http://www.instantshift.com/2009/01/29/20-corporate-brand-logo-evolution/ 

A collection of works from leading designers, illustrators and artists responding
to themes generated by the recent WikiLeaks cable releases and subsequent fallouts
from such. 

http://www.information-is-currency.com/ 

What is in a word? What nuances and meanings does it carry and project upon us, or do we carry internally and historically to project upon it? This clean unadorned black text on white leaves itself open to interpretation; but it also provides a swing in context by referencing the same word used by US Military Operatives after having gunned down from a helicopter; what was later revealed to be unarmed journalists and civilians. *(Collateral Murder-video released by WikiLeaks).

http://www.information-is-currency.com/poster_AllenSmithee_Nice.htm 

a set of 12 bound volumes documenting every change made to the Wikipedia entry for “the Iraq War” over a period of five years

by  James Bridle

http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/ 

There is an increasingly pervasive notion that other forms of media are additive to literature, that they somehow improve it. Because, you know, books are just telling stories, right?

We are witnessing a profound assault on book publishing and literature, on the text itself—not from ebooks, which publishers are slowly, painfully coming around to after a long resistance, or the internet, which is after all entirely made of text—but from applications, “enhanced” books and reductive notions of literary experience. As I’ve written about before, in the context of advertising, publishers’ reactions to new technologies betray a profound lack of confidence in the text itself. We are being distracted by shiny things.

Text lasts. It’s not platform-dependant, you don’t just get it from one source, read it in one place, understand it in one way. It is not dependent on technology: it is what we make technology out of. Code is text, it is the fundamental nature of technology. We’ve been trying for decades, since the advent of hypertext fiction, of media-rich CD-ROMs, to enhance the experience of literature with multimedia. And it has failed, every time.

Yet we are terrified that in the digital age, people are constantly distracted. That they’re shallower, lazier, more dazzled. If they are, then the text is not speaking clearly enough. We are not speaking clearly enough. Like over-stuffed attendees at a dull banquet, the mind wanders. We are terrified that people are dumbing down, and so we provide them with ever dumber entertainment. We sell them ever greater distractions, hoping to dazzle them further.

Literature is an active process: the communication between writer—who wishes to tell the reader something, and imagines that reader in their mind in order to best adapt their writing for their understanding—and reader, who reconstructs and reanimates the text in their own mind. Any other input, audio or video, however pleasurable in certain contexts, diminishes the reader’s capacity for imagination and understanding. All else is distraction. Other—particularly visual—media reduce the bandwidth of the imagination.

“Storytelling” is what we do for children. It is the infantilisation of literature. And while there is much of interest in children’s literature and children’s publishing, to emulate it is to debase literature, and ourselves. (It’s dangerous in science, technology and other non-fiction too: no application or television programme is equal to a well-written, long form text.)

And these reductive notions of literature infect the rest of the body. Contrary to popular thought, everyone is not a publisher. When you hear a publisher say it, it’s even sadder. Publishing is a complex and well established collection of knowledge, competencies and processes, refined over time, practiced under forever difficult circumstances in a frankly indifferent market. Which is not to say that it’s exclusive: the bar to entry has dropped massively, obviously, in the last ten years. But it’s still hard, and hard to do well, and the rewards are still small. Writing something and putting it on the internet is not publishing. Producing an application and getting it into the app store is not publishing. If you think everyone is a publisher, go home now, and come back when you’ve thought about what you do.

In my writing on advertising, I suggested looking to Amazon and Apple as to how to market reading: it’s in the text itself. Amazon in particular are making a killing with the Kindle, they’re eating the publishing business, and they’re doing it by focussing on text. Kindle Singles and related ventures like Byliner and Random House’s Brain Shots take advantage of digital text’s primary advantage: speed. (See the opposing directions of The Guardian’s liveblogs and News International’s The Daily for fundamental understandings and misunderstandings of digital text.)

Added to the velocity of the new text is its sociability, its connectivity. Social reading, whether of the Kindle highlights, Kobo Dashboard, Instapaper, Findings or Readmill flavour, adds depth to the text without diminishing it. When I write about the reading experience, I’m talking about a deep engagement with text, an active, intelligent, two-way conversation between reader and writer.* I am not talking about pretty pictures, sound effects, film clips, or point-and-click “interaction”. 1001 words trump a picture, and books have always been interactive. (There is so much of value in comics, films and games but it is not what book publishers do.)

Finally, the text still requires context. As publishers spin up their digital and print-on-demand backlists, more and more is published with less and less context. These efforts amount to land-grabs and rights-squatting, without adding value. Works without TOCs, indexes, author bios, footnotes. Placing work in context is one of publishers’ primary tasks, stretching out to commissioning introductions, assembling background material, supporting biographies and critical studies. Design belongs here too: good book design, appropriate book design, as important now as it has ever been.

Velocity, depth, breadth. These are the dimensions we can add to books, that are the gifts of a digital age, not gimmicks, glossy presentation and media-catching stunts.

The text works. It stands and speaks for itself. It is not what we need to change.

http://booktwo.org/notebook/the-new-value-of-text/ 

Dr Lagina’s Math tutorial

√24/√3 = √(24/3) = √8

= √(4.2) = √4√2 = 2√2

√(81/25) = √81/√25 = 9/5

MOZ

Detention
Bramm S
Blake F
Morty
Hailey Y
Jordan A
Kara B

Mathematics – A-level standard.

These are some good examples of operations with surds, using the rules for both multiplication (ⁿ√(a.b) = ⁿ√a.ⁿ√b) and division (ⁿ√(a/b) = ⁿ√a/ⁿ√b). All the working is correct. The sloppy square root sign in the second example extending over the equals sign could be confusing, and handwriting in general isn’t great, but is legible.

Unfortunately, despite this good academic work, Dr Lagina is entirely unsuited to a career in education due to his surname. It would be no use trying to insist on a different pronunciation such as La-GHEE-na as students of any age will still make cruel remarks – it is little wonder that his detention list is so long. It is a shame that no careers officer ever tried to dissuade him from his current employment path, though he is still young enough to change his vocation. It is either that or change his name: even a teacher should be able to afford the £33 fee for a Deed Poll, though perhaps he has already changed it from something even more embarrassing, like Dr Lesticle, Dr Lyphilis or Nick Clegg.

There are a couple of other points to make. Firstly, a different hand has scrawled MOZ on the blackboard. According to Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows theory, a disordered environment signals a place where people do as they please and get away with it without being detected. Like the New York City Transit Authority removing graffiti from their trains leading to a sudden and significant drop in petty and serious crime, this should have been wiped off before the lesson began in a zero-tolerance approach. Not restoring a disordered environment early means that classroom discipline will only deteriorate, a fact surely worsened when one’s surname rhymes with a part of the female genitals. Whether Moz is the Morty who appears on the detention list, or just a deranged Morrissey fan is not clear.

Secondly, the appearance of Bramm S on the detention list raises the questions of how many students with this unusual name there are in this class that they need to be differentiated by their surnames, and whether this is a class consisting entirely of Gothic novelists, though there is no sign of Mary S or Edgar A P, and the works of Jordan A and Kara B must have been sadly lost to the world of literature.

8/10 – Good work, though loses a mark for ‘math’. And remember that sticks and stones may break your bones, but being called Dr Vagina every day of your working life will never hurt you. Though it may cause a career-ending nervous breakdown.

http://blackboardsinporn.blogspot.com/

NUDE PAPER is an art magazine for centerfold enthusiasts.
NUDE PAPER is a fashion magazine for the underdressed and oversexed.
NUDE PAPER is for photographers and artists who believe in nudity
being more than just plain old nakedity.

http://www.seltmannundsoehne.de/en/buecher/ansehen/57

http://www.rollingstone.com/videos/new-and-hot/duck-sauce-big-bad-wolf-20111024

The Making:

 
September 24, 2011 - THE MARCH TO UNION SQUARE

Nearly 100 peaceful protesters were brutally arrested.

_______________________________________________

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET

“We are unions, students, teachers, veterans, first responders, families, the unemployed and underemployed. We are all races, sexes and creeds. We are the majority. We are the 99 percent. And we will no longer be silent.

As members of the 99 percent, we occupy Wall Street as a symbolic gesture of our discontent with the current economic and political climate and as an example of a better world to come.”

https://occupywallst.org/

In a special visit by one of the world’s most influential and beloved graphic designers and design teachers, Karel Martens will headline AIGA/NY’s fall season. We are excited to invite you to his upcoming lecture. Hey, students! Don’t miss this one.

Martens has been practicing for fifty years and continues to create forward-looking and technologically ground-breaking work that is comfortable in the current moment but not consumed by it. He is a highly influential book designer but considers himself more broadly a “designer of the printed word.” But he’s really a designer of language, even abstract and photographic language. His work extends with equal innovation and clarity of communication across almost all imaginable media, from coins and postage stamps to monoprints to ASCII art to experimental video to electric signs to textiles to building facades. Martens himself says simply that his work should “respect the receiver of the message” and be “answerable.” Honesty and economy of language and material are crucial values in his work, but so are rhythm, color, and “delight.” Martens has described form as content’s “melody.” Robin Kinross says Martens’s work “is not wrapped up, as a closed and sealed thing. Rather, there is openness, textures that you can feel with your hands.” Paul Elliman has pointed out Martens’s love for “working or thinking in the language of the things around him” and says his work invites recipients to feel “how we ourselves, our ideas and perceptions, are formed by what happens around us.”

Indeed, teaching has been an important and integrated part of Martens’s practice since the 1970s. “Every generation,” he says, “has the duty to find form freshly, and the continuation of the status quo is by definition something to be avoided.” In 1998, Martens co-founded the Werkplaats Typografie, a masters program in graphic design that has often emphasized collaboration and commission, in Arnhem, Netherlands. He has also taught graphic design at Yale University since 1997.

Martens is a unique presenter and speaks about his work in a way that nobody else can. This is a rare chance in New York to hear him describe design in his way, through his own work. Register early! Reservations will be first come, first served.

TIME AND PLACE

Wednesday 7 September 2011
6:30–8:30PM

Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street
New York, NY 10016

6:30PM Check-in
7:00-8:30PM Presentation

http://www.aigany.org/events/details/12P1 

http://www.myblocknyc.com/

A new video-mapping website that invites residents, tourists and videographers to upload clips they’ve taken on the streets of New York to an interactive online map of the city — and lets the rest of us get in on the action. Made by Alex Kalman, a native New Yorker and son of illustrator Maira Kalman and the late designer Tibor Kalman.

Where They Create is not ‘just a book’. It’s a one-man journey that had its inception 20 years ago, but did not find a destination until one afternoon in 2009. After interiors photographer Paul Barbera shot the studio of one of his friends, an artist, he realised he had found his own true voice. Peeking behind the scenes of creative studios in the most natural and unobtrusive way possible was a means to satisfy his never-ending curiosity towards spaces and people alike. He started the blog wheretheycreate.com, which now becomes a book.

http://www.wheretheycreate.com/

Matta - Release The Freq from Kim Holm on Vimeo.

This book is devided in two parts. The first one is the Chinese government state TV censorship keywords list, found in a wikileaks article. The second one try to give an explanation or / and a face to those words.

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2029655 

http://www.blurb.com/books/2029655 

Students from the graphic design department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy browsed the content of the WikiLeaks website. They went through lots of documents and picked a leak. They were asked to edit and design this content. This resulted in 34 pockets with a broad variety, all based on the documents provided. They revealed not only information given by the WikiLeaks website but also displayed a critical stand towards the leaks themselves, WikiLeaks as a medium and the position of journalism in these days. 

http://www.orderyourwikileak.org/