeless classics, a thing of beauty. They felt it was their job to replicate such a thing, and a fine job they’ve done.

In their company description, “Hulger brings humanity back into the equation, with functionality no longer playing the lead role.” I believe I’ve fallen victim to this new equation, and if my math is right, I’ll soon be out a couple hundred bucks after buying the American walnut and brass phone known as the PAPPA (see first two photos). I love it when you call me big PAPPA.

n Tuesday, Scout Books launched their new website which includes an online shop, blog, and the option to make your own pocket notebooks. Any creative living in Portland is probably familiar with Pinball Publishing, the independent and sustainable offset printer that produces these lovely custom cahiers (and many other items) printed on 100% recycled paper with soy based inks. Frank Chimero fans will also be excited to discover a limited edition Scout Book design for sale called Muttnik, a title in which Frank explains is “a nickname for Sputnik, since it was ‘manned’ by a dog named Laika and had no humans on board.”

Several years ago, Portland-based designer Aaron Draplin teamed up with with Coudal Partners of Chicago to create Field Notes, a line of little notebooks inspired by agricultural memo books and pocket ledgers which was printed with Pinball Publishing. The Field Notes brand has since become so popular in demand that Pinball has been unable to keep up with the quantity needed to be produced. Even though the notebooks are now being printed elsewhere in Illinois, I still love the fact that it originated from a small northwest print shop and has become a cultural brand with universal appeal. Jim Coudal said, “The thing that’s cool about Field Notes is it appeals to a rifle-toting budweiser-drinking mammal killer, AND a coffee-swilling fedora-wearing pretentious Brooklyn hipster.”

Read+Write, the new Scout Books blog is running a series called Show Us Your Scout Book. Nicole Lavelle, the Design and Marketing Assistant at Pinball describes it as a place “where artists and designers send us photographs or scans of their filled-up Scout Book interiors and we post them to our blog with a short interview.” Michael and I are excited to take part in this series by sharing some Colorcubic doodles and drawings in the near future. To take part in the series, all you need is a Scout Book of your very own. You can purchase some from the shop (I personally love the various colors of the Composition style), request a free sample, or better yet, customize your own. I spent quite a bit of time looking through the Scout Books gallery and have selected a few of my favorite custom designs below:

rad Simon from Wieden + Kennedy put together this cool calendar project and will be screenprinting it in-house. Each designer was given an 8″ x 10″ French Kraft paper stock and was limited to designing only in black & white for their chosen month. The calendar will be for sale for twenty-five bucks, and you can pre-order yours now. There’s only a limited run of 50, and it might go fast. It’s probably one of the few calendars you’ll find that actually starts on a February!

Artists

• Feb: Erik Blad
• Mar: Sam Tudyk
• Apr: Paul Levy
• May: Curtis Pachunka
• Jun: Brad Simon
• Jul: Sarah Hollowood
• Aug: Steve Denekas
• Sep: Chris Lael Larson
• Oct: Dani Guralnick
• Nov: Cari Vander Yacht
• Dec: Peter Yue
• Jan: Mike Weihs

he Center for Urban Pedagogy is an organization that makes educational products, bringing together art and design professionals with community-based advocates. CUP’s latest project is called Vendor Power!, a collaboration between The Street Vendor Project and designer Candy Chang who described it as, “translat[ing] the intimidating regulation book into friendly diagrams and minimal text in English, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese and Spanish, so NYC’s diverse street vendors can understand their rights, avoid fines, and earn an honest living.”

While I’m not a street vendor myself, I purchased the poster anyway based on its well-designed attributes and to support CUP’s efforts. Upon closer inspection, I learned a thing or two about the rules and regulations of New York’s 12,000+ street vendors. For one, vendors can get a $1000 ticket for parking more than 18 inches from the curb, which seems incredibly ridiculous based on the fact that the average NYC vendor salary is $14,000. Here are some other interesting facts I picked up:

• Former NYC vendors include Jerry Seinfeld, Jay-Z, and Jean-Michel Basquiat
• Some businesses that started as pushcarts were Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Roc-A-Fella Records and Goldman Sachs
• In 1927, between 10-15% of all produce sold in New York was sold in pushcart markets

There’s obviously a rich history behind pushcarts, and the poster is well worth picking up, not just for its history lesson but as an example on how well-designed infographics can inform and educate citizens around the world.

More Information

• Download the PDF version of the poster
• Chang’s Street Vendor project page
• Chang’s article about the process

was hoping to breeze by today without blogging anything for the sake of productivity, but I couldn’t help but drop everything just to talk about this new (OMG rad) ASUS notebook. Apple has severely raised the bar when it comes to top-notch industrial design, but I’m always excited to see how other computer manufacturers innovate in rivalry to Apple’s success, especially when done well. Bang & Olufsen’s designs are generally hit-or-miss with me, but they’ve done a pretty incredible job designing this notebook. I wouldn’t be able to tell you how it functions, but here are some specs from Engadget:

• Polished aluminum body
• Dual touchpads (cool, but why?)
• High-definition 18.4″ display
• Core i7 processor
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 334M graphics
• Support for up to 1280GB of storage (with dual drives)
• Slot-in Blu-ray drive
• USB 3.0
• B&O ICEpower speakers

For such a large notebook, it’s obviously meant to be more of a living room machine rather than something truly portable. Still though, I want it.

hile browsing the Herman Miller site yesterday, I wandered upon the Airia Desk and Media Cabinet and immediately fell in love. Not only is Airia well-designed, it’s also highly functional. The Airia desk gracefully combines the dual-level desk top architecture reminiscent of Nelson’s Swag Leg Desk with the sculptural curves of Jamie Hayon’s Artquitect series. This desk, among many other notable works was designed by Kaiju Studios based in Providence, Rhode Island. Founded by Ayako Takase and Cutter Hutton in 2001, these partners have taken an interesting multidisciplinary approach to design that Colorcubic is similarly working towards, creating everything from furniture to graphics to websites. I haven’t yet explored their works beyond industrial design, but if it’s anything like this desk or the Kotatsu Table (further below), it’s probably really good stuff.

To me, well-designed desks should always take cable management into consideration. There’s nothing worse than having a desk growing vines of cables that take away from the beauty of the design. Like everything, it’s certainly dependent on context though. In very industrial settings, naked cables and wires look natural to the environment and can add to the aesthetic. In any case, it’s always a good thing to have a means of organizing in clever ways. With Airia, the elevated secondary surface provides hidden storage for small peripherals and smart cable management. A center cork-lined drawer includes three removable organizer trays for small items.

Airia is built to last, too. It’s constructed with finely crafted millwork of the solid walnut frame that sits atop cast aluminum legs. I particularly love the companion media cabinet, too. There’s something awfully elegant and all the while humble about the harmony of the ivory and walnut finish. I can’t help but imagine Airia to have been a yacht in a past life whose purpose was to evolve into a classic piece of furniture that somehow lacks pretension. The only thing that might be pretentious is the price. Unbeknownst to me at this juncture, I may just keep it that way and admire it from afar — at least until I decide to upgrade my office setup.

In the photo above, the elevated secondary surface is exposed, revealing a collection of cords and cables, later hidden with the cutout cover.

Another piece that caught my eye was the Kotatsu table. Influenced by the traditional Japanese kotatsu, a low family gathering table, it sits low and serves as a gathering point for informal collaboration. My favorite part about the design is the recessed table top storage for small items like pens and clips, as well as the lower shelf storage for books or even drinks. Always a fan of molded plywood, this table has a certain Eames appeal that I adore.

ell, we’ve finally reached the end of 2009. Cue 2010, a new decade. A year of progress and innovation. A year of growth and new ventures. We’re very excited to have reached this point, and we’re looking forward to many more years to come. Thanks to all of our family, friends, clients and colleagues who have supported us thus far. Without you, we would not be here. Let’s all celebrate this new year with open minds & open hearts while moving toward a better future.

Happy New Year, from Colorcubic.