125th Anniversary Coke Cans: Nostalgia at Work

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For Coca Cola's 125th anniversary, Peter Gregson designed a series of six cans based on Coke's ads and posters circa 1930-40. Looking at them slips me into a reverie about pulling an old fashioned shorty glass bottle of Coke out of the fridge in my grandparents' garage and drinking it while leaning on my grandfather's workbench—and I don't even know for sure if my grandparents actually had a fridge in their garage, that's the power of nostalgia for you! Bravo, Coke. 

Monday Digest: Album Design Goes Small; Fairey on Copenhagen; Hipster Ipsum

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• The NYT asks album cover designers whether the small size of art used on iTunes, iPods and other digital devices influences their design choices. While some musicians still want complex covers, the industry seems to agree that how well an album cover reads at thumbnail size can contribute to sales. Above, the cover of the Black Keys' album "Brothers," praised for its recognizability and simplicity, earned designer Michael Carney a Grammy for best best packaging. Check out a slide show of other albums discussed in the article here.

• Need a break from lorem ipsum dummy text? Try Hipster Ipsum which peppers your traditional Latin with hipster vocab like "craft beer," "portland," and "food truck." It also offers a version that is straight up hipster gibberish.

• On the Obey Giant blog, Shepard Fairey gives his version of his recent trip to Copenhagen, where he was beaten up and called an "Obama illuminati." He says the media misrepresented the story of why he was there, potentially contributing to the anger that fueled his attackers, by erroneously stating that he was being paid by the local government for one of his murals. (Bewarned: the blog is tight white type on black and will probably give you visual ghosting after reading it.)

Postcardly : The Digital Savior of Snail Mail?

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Postcardly (currently in beta) is a new digital service that will convert an email with an attached photo into a postcard (email content on back, photo on front) and send it to your designated recipient via the US Postal Service. Promoted as a way to keep in touch with friends and family who don't use computers (grandparents are mentioned a lot) it also seems to have caught on with military families. 

Postcardly is a relevant discovery for me; as it happens my current to-do list includes curating a batch of digital photos from a recent family visit, uploading them to Snapfish, ordering doubles on select prints for my grandmother, and then sending said prints to her via USPS—a process which all told requires a couple of man hours (plus the waiting time between each step), the fees associated with Snapfish and the cost of postage. So I understand the hassles involved when sharing things from the digital age with someone firmly rooted in a non-digital world. 

While I decided not to try Postcardly for this latest undertaking (at 99¢ a postcard it isn't practical for sending batches of prints), it does combine two of my great loves: postcards and communicating the old-fashioned way.

One downside: There aren't any clear examples on the website that show the format of the back, what typeface is used, etc. This might seem a little designer nitpicky, but if handwriting (one of the personal touches of the traditional postcard) is going to be replaced, I want to see how—and be sure Comic Sans hasn't infiltrated my communications. 

But all in all, Postcardly offers a simple and useful service, for which there appears to be a market, while throwing some much-needed business to the desperate USPS to boot. I'll be interested to see how it progresses. 

(Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Postcard Club of NYC)

I will hereby begin peppering this blog with designer/illustrator Jessica Hische's awesome Daily Drop Cap. Begun in 2009, she pledged to design a drop cap a day until she'd completed 12 alphabets. It now being 2011, the goal has been met but her letters as well as those designed by special guests are free to use (with credit) on non-commerical blogs. Peruse the letters here and check out Jessica's inspiring work here. Also make note of the URLs on her website. So clever-cool I can barely stand it!

Stop-Motion Magic

I can't get enough of stop-motion animation. For me, it taps into that same feeling of creative transformation that comes from art like that by Tara Donovan: the magical payoff of tedious, minute and disciplined repetition. To this end, here's a project helmed by Wieden + Kennedy London called "Gulp" which garnered the record for "World's largest stop-motion animation set" from the Guinness Book. Filmed on location at a beach in Wales and captured with a Nokia camera on a cherry picker, it's a pretty cool feat. 

Sometimes the "Behind the Scenes" are more impressive than the final result:
W+K also won a record for "Smallest stop-motion animated character" with this cute short called Dot.