Episode 9: Snapshot Edition

My gosh, this picture of Mr. Hawking makes me appreciate my life.

Just so you know, a dumbo octopus neither look like an octopus or an elephant. Presenting the amazing lifeforms from the depth of Monterey Bay. I personally dig this Ping-Pong tree sponge.

A croc bites off a man’s hand. All I gotta say about it is that I’m glad that the man was able to fully recover it.

If it looks like a snake and lives like a snake, it may just be the new limbless lizard species that’s discovered in India.

Mon village, ceux qui n’oublient pas is loaded with both beautiful illustration and fine typography. I mean, get a load of those swashes!

One word: TROGDOR.

Another set from that blog. Ooh, so that’s how the ‘Ideal view of marine life in the Carboniferous Period’ might’ve looked like.

The Camouflage House. Via Coudal Partners.

“Just a bite of the bacon was too salty and yearned for the sweet kiss of chocolate syrup.” The Bacon Candy Bar, ladies and gentlemen.

XM Satellite Radio: A Packaging Proces Overview. People always thought that industrial design is this ethereal piece of knowledge that can bestow beautiful objects upon its practitioner rather effortlessly; while in reality, a lot of rough sketches and crappy ideas must be generated before ‘the good one’ finally emerges. Via Signal vs. Noise.

And to close, one audio piece: Frank Lloyd Wright: The Mike Wallace Interview. Buy. It. Now. Via Signal vs. Noise.

UPDATE: I just found this video when I visited Youtube. It’s “500 years of female portraits in Western art”, condensed in 2:42 minutes. Amazing.

Have you all seen this lovely piece of work?

Genuinely appealing car ads are very rare. This is one of them.

My friends would say “It’s so Bram,” to which I would then reply with a hearty “Amen.”

Good night.

UPDATE: Jonathan Coulton’s rendition of Baby Got Back takes the crown for being the most remarkable song of all time, exhibiting unnerving mention of innuendos and the word “booty” accompanied by family-friendly folk music. The famed John Hodgman wrote: “I SUPPOSE FOR THE NEXT BOOK he will just have to tour with the Geico Cavemen.” Wow.

Also, If I May Note

A cartoon from The New Yorker that my brother might enjoy. Good night.

Interlude: Following My Continuing Obsession Over All Things Origami

Here’s The Origami Lab, or, “Why a physicist dropped everything for paper folding.” Beautiful.

Leyla Torres documented variations on a ‘pinwheel’ origami fold on a project called Wonderfold Squares.

Peter Callesen made 3D paper sculptures out of pieces of paper. They are cut and scored, and therefore are not considered to be pure origami, but still!

Speaking of papercuts, let’s see if you can make any of these Chinese masterpieces.

But enough extravagant display of unattainable handiwork. The guy whom I got the dragon link from, Robert Lang, actually gives you the templates to make one of those.

Okay, the templates doesn’t make it look any easier, even after looking at another site that is clearly labelled “A Beginner’s Guide to Crease Patterns“, but they’re still a sight to see.

And this is one sick dragon. The guy also made paper figures of characters from, get this, Final Fantasy. His crease patterns are strangely hypnotic, maybe because they’re drawn in black and white.

The good people at Coudal Partners, whose links made up a lot of Link En Fuego, might like this one.

And, yes, in case you were wondering, there are also Yahoo Group and blog dedicated to the study and the interpretation of crease pattern, respectively.

“Its truly remarkable how much effort people put into making the papers they “drop acid” with look lovely.” Yes, that’s the LSD LSD. Note, for example, that the most common pattern is “Felix The Cat.”

While the blog that published the above article, A Capite Ad Calcem, takes the crown for being the radest name on the blogosphere. Moreso, he laces a full-blown manifesto in the areas of:

Religious (written in Latin, no less)

Politic

Social

Particular, local and traditional (though this is only a rough topic approximation)

With the “occasional ethanol induced post.” Read that? Ethanol. Induced. Post. Awesome.

That, if you ask me, is worthy of Link En Fuego’s Interlude coverage.

My big thanks to the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society for some of the links.

Episode 8

Hermi, I officially declare that camera tossing is the next big thing in photography! Okay, if it’s not, then it sounds like a lot of fun to do on summer nights. The instruction is here.

Well, it’s about time that somebody take the Creative Suite 3 icons and either a) spice them up, or b) take them to the next level. Apparently, this guy is behind it. Blasphemy! Via Typophile and TUAW.

The Morning News 2007 Editors’ Awards for Online Excellence has been announced. A must read. Via Daring Fireball.

Glad to know that Dinner In The Sky is up (no pun intended) and running. I read about this a few months ago but saw it again on Coudal Partners this morning.

This is the reason why I would never become an architect like my mom, even though international architecture magazine like this can be downloaded for free and the phrase “I have no life” can also apply to the ad industry.

And while we’re on that subject, my kids will be granted the privilege of watching this excellent video and playing around with this site.

Sorry, Jen, now we can’t complain that we’re not great graphic designers because making stuff look good in their context has become so ridiculously easy.

I told ya, the Rieses were right all along, ‘divergent’ products will trump its ‘convergent’ rival any day of the week. James Surowiecki wrote on people’s tendency to like, but their inability to cope with, barrage of features in a product. Via Signals vs. Noise.

Bill Higgins on ‘uncanny valley,’ The Simpsons and “desktop app in a web browser.” Via Signals vs. Noise.

I think that this is a great way to present user ratings, and that other sites will soon follow in Summize’s footstep.

While I only have the slightest idea of what this site might mean in English, I have no doubt that the public transit map design in Russia is alive and well.

The Enertia geo-solar home can heat and cool itself by working like the earth’s atmosphere. I have to read this tonight. Via Pogue’s Post.

Richard Sweeney’s paper sculptures just owned the Origami big time.

“Every conscious moment is like waking up for the first time. New information…’melts like snow, leaving not a trace’.” The Death of Yesterday made me appreciate every second of my life.

The two above links are taken from The Proceedings of The Athanasius Kircher Society.

On the Upper Nile, a man was “forced to ‘marry’ goat.”

The Simpsons’ take on Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten produces the best intro in the series history, I think.

And to close this post, Jessica Hagy’s sublime observation on the similarity between tax fraud and online dating. Good night.

Please welcome Cory Brubaker

Link En Fuego’s newest author.

A notice to both authors: when you post, please enter in a category from the right tab. Regular posts are considered “Links,” posting on a specific subject is “Interlude,” and “Etc.” is reserved for special notice and things that doesn’t neatly fit anywhere. Good night.

Rethink Advertising Group

Their logo, however simple it may seem, is rather genius in my opinion. Their approach to business, staff and how they go about designing personal business cards just blows me away. Researching this Vancouver, BC based advertising group was quite entertaining. But I don’t want to spoil it all for you. You can find out the rest just as I did by checking out their site.

As a suggestion, check out the *student section under the inquires link. It provides some valuable information for people like us whom are a considering a career in advertising.

Also, they have a link to some work done by an intern they hired. Leo Lung is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art. He has some great material, but I think I’ve seen some comparable if not better work from some of my fellow AIP students.

Obe Wan Kenobi of Advertising

Mark Fenske teaches the advertising graduate program at Virginia Commonwealth University. In Ernie Schenck’s The Fenske Upload, he is regarded as “one of the few guys left in this business who genuinely gets it.” His website features an article titled Snake Venom & How Good Advertising Works -Part 1, I suggest you read it.

Prepare to be awe inspired.

Interlude: My Brother

Ladies and gentlemen,

It has come to my attention that some three-hour ago my brother, who also happens to be an illustrious wunderkind of many talents, had posted a birthday comment that is addressed to me right on this blog. Indeed, yesterday the 21th of May was my birthday. How was he able to connect to a wireless network on the campus, or how did he know that Episode 7 was so ripe for a comment, I don’t know; but so it is.

Therefore, I shall now commend you to visit and subscribe to his excellent proceedings on MySpace, which will contain approximately the same kind of content as this blog, but with actual complete paragraphs in it, annotated thoroughly with substantial cogitation on various matters that are, for starters, actually useful.

So please email your further gratitude his way at krizpiyo at yahoo dot com.

Thank you to my brother’s kindness to pay a visit to this blog. Thank you also to Corey Cory Brubaker, who spared some of his precious time inbetween drinking the tea tonic and working on his Macbook to comment on the origami link.

We thank you for your support. Good night.

Episode 7

To start off, two ad goodness that I got via John Nack:

Comedy Central. Hitler’s got a small do-do, and

42 Below. Who says that clip art doesn’t sell?

Middle Eastern music videos are moving from the ones where “…singers wandered uncomfortably around cheap sets of palm trees and fountains, bemoaning their lost loves” to “…I came up with red glasses and I had bleached hair and I was on guitar and I had like these jeans, I was representing my generation.”

Yes, many people hates Mac, but I’ve never seen someone who evangelizes Internet Explorer 7 so fervently. I mean, come on, what kind of people advocate the use of a non standard-compliant web browser? In a twist of irony, he ripped off Firefox grassroot campaign. The similarities? Both sites have heinous typography on their mastheads. The Firefox is better (lose the gradient, please) but the one on Macs Suck site is a sin against all the Ten Commandments of Typography.

While we’re talking on that subject, if there’s indeed a Ten Commandments of Typography, David Carson would be satan himself. This could be good or bad.

These vector illustrations are not my style. These ones, however, are more like it. Mad, mad, mad Illustrator skills. Via John Nack.

Al Gore’s got a sweet rig, yo.

The return of Coudal’s Photoshop tennis. Watch this space closely, friend.

Just so you know, list of the best and worst airport to sleep in. Via Coudal Partners.

And lastly, I can assure you that my kids will have these fine luxuries as their first toy.