Sycamore crush Jim Coudal (of Coudal Partners) appears on the Chicago-based public radio show, Hello Beautiful.  Jim explains just about every project Coudal Partners is involved in.  Of particular interest to you writers: Verse by Voice, Field-Tested Books, and Booking Bands.  The interview is punctuated by other features, so you might want to stick out the whole thing.  It's a good show.

If you need more explanation of why we admire a design firm, just watch CP's short film Copy Goes Here, or browse the Museum of Online Museums.

Veer has put together a new catalogue [.pdf link] of their visual design elements.  If you work with words or pictures, or just like looking at them, then this is something you should check out.  Of particular interest are their example movie titles "Legend of the Exploding Vampires" and "Gators on a Train" (page 24).  Previous Veer catalogue coverage here. 

There's also a nod to John Langdon's amazing Wordplay, a book of "ambigrams" (words which can be read right-side-up and upside-down).  Unlike anagrams, ambigrams can spell two different things (asymmetrical ambigrams) depending on which direction you approach them from.  Examples here.  Note the ambigram for Kelly Ripa, Nathaniel.

 There's something incredibly satisfying about Bowie Style's blog, print & pattern, which is simply a compendium of gorgeous prints and patterns (!) all jumbled together with the occasional editorial comment, and links.

The International Herald Tribune did a great piece on the history of the now-omnipresent Georgia typeface.  It was designed by Matthew Carter, who is also responsible for Verdana, and both were specifically designed to be readable on computer screens. 

In case you were wondering, the current incarnation of the Sycamore Review website uses Verdana and Georgia exclusively (Georgia for headlines, Verdana for body text).  We used to use a flavor of Garamond for the banner, but now it's in Georgia as well.  The issue is (and, to my knowledge, always has been) printed in easy-to-read Garamond.

If you don't know who Ze Frank is, he is a man who turns his camera on every weekday morning and proceeds to say and do amazing things.  Friday, he officially opened the voting on his I Knows Me Some Ugly MySpace Contest, the object of which is to create the ugliest MySpace homepage possible.  What's interesting is that in defending the value of such a contest (against the accusation that he had conceived the contest solely to mock people with no design expertise) he actually dropped a couple of interesting gems regarding the cost of creativity:

Over the last twenty years...the cost of tools related to the authorship of media has plummeted.  For very little money, anyone can create and distribute things like newsletters, or videos, or badass tunes about ugly.

[...] 

In MySpace, millions of people have opted out of premade templates that "work" in exchange for ugly.  Ugly when compared to preexisting notions of taste is a bummer.  But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.

Watch the full video here

This is an idea I tried to touch on a couple of weeks ago, but didn't really do justice to.  It's hard to say where a culture is heading when so many of it members have access to sophisticated content creation and editing tools, and whether or not all this technology, once it has been assimilated, will distract us or encourage us to create good art (yeah, yeah, "good").   

I think  that Ze is right on with his guitar metaphor: once you become aware of the craft involved in the creation of something, it changes the way you experience those creations.  In writing, we call this reading as a writer, but the concept extends across all industries.  I don't know that this necessarily leads to a more informed population, or a more creative one (like I said, the potential for distraction is troubling), but I find encouraging evidence to support that theory everyday.

Something Francis Ford Coppola said in Hearts of Darkness had a profound effect on me.  I'm paraphrasing, but he said motion pictures were not really an art form yet, because there were too many people involved, too many committees and interested parties, but that when a girl in Iowa could sit down with a camera and make a movie all by herself, then motion pictures would be art.  I think that scenario may occur sooner than Coppola could have dreamed when he was mired in the endless bureaucracy of Apocalypse Now.  Ze Frank and others make me think that that scenario may, in fact, have already come to pass.

I love Veer.  Veer is a company that sells visual elements for designers: fonts, stock photographs, illustrations, that sort of thing.  Like any company that sells a lot of stuff, they feel the need to put together catalogue to, well, catalogue all that stuff.  But instead of simply slapping together something utilitarian and boring, Veer decided to use their stock of visual elements to put together an activity book for creative professionals.  It's got all the standard activity book fare: crosswords, jumbles, word finds, and the creeping death that is sudoku.  Along the side of every page there is a list of all the typefaces and images used in creating the game or puzzle, and how much each of those elements costs.  So it's just like a real catalogue, only much more fun. Frankly, it's almost too much fun, almost an unnecessary amount of effort for a company to expend unless it feels that part of its business model is to be cool (Coudal, I'm looking at you).

The catalogue (activity book) is a free download.  You should grab it even if you don't have an immediate need for visual design elements, just in case you find yourself on a long plane ride with nothing to do, or if there is any danger of getting some work done this summer. 

Veer keeps a weblog called The Skinny that usually has very interesting finds, and they run a contest called Lightboxing where designers duke it out using selected visual elements to express a given theme, kind of like Iron Chef.  Check 'em out.