Liquid Treat

In our ongoing quest for office supplies that are both functional and inspirational, we have discovered Stickytape, a hefty roll of clear packing tape printed with quotations and advice from leading designers. The adhesive-backed, sans-serif wisdom ranges from practical suggestions (“Think first before you put anything on paper or computer,” recommends Wim Crouwel) and affirmations (“Trust your eyes”) to terse directives (“Focus”) and management tips (Adrian Shaughnessy’s “Always employ people who are better than you”). Meanwhile, Daniel Eatock is out to save lives, warning “Never tie your shoe in a revolving door.” Designed by James Greenfield for British creative hub Blanka, the tape proves that good advice sticks.

After a recent project had us overdosing on pie charts and line graphs, we found ourselves in a visual representation rut. Three-dimensional color histograms to the rescue! We owe it all to 3DHistogram.com, an open source web application that allows users to produce and model three-dimensional color histograms based on a supplied image. A project of Minneapolis-based Third Ave Design and its wind-powered servers, the application analyzes the distribution of colors in an uploaded image and renders the results in mesmerizing constellations of correspondingly hued 3D cubes. Betcha can’t make just one.

Creativity is contagious. A group of South Dakota middle school students learned this firsthand when they spent the day learning about advertising, design, and…swine flu. The staff of McQuillen Creative Group in Aberdeen, South Dakota recently welcomed students from nearby Holgate Middle School for a day of interactive activities to introduce them to the worlds of design and advertising. Their challenge? To get the word out about the H1N1 virus. “Kids got to experience logo design, graphic design, photography, image manipulation, marketing, concepting, and video production,” MCG president Troy McQuillen tells us. Along the way, they produced a series of posters based on a “street smarts” theme and ended the day on a high note by recording a catchy flu jingle. “The song is an audio reminder of things to do to avoid the flu.”

Is it a cheese? Is it a font? You decide in a new online game that presents players with a procession of names to categorize as the province of the dairy case or the type foundry. Sounds simple, right? You know your Goudy from your Gouda and would never set a block of text in Manchego nor snack on a block of Helvetica. But watch out for the trickier ones: Rudelsberg, Gabriel, and Beaumarchais have emerged as particularly challenging. Click to see how your skills stack up against the site’s approximately 180,000 visitors so far who have made three million guesses—about 57 percent of them correct.

As of Wednesday, September 30, the last batches of Polaroid film passed the expiration date printed on their packages, but the products of this now defunct form of photography live on—online. Among the forums helping instant memories endure is Abandoned Polaroids, a Flickr pool that contains nearly 500 photos. Many of them are the work of Baltimore-based photographer Brian Hjärna, who has a keen eye for the dark beauty of old chairs and even older industrial machinery. Heavy on parched landscapes, roadside signage, and ramshackle interiors, this growing group of images is a hauntingly inspirational coffee table book waiting to happen.

In 2004, Merle Becker quit her corporate television job at MTV to pursue a growing fascination with rock posters. Soon, she was traveling across the country interviewing artists such as Stanley Mouse, Art Chantry, and Tara McPherson. “My initial intent was to find out why so many artists are drawn to doing rock posters,” says Becker. “I also wanted to tell a clear story of the history of the art form.” The result is American Artifact, a documentary that has been making the festival rounds and premieres in New York and San Francisco later this month. The film chronicles the rise of American rock poster art, from the “skeleton and roses” posters created for the Grateful Dead and the birth of silk-screening to grunge and the off-kilter whimsy associated with contemporary bands. “It is my hope that this film causes people to see ‘lowbrow’ art in a different way,” notes Becker, “as beautiful pieces of art that are also valid statements about the cultural changes that America has seen throughout the years.”