Simian Design

These are my delicious links for June 24th through June 26th:

• Touched by an Angel – The story of how the Farah Fawcett poster came to be.

  "…t may be the most famous pinup poster of all time. Farrah Fawcett's smile is a row of impossibly white teeth so perfectly aligned they look machine-made, her hair a windblown blond tangle that swallows her slender hand.
  Then there is her nipple: a salacious nub straining against the nylon of her red one-piece. Its appearance marked the advent of "nippling." Whenever a model applies ice to her breast before a photo shoot, she's paying homage to Farrah….."

• The Bug, the Worm and the Death Star – As professionals, we prefer logo, logotype, mark, symbol, wordmark, icon, visual identity or signature. With this many choices it is no wonder others have settled on the irreverent bug. Incidentally, a long-time friend in Mumbai told me of some of the general names for logo in India include pintu (pint sized), chintu (tiny), dabboo (fat) and kaka (small one). (But depending on the specific region, language and even community in India, kaka also can mean poo-poo, as elsewhere. I guess context is everything, when calling a logo kaka in India.)

  But whether we designed it, manage it, or just live with it, having a name for the logo appears to fulfill some human need. Some companies provide a formal name, such as The Monogram (GE). Here are a few logos and their officially sanctioned names:

• How many colors? Wrong. – Richard Wiseman comes one of the best color optical illusions I have ever seen.
• Fun with a spray-gun, a field and perspective. – Nice project, doing POV Perspective on a field, the photos are quite nice.
• Volcano from Space; or how I would kill a man to stay in the ISS for a bit. – A chance recording by astronauts on the International Space Station has captured the moment a volcano explosively erupted, sending massive shockwaves through the atmosphere.
• 10 Ways to Instantly Increase Your jQuery Performance – Nettuts+ –

These are my delicious links for March 24th through March 26th:

• Alpine Hut – Gorgeous 6×11 Alpine hut by OFIS Architects. The hut is situated in a small Alpine village, part of Triglav national park in Slovenia, with very strict rules of construction and architectural design. The client bought the site together with existing construction permit for the generic project. Demand was not to change construction permit but change the elements of the house to suit his family, sustainable factor and open the windows toward the views.
• Rebuilding Spotlight's Index on OS X (Manually) | Walt-O-Matic – My spotlight recently got hosed, this is a good reference on how to fix that.
• Letter from an AIG Official; The Other Side of the Story. – The resignation letter of an AIG executive explaining his point of view on the bonus furor. The proverbial other side of the story.
• Fuck That. – Russian teens have now new fun. They dare trains.
  This is needed to be done fast, because if one is appearing before the train too long before and machinist could see him and start breaking, so they run on the rails just before the train so he couldn’t start breaking and fell down on the rails, then the train moves above the person at his maximum speed, just a few inches from his head and back.
• Top 10 Time-Lapse Videos Show Nature at Work | Wired Science from Wired.com – When a phenomenon happens very slowly, viewing accelerated footage helps scientists take a step back and see the big picture: At higher speeds, things that we regard as fixed take motion — even the dullest scenes spring to life.
  Here are Wired Science's picks of the best time-lapse videos of nature at work.
• Travel photography: The Wave – Los Angeles Times – The Wave is a red-rock stunner on the border of Arizona and Utah, made of 190-million-year-old sand dunes that have turned to rock. L.A. Times photographer Spencer Weiner captured the swirling drama of this little-known formation that's accessible only on foot via a three-mile hike and highly regulated. (To apply for a permit, go to the Bureau of Land Management's Arizona Web page.)