Posts under 'Design':
This comes to the attention of Bunny Blog via my colleague Nahil, who shared this article on Slate with me via various acts of Facebookery.
The problem of charging iPods seems to my relatively armchair self to be something far too much of the world is devoting time to finding innovative solutions for. For perspective, I’ve owned an MP3 player nonstop since the introduction of the Diamond Rio. I love music and listen to it constantly, and I defy you to find too many photos of me in which a pair of slim headphones is NOT around my neck with a grey wire leading into my pocket. Somehow, only about twice in my iPod ownership have I ever exclaimed “damn, the battery’s dead!” and not been able to do something about it fairly quickly.
You mean to tell me you’ve got your life together enough that you have the discipline to jog or bike regularly enough that you need music to relieve the monotony but you can’t apply the same regimen to charging a device with a 10-hour battery? And you further mean to tell me that of all the things you hope to bring to human understanding with a scientific inquiry into the nature of breast movement the one you remain extra excited for is the ability to charge an iPod?
Steve Jobs, you claim to be making computing devices sexy. But those devices are bleeding the sex out of the rest of our lives.
Yep, that’s right — Travel and Adventure!!
This email blast I just got from Spirit Airlines is pretty racy:
Obviously they’re playing on the alternate meaning of T&A, but they’re playing it smart. If anybody gets angry, they can calmly reply “What? We had no idea it meant that!”
Even Virgin America, which brands itself as the new “hip and cool and sexy” airline, doesn’t go that far. Spirit, on the other hand, had a Mother’s Day sale entitled “MILF.” As in, “Mothers I’d Like to Fly.” In an email Spirit has said these promotions are “designed to be entertaining, humorous, and of course, impactful.” And you know what? I think they’re dead on.
I saw this on a bus ad today:
Yes, because I want to buy my auto insurance from a crow making the “I dunno who did it. Certainly not me!” face. That’s a face you can trust!
A day late, but it’s never too late to celebrate Easter, right?
Glen made this Easter card, and we love it…
As may not be apparent by our pictures of foosball tables and playing with Lego, we do a ton of work here, and since we don’t actually have the time right now to update the website, I thought we should at least mention one of our latest projects, Slacker.
Slacker Personal Radio is web radio that learns what music you like and adapts itself accordingly. You can listen on the web, or buy their Portable player and listen on planes, in trains, and even inside large cabinets if that’s your thing, jelly bean. OH MY GOD, but I don’t even have to tell you about it, because we made this video:
I finally met the guys from Slacker at the SXSW Music Fesival, at the Blender/Slacker after party, at around 2 or 3 in the morning. Our videos were playing in the main tent of the party while everyone was drunk on free beer and getting down to the likes of Diplo, A-Trak, and the Cool Kids. Slacker is based in San Diego, and we actually completed the entire project without ever having met face to face. See the rest of our suite of videos over at
Thought this was pretty poignant for everyone who does art/film/fiction.
This here is pretty great: This fellow bought a font from Letterheads, and it managed to get uploaded to a file sharing site. He refused to get it taken down, so they want to charge him for the extra downloads that have now been generated. This is a real case of piracy hitting home because the designer that made the font takes home 70% of the sales there, so this is directly affecting him. As the economy becomes more specialized and direct delivery of media becomes a reality, piracy will start to hurt the little guy more and more. Letterheads has had to up the price on that font to pay off the outstanding fee (and get that money back to the artist):
“In order to recoup these losses, LHF Garner must now sell for $39 (32% increase). $9.50 of each sale will go to pay down Randy’s bill. When Randy’s bill has been paid in full ($944), LHF Garner will revert back to it’s original price of $29.50. Of course, if anyone would like to purchase a single copy of LHF Garner for $1000… well, that would work too.”
Oh yeah, and they published Randy’s email address. I like it: Vigilante font justice.
Great. Just great. Check out the cannon.
More here, at the website of Mattias Inks, who does all sorts of great little drawings.
None of the Bunnies has ever directly been accused of being a hipster. But we’ve all been spotted in the Silverlake region from time to time and the funky chic aesthetic is something we enjoy and draw inspiration from. So in this season of mass-market consumerism, may I draw your attention to:
…which is (in case you’ve never heard of it) kind of like an Ebay but for handmade things.
Not only do I dig on Etsy’s smart use of the information age’s hyper-niche-driven economy, but I think some very clever and innovative people thought about information design and the user experience when they put the interface together. (more…)
This is cool:
At Yahoo! Research, JASMINE NOVAK has been running data analysis to identify when a search term becomes very popular, or “bursts.” Sharing this data with us, we did reverse IP lookup on the addresses in the data and plotted the patterns of activities as a particle system. Here, in a time-lapse animation, particles show queries from each location worldwide. Visualized are searches for “miss teen usa” (related to this video), “cricket” (world playoffs) “mattel” (recalls of toys with lead paint), and a close up on the Gulf of Mexico for “hurricane felix”.
This is a nice example of a clean, informative data visualization. The obvious next step is making it interactive… pair this up with Google Earth (Yahoo! may not be too interested in that, but you get my drift) and let the user spin the globe around and try out their own search terms, and suddenly you have an interesting and potentially useful cultural tool for studying patterns in viral marketing, politics, any meme at all. Presumably there is a fully interactive version hiding deep within the labs, so let us at it!
Have a look at their other projects – there’s some very interesting stuff trumping FlickrVision, SigAlert (which particularly looks like something right out of 24), and more. It’s clear they have some good designers on this team.