Pop Loser

Draplin on Design

Another nugget of brilliance from Aaron Draplin:

Go to, uh, Best Buy or some shit and find their “recordable media” section. Maybe there’s some burnable CDs and DVDs and whatever…hell, maybe even some cassette tapes sitting there? Look at the packaging. Shit sucks, right? Of course it does. Then, remember the beautiful reel-to-reel box up above that Minneapolis’ Derek Schille sent in. Nice, right? Then, punch yerself square in the face.

Little Printer

Want: Little Printer.

Susan Kare’s Notebooks

Inside Susan Kare’s notebooks.

Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing — each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.

First Covers

First covers of famous magazines.

Asian Pop Records

Asian pop record covers from the 60s and 70s. [via]

History of the CBC logo. [via]

Related: This is the desktop I’ve been using since I got my Macbook Air two months ago.

Get ready for radical changes in ketchup package design.

The Pretty Colors Tumblr will run out of material in the year 5012.

The incredible shrinking album cover.

Art directors and designers say they’ve never been given blunt directives to be more elementary. Yet they admit the transition to easily grasped images is an inevitable part of the move from 12-inch discs to MP3s. “The album cover has become just a pictographic button, some little thing on a Web site that you can click on to listen to or purchase some music,” said Frank Olinsky, a designer who has worked on covers for Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth. “A thumbnail-size image can’t replace an LP or even a CD cover, but these days I’m not sure that matters to people. It’s what people are used to, and they’re getting more used to it all the time.”

A field guide to musical typography.

Josh Berta on Cars and Intelligent Design.

The design of the vehicles is devoid of any suggestion of natural selection. The cars have eyes in their windshield, and mouths, complete with teeth and tongues, between their headlights. (Apparently motorcycles don’t exist, presumably because the Designer couldn’t figure out how to give them a face.) They can flex and move their metal frames, undercarriages, and tires at will, and yet they are undoubtedly made of metal, plastic and rubber. They are imbibed with life, which apparently allows them to ignore the laws of physics. Conveniently, non-living fixtures made of those same materials (buildings, furniture, etc.), obey those laws. Indeed, it is those very fixtures that offer the most disturbing glimpse into the Designer’s machinations. It’s as if the world was made by humans, now long gone, and replaced by living, breathing autos. One might expect Charlton Heston to crash land on the planet and later discover that those maniacs blew it up.

Attention musicians: Please stop using a font called “Bleeding Cowboy.” Living in Calgary, this thing is fucking everywhere and must be stopped. [via]

Wow. McSweeneys (sort of) redesigned their site.

A few months ago, coming up on this site’s six thousandth article and thirteenth anniversary, we realized that it was probably time to make sure everything was still working the way it should. (It might not’ve been the numbers that made us accept this. It might have been the way that, whenever we attempted to describe to people who worked on the internet of today how our site was sort of just a bunch of hand-edited text files, these people laughed nervously and did not believe us.) Surprisingly, a lot of it was still working—even having our web editor manually copy-and-paste bits of HTML was still pretty much working, in a charming folksy way—but we found a lot of things we wanted to tweak, too. So this redesign, in large part, is intended to reinforce all that is good about mcsweeneys.net (the style, the layout, etc.), while also incorporating some of the things that have come to seem more important since the salad days of 1998, when we launched the site.

Peter Saville on the cover art he created for Joy Division and New Order. [via]

This cover for the band’s second album was like a work of antiquity, but inside is a vinyl album, so it’s a postmodern juxtaposition of a contemporary work housed in the antique. At first, I didn’t believe the photo was an actual tomb but it’s really in a cemetery in Genoa. When Tony Wilson (Factory co-founder) told me Ian Curtis had died I said, ‘Tony, we have a tomb on the cover.’ There was great deliberation as to whether to continue with it. But the band, Ian included, had chosen the photograph. We did it in good faith and not in any post-tragedy way.