I know it’s not even September yet, but the unbelievable-oppressive heat is giving way to just regular heat, so maybe Autumn creeped into my consciousness lately… Anyway, these posters for Movember by TBWA Singapore are amazing.

Tymn Armstrong has started a collection of fake logos, not fake as in they don’t exist, fake as in they only exist in fiction.  Pretty cool collection, check em out and see if you can id the movie/tv show before you read the caption.

Ok.  Remember when you got all excited because you assembled that Ikea computer desk without having any leftover pieces lying around when you were finished.  Yea, Kagen Schafer would have made an MC Escher-esque sculpture out of your Ikea parts and had it sing romantic Portuguese lovesongs to you.

Schafer creates furniture, boxes and other curious devices, all of which have some kind of puzzle twist that, when solved, allow secret compartments to open.  For example, the Lotus Table has a surface with 10 concentric rings of inlaid wood, that when twisted into certain combinations and patterns, allow one of the six compartments below to become unlocked.

Another recent creation, the Pipe Organ Desk, is quite a curious piece of furniture.  Each of its drawers are connected to a different note of a full octave pipe organ.  When you close a drawer, the air is directed into one of the pipes and it creates the sound.  The entire thing, down to every single screw, is completely fashioned by hand out of wood.  Now that would be pretty damn cool in its own right, but of course, here comes the twist.  Inside of that desk is what Schafer calls a pneumatic logic board which allows the desk to remember the pattern of notes you’ve played.  If you play the right jingle in the right pattern, a secret compartment unlocks.  You can even adjust the logic board to allow a custom tune to be used to open it up.

Seriously, take a few minutes to poke around his site.

MOMENTUS is an illustrated series of defining moments in American History.  Stremke, a talented designustrator in his own right and apparent history buff, hand picked a crew of seriously-also-talented designy folks to do all the work of putting historical moments into pictures.  Though it appears as though he’s finally given himself a moment to work on as well.  They are being regularly released every few days or so until the end of the month, so check em out now, or follow EvanStremke on twitter if you want to know when the next one is released (and also don’t mind a lot of really randomly weird commentary).  Above and below are a few of my favorites so far, but check out the rest on the site.

Turntable.fm is the coolest thing on the internet right now.  Apple wishes they hadn’t done that stupid Ping thing and done this instead.  Social networking + music is not sharing what crappy pop song you just bought on iTunes.  It’s this.

Everyone loves to play songs in the jukebox.  Everyone loves getting points.  Everyone loves impressing their friends with that sick song from some unreleased whateverthefuck.  So why the hell did it take til 2011 for all these things to be put together online?  Plus, did I mention there were points involved.  Everyone loves points, likes, retweets, whatever – we live for that shit in this social networking age.

The gist is – go to a room, 5 djs will switch off playing tracks.  ”Lame” them or “Awesome” them to show your appreciation.  Simple.  Because we love you, and because we all have impeccable taste in music, we’ll occasionally throw a room together and spin some of our favorites for you.  Right now – 4:45 pm EST on Friday – Dylan and Mike are rocking some jams here.  You weren’t going to get anything else done today anyway.

Go get with the head-boppin!

For the last year or so, your humble OKGreatster (me) has been hard at work on a new little project called Bound Custom Journals.  It arose out of a simple need.  Many of us use journals for sketching, note-taking, traveling, and a whole host of other uses.  But until now there was no way to conveniently do all of those things in one place.  We may have one book with grids or blanks for sketching, another with lines for writing, and entire books dedicated to city maps for traveling.  Bound Custom Journals will allow you to craft the contents of your journal around your life.  Via a simple website, you’ll be able to select from our ever-growing library of content and organize, page-by-page, section-by-section, your very own, American-made custom journal and have it in your hands in just days.

It’s been a lot of work getting to this point, but now we need to see if this idea is really something that people want.  So what better way to do that than to hold a pre-sale on Kickstarter.  Check out our project page for all the deets.

I could wax poetic on this stuff all day, but I think the easiest way to explain it all is to watch our video on the Kickstarter page and embedded below.  If you like the idea, go ahead and toss a few dollars in our pledge bucket.  Or just help spread the word – every last dollar, tweet, tumbl, facebook, blog post, whatever counts.  Thanks!

Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran, each talented in their own rights, have merged their brains together to form a new site called the Lost Type Co-op.  The idea is simple.  Designers work on a typeface, they host the typeface on the Lost Type Co-op, type junkies like me go there and pay-what-I-want for any of their offerings, and the designers keep 100% of the profits.  Everyone wins!  Check it out.

Earlier this week I attended the Duke Library’s Instructional Retreat titled Using Data in the Classroom.  The half-day event hoped to teach the library staff (and others, like myself) all about data – how / where to find it, how to use it, how to visualize it, and all the associated tools for those tasks.

The very first session of the day, co-led by Paolo Mangiafico and Joel Herndon was really interesting.  Paolo’s discussion of what the world of data looks like from 30,000 feet was simultaneously both inspiring and terrifying in it’s breadth and pervasiveness in our daily lives.  The one thing from this talk that really stuck with me was this notion of Data Exhaust.  As consumers in an internet-driven world, we are constantly driving ourselves around on the information super-highway.  But along with that analogy comes another, the constant fume of data exhaust that we are emitting as we are happily chugging away.  Take twitter for example.  That mere 140 character tweet is actually made up of about a hundred lines of code, including things about you, your account, your profile, friends, and potentially your location.  Every time you search for something on the internet, or check in on foursquare, or buy something on amazon, you’re leaving behind a wake of data that is not only mineable, but is potentially extremely valuable.

To search engines and marketing firms, this data exhaust can translate into real dollars.  But to some others, it can be organized into something beautiful.  Take Nicholas Felton, a NYC-based designer and meticulous personal data-keeper.  Each year for the last several years, he’s been keeping extremely detailed notes about his location, eating and drinking habits, interactions with other people, and much more (detail of 2008 report above).  And at the end of each year, he produces the Feltron Annual Report, an increasingly popular design artifact that is not a byproduct, but an actual product of his constant data exhaust.  He just happens to pipe that data exhaust into a useful and trackable location and interpret that data into something beautiful and meaningful.  And to think this started before foursquare and twitter were even a glimmer in their founders’ eyes and the very first iPhone was still years away.  Now Felton has provided that same ability to capture that constant data stream through a web/iphone app called Daytum.

Of course, the flip side of this double-edged sword is that this data exhuast, if mined properly and in the hands of the wrong people, can be potentially dangerous.  A sort-of-funny-but-sort-of-scary version of this is the website Please Rob Me, which, until recently when it was essentially deactivated, was a stream of foursquare (and the like) checkin’s.  Presumably, if you wanted to rob someone, all you’d have to do is wait for that person to check-in somewhere and then you’d know their house is empty (of course, the owners of the site weren’t actually encouraging burglary, just raising awareness of the over-sharing culture).  Similarly, the recent discovery that the iPhone is logging all of your cell-tower connections into a huge database caused quite a privacy-related stir.

I guess the moral of the story is that we at the very least need to be cognizant of our data exhaust.  We are living in an age of sharing and social networking, and personally, I think the net result of that is a very big positive – the amount of information and connections we have now is indeed an enrichment of our lives.  However, it’s important to remain aware that all of that information doesn’t just disappear into thin air either.

Soft.  Nostalgic.  Haunting.  Dark.  Hopeful.  Desaturated.  Fleeting. Consistently prolific.

I’m kind of at a loss for sentences, so I’ll just go with a few words.  Check it all out here.

Have you ever been just randomly walking around your city and seen one of the enigmatic Toynbee Idea tiles in the middle of the street?  Maybe you’ve seen this one in Washington, DC, or this one in Pittsburgh, or any of the hundreds more mysterious plaques that span the east coast and midwest of the US and even extend into various parts of South America.

What does it mean?

TOYNBEE IDEA

IN MOVIE 2001

RESURRECT DEAD

ON PLANET JUPITER

Well, if you’re like me, then you probably think that either a) this is really freakin’ weird, or b) this is really freakin’ cool, or c) all of the above.  And if you’re like Justin Duerr, the guy in that picture up there, then you are probably thinking: d) I’m going to devote my life to figuring this out.  And that’s what he did.

Last week Durham held it’s acclaimed Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, where dozens of fantastic documentaries are presented to eager audiences over the 4-day schedule.  I usually drop into one or two movies each year, hoping to hit a few that look super interesting, and this year, we hit the jackpot.  On Saturday, we got last-minute-line tickets to see Resurrect Dead, a Kickstarter-funded Sundance-winning documentary about the mysterious Toynbee Tiles.  The feature-length film had us captivated from minute one as the crew – basically three dudes and an amateur film-maker with a camera, set out to discover the origin of these tiles.  Their surreal journey took them through all kinds of you-can’t-make-this-whodunit-shit-up clues, including tracking down leads on microfiche, short wave radio, and pounding the pavement in blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhoods.

I don’t want to spoil the mystery for you, but needless to say, this doc was a great story and was really well-told, especially since this was Jon Foy’s first ever crack at making a movie, much less shooting, editing, and composing the soundtrack (all done without any prior experience while self-funding by cleaning houses)…

If you like an urban mystery with more than a touch of nerdiness (and you do, trust me), check out Resurrect Dead.  Looks like there may be another round of screenings later in the summer, so look out for those.