Chinese Food on Christmas

Here's a seasonally appropriate video for this week's show and tell post. It was shot in Baltimore by my friend Justin Beckenheimer and it stars another friend and ex-band member, Brandon Walker. It's hard not to love this clever Adam Sandler-esque song, but the video makes you love it even more (not to mention, I have a couple of cameos). Enjoy!

InfoGraphics

This poorly designed infographic is trying to use the top parts of the flagpoles to display the data, but because there is no axis for comparison, we are forced to read the labels. The labels are not placed in a way that correlates to the curve of the flagpoles, but we are lead to believe otherwise. All we end up taking away from this infographic (if we’re lucky) is what some of the state flags look like. I had no idea that West Virginia’s state flag had so much white space.

Leon is a restaurant that changes its menu based upon the seasonality of natural ingredients. With the mindset that nature doesn’t intend for us to eat out of season ingredients, Leon has created this seasonality chart to help people visualize the times when most certain ingredients are at their best. This information could have been placed into a boxy chart that is hard to follow, but Leon has made it into an interesting visual that grabbed my attention immediately and is easy for me to understand.

Save The Words!

Did you know that words are an endangered species? Just like giant pandas and black rhinos are slowly disappearing from our Earth, words are slowing disappearing from our vocabularies. The Oxford English Dictionary has already dropped thousands of words, and it is up to you to save the rest. Go to www.savethewords.org and adopt a word. You will be given the definition of your word and an example of it used properly in a sentence. Then it is up to you to use your word as much as you can. Write it on your hand. Use it as a pet name. Tattoo it on your face. Let your word replace your current Facebook name. Do whatever you can to save it from extinction. Don't let the extinction of words pessundate your abundant vocabulary, spread the word.

My adopted word

I pessundated the confetti party when I x-ed out the box.

Stop Motion Animation

Project four has me thinking about a video I saw a few years ago for the song "Her Morning Elegance" by Oren Lavie. While this piece is more of a music video and less of a narrative, it is still really interesting and well done. Check it out below.

Should Saturdays Really Be Sundays?

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but every single Saturday of the semester has been beautiful. It doesn't matter what the rest of the week has been like or will be, Saturday is always sunny and warm. Take a look at this week's forecast, for example.

I have come to the conclusion that it could tornado on Thursday, blizzard on Friday, but come Saturday the sun will be shining and the world will be still just in time for six hours of class inside of a building set to an automatic 30 degrees.

Oops! Packaging With A Story

The name of this playful wine is derived from a true story based on the Carmenère/Merlot grape mixup. "Following the migration of the Old World vineyards to the New World in the 1800's, the Carmenere grape was taken to and successfully grown in Chile. As Chilean Merlot became successful as a New World Wine it was discovered that the Carmenere grape had become mixed with the Merlot grape. The grapes were finally correctly identified, the 'big mistake' rectified and 'the lost grape of Bordeaux' rediscovered."

In addition to the cute headline, the rest of the label tells a shortened version of how Oops came to be. Their slogan "some mistakes were meant to happen" turns instance from negative to positive and makes light of the situation.

Wit-tea Packaging

Drinking tea is nothing new. In fact, tea is one of the world's oldest beverages, making it that much harder to market in new and exciting ways. Tea is one of the products I considered re-packaging for project five, but have decided against. However, when I googled "clever tea packaging", I did find some share-worthy ways that other people are marketing tea around the world. I present to you: Clever Teasigns (a series of pictures of cleverly designed tea)

Hanger Tea

OrigamTea

RoyalTea

StripTeas

DemocraTea

CigaretTea

SprouTea

DaredevilTea

T bag

Ticket Fail

Last night, a co-worker of mine asked if anyone wanted free tickets to a show. As soon as I saw them, I snatched them from her hand and said "I need those!". Little did she know, these tickets will go no farther than my scanner. I needed them because I felt obligated to share the with the world (aka our class) the most horrifyingly designed tickets EVER. If you are even able to figure out what this ticket is for, I applaud you. Let's take a closer look at this headache, shall we? I don't even know where to begin. Every time I try counting the number of fonts used, I lose track. Did you notice the stretched photo right next to the squashed photo? What about that skewed sports clipart image in the bottom left corner? Or maybe you noticed the overlapping text or the random capitalization of words. I could go on for a while, but I am seriously feeling nauseous. I kind of want to delete this from my blog now.

Narrative

My show and tell item for this week relates to my last post. I love "One Big Happy" comic strips and I found one that pokes fun at the use of photoshop for retouching images.

I love this because One Big Happy reminds me of my childhood and I will always adore it, but also because I'm usually interested in anything that involves photoshop and humor.

One Big Happy Bat Mitzvah

The Sunday mornings of my childhood were marked by pancakes and comics. As my dad sipped his coffee, I’d fumble through the sea of black and white paper until I spotted the few colorful pages that brightened my day. I used to read my least favorite comic strips first and save “One Big Happy” for the very end. My ability to relate to the character Ruthie and her hilariously naive view of the world made One Big Happy my favorite of the funnies. Unbeknownst to me, my Godfather knew One Big Happy’s cartoonist, Rick Detorie. Rick was so flattered by my love for his work that he drew me into one of his comics. The comic was published in the paper and the framed original (Wite-Out®marks and all) was presented to me as a gift for my 13^th birthday. Best. Bat Mitzvah. Ever.

Handmade Fonts

Handmadefont.com is a really awesome website that features a vast amount of incredibly unique fonts. The designs are created using everyday (and some not so everyday) materials. Handmade Font offers letters made up of almost anything, from caviar to beard hair. I've pulled out some of my favorites, but they are all so creative.

Scarf

Glaze

Sofa

Toast

Zipper

Paperclip

Chocolate