Magic Potion

Ready for a visually stimulating autumn road trip? There’s always room for Jell-O -- specifically the Jell-O Gallery, located in Le Roy, New York, once home to General Foods’ Jell-O factory. Open every day through December 31, the Jell-O Gallery welcomes you to its website with, "If you haven't been to LeRoy recently, please do so!" and from there details what you can expect to see, including “a large new exhibit that reflects Bill Cosby's influence over 30 years.” And don’t miss the gift shop, which offers keepsakes such as Jell-O-emblazoned molds, thimbles, and, um, boxer shorts, although we're not sure what to make of this online description of them: "A great gift for the man in your life, or wear them as shorts (they don't have a fly)."

‘Tis the season for novelty typefaces, and we have just the thing to get you in the holiday spirit. Dafont.com offers freeware, shareware, and demo versions of more than 50 Halloween-themed fonts. We’re partial to pumpkins. From Tim Watkins comes Pumpkinese, which inserts jaunty script characters into solid black pumpkin shapes, while French designer Claude sketched more realistic pumpkins for Jack O. Punkins, Bumkins, and KR Pick a Pumpkin offer an array of jack-o-lantern dingbats. Blue Vinyl’s Trick or Treat also aims to please, with dingbats ranging from black cats and a bubbling cauldron to skulls and spiders. If it’s truly spooky symbols you’re looking for, try Dancing Dead, for which Mike Larsson created an uppercase alphabet backed by skeletons and a matching set of undead dingbats: skeletons in assorted poses.

While the iPhone isn’t yet available in a rainbow of colors, there’s an app for that! From color authority Pantone comes myPANTONE, now available for the iPhone or the iPod Touch, which allows users to capture, create, and share Pantone color palettes. On-the-go designers can snap an iPhone photo of whatever inspires them, use the app to instantly match the colors, and share their Pantone palettes in forms ranging from e-mailed color swatches to Facebook updates. Amaze your friends with your ability to identify 14-0848 Mimosa (Pantone’s 2009 “color of the year”) at fifty paces.

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.

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.

Symbols, logos, and a whole lot of multi-colored masking tape are the preferred media of Swiss artist Nic Hess. Among his latest projects is a sprawling four-part installation on the walls of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. On view through November 5, “Automatic Crash Response” is a warped game of Chutes and Ladders that mixes expertly applied masking tape, whimsical drawings, and out-of-context corporate identities (is that the Geico mascot or just a sassy lizard?) from the lobby to the exit that leads to the parking garage. It’s up to the viewer to figure out how the stylized eagle head of the United States Postal Service relates to a giant hog in a shopping cart, a water-skier, and the logos of recently failed banks, stacked like dominoes near the main staircase. When it comes time to take down his installations, Hess likes to keep the used tape, squashing it into densely packed, colorful balls. “I like the idea that they are really heavy and round,” he explained at a recent lecture at the museum. “Because for me, that’s like the implosion of the drawing and of of this industrial material.”