Lunch Bag Art

New favorite blog: Lunch Bag Art, where the father of two grade schoolers posts photos of the drawings he adds to his children's brown bag lunches every morning.

New Favorite Blog

If you ever need an ego boost regarding your design skills, wander over to Photoshop Disasters and you'll automatically feel better.

"There's No Food Here."

Khoi Vinh, the Design Director of NYTimes.com and creator of Subtraction.com, just started another blog -- on behalf of his dog, Mr. President.

Joan Rivers Doesn't Actually Think Iceland Is Weird, She Just Wanted to Say "Reykjavik"

This is not to suggest that I in any way care about what the woman thinks or writes in the slightest, but Joan Rivers recently posted in her blog that she's training for this fall's New York City marathon. She excuses her general athletic mediocrity, however, by saying:

"I have run in the last four New York City Marathons. True, I didn’t win. The winners, if you check you local papers, are always foreigners from weird places like Uganda, Nepal and Reykjavik and the reason that these people win is because they are not running for prizes like the rest of us; they’re running to get away from the I.N.S."

Uh.

So according to Ms. Rivers,

1. Any American of Ugandan, Nepalese, or Icelandic descent must be a foreigner. They all, clearly, are fresh off the boat from their respective weird countries and just raring to run a 26-mile race.

2. These aforementioned foreigners, moreover, must be illegal -- because lord knows that they otherwise wouldn't possess the skill to outrun her liposuctioned derrière.

3. John Rivers, clearly, is "running for prizes" -- because finishing 1,334 out of 2,000 certainly shouldn't deter her from thinking that she's actually going to win anything.

...Right. Just clearing things up.

New Blog From SND.org

The Society for News Design just launched a blog to delve into everything from the art of infographics to Helvetica haiku. (There was a contest, apparently.)

In other news, UCLA researchers spend all their time playing Scrabble with lasers.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

Oh how I love Wired.

Linkage

1. This is the dog stealing the show at Westminster?! It looks like a rat with a poodle bouffant. Ech.

2. A former Spectator news deputy just started a blog about her semester abroad in Ghana: Wrapped Up in Dust.

3. Sweet! Actual justification for owning a Vespa!

4. FontShop has a great post up on Helvetica alternatives.

5. NOLA just can't catch a break.

The 2007 Bloggies

The nominations for the 2007 Weblog Awards are out, and some of my old favorites are up: GapingVoid, Drawn!, Subtraction, Design*Sponge, PopGadget, and Apartment Therapy.

A few never-before-discovered (by me, that is) favorites, though, are:

Chocolate and Zucchini - a wonderful French food blog (in English, thankfully)

Tree Hugger - a sustainability-center web magazine

Make - a blog for fans of all things DIY

Have a look around -- there are finalists for music, sports, photography, entertainment, regions, &c. What else looks good?

Minimalizing Accountability, Bit By Bit

Has anyone noticed that in the blogosphere, the phrase "New Year's Resolutions" has become synonymous with "Resolutions That Other People Should Fulfill"?

The COR Building

I'm completely ripping this from one of my new favorite blogs, Inhabitat -- an architecture + design blog focused on sustainability -- but apparently Chad Oppenheim, Buro Happold, and Ysreal Seinuk teamed up to create a beautiful (and green!) highrise in Miami whose exterior structure includes wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and solar hot water generation. Plus, it's pretty. What more could you want from a building?

EDIT: And -- to be sung to the tune of "It's A Small World After All" -- Inhabitat's founder Jill Fehrenbacher is actually a grad student at Columbia's GSAPP architecture school.

Decisions, Decisions

Old:



New?

NaBloPoMo

For the die-hard bloggers out there (or, alternately, for people who lack the time & motivation to participate in NaNoWriMo), Fussy.org brings you NaBloPoMo.

Blog of the Week

For quick and quirky DIY ideas and other design news, check out ReadyMade magazine's blog. Recent examples range from how to construct a miniature trebuchet (y'know, in case you need to launch small stones at pigeons from the safety of your windowseat) to reusing gutter pipes as bookshelves. The archives of the magazine itself are worth a look as well -- especially their current "small spaces" issue that is something of a must-read for any Manhattan resident.

Photoblogs That Have Recently Caught My Eye

Mareen Fischinger, a 22-year-old designer/photographer from Düsseldorf, Germany who's currently living in NYC. Interesting macro shots.

Daily Dose of Imagery, a record of Canadian Sam Javanrouh's photos. The current image on the front page is stunning.

Mystery Me, Gary Shrimpling's photographic accounts of life across the pond. Incredible landscapes (see above).

Overshadowed, the photos of Keith Yan; another photographer caught between NYC and elsewhere (in this case, Hong Kong). Wonderfully gritty street photography.

(All of them, incidentally, have Flickr accounts, so check those out too.)

Far From Blog of the Week

Gawker has launched a new music blog, Idolator.

Quoth Gothamist:

So far they have shed light on things that already have glaring spotlights on them, such as: blogs create buzz about bands, and sometimes those bands aren't worth the buzz! Nothing new there, though they promise to step in and "cover the people who are manufacturing the latest band buzz, whether it's an old-guard standby (Rolling Stone), an absurdly powerful new-media turk (Pitchfork), or an agenda-pimping blogger (take your pick)."

I am less than impressed.

Random Blog of the Week

Process Recess is the blog of James Jean, an SVA grad who lives in Los Angeles and has had illustrations published in the NYTimes, the LA Times, WIRED magazine, and The Rolling Stone. His work is a mesh of Photoshop effects and hand-drawn art, often with a political twist. Very interesting, definitely worth some browsing time. His website provides an archive of illustrations, paintings, and comic book covers, and his blog shows a little more behind-the-scenes work.