“The world’s US$71 billion battery market, once an old-tech backwater, is becoming a hothouse for innovation. The flow of U.S. venture-capital dollars into battery development has grown from US$4.3 million in 2002 to more than US$200 million this year, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.”

For folks my age, I bet you get a nostalgic feeling of delight when you see this new shirt from Chris Glass and his cohorts over at Wire & Twine.

Oh, and while you’re over there, take note that my Subtraction.com tee-shirts are still available, including the ever-popular Hel-F’ing-Vetica design. They make for excellent holiday presents.

In general I’m not a fan of the ongoing public radio series “This I Believe,” finding it too precious. And the transcript for this installment from Brian Eno, which extolls the virtues of singing as a socially valuable activity, reads a little more stuffy than suits my taste. But the spoken version of the essay, not to mention the idea, is disarmingly profound:

“When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue…

“So I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.”

The noted typographer muses on the deep past and uncertain future of screen typography’s atomic unit. “It’s likely that the pixel’s final and most enduring role will be a shabby one, serving as an out-of-touch visual cliché to connote ‘the digital age.’”

Portfolio for a French graphic designer and illustrator. Very sharp, very of-the-moment work for culture and luxury clients.

This picture collage in particular really struck my fancy. Via SeptemberIndustry.

It’s so great when a developer creates a piece of software that matches precisely a feature that I’ve been wanting for years. This is the case with George Brocklehurst’s compactly executed and altogether wonderful utility Choosy, for Mac OS X. Once installed, it effectively intercepts your clicks on Web links from non-browser applications — Mail, Word, iChat, whatever — and displays a menu of available browsers that you can ‘send’ the link to.

Incredibly handy for people who use multiple browsers regularly — people like me and you, too, I’m guessing.

Starkly quiet architectural imagery. Not recommended for manic depressives. Via AisleOne.

Two radio dramas that I had no idea existed; one by Joel and Ethan Coen, the other by Charlie Kaufman. Both aired on Sirius Satellite Radio three years ago.

Cute, simple tagline: “Twitter + history. And that’s really it.” In reality, just slightly more robust than that: this new service grabs your tweets and formats them as a subscribe-able calendar file that plays nice with iCal, Google calendar, etc. It’s clever, but if there’s a business model in there, I can’t see it. Via John Niedermeyer.

Fearing that the traditional mode of narrative storytelling is increasingly at risk from disruptive new technologies, the Media Lab at M.I.T. is looking at the problem more closely. This article includes quotes from Bob Farrelly (of the Farrelly brothers):

“‘If you go off the beaten path, say, give them something bittersweet, they’re going to tell you they’re disappointed,’ Mr. Farrelly said. He spoke from his home in Massachusetts, where he is working on the script for a Three Stooges picture, and said he missed complex stories like that of ‘The Graduate.’“ Hilarious bit of irony there.

Fresh out of the gate, a new site dedicated to the review of design-related books.

In a tradition of endless repackagings of Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories and novels, it’s probably fair to say that this is the most aesthetically sophisticated. Certainly the fancy-pantsiest:

“Hyland created a cloth-covered hardback with cover imagery restricted to a silver foil-blocked image of Bond’s infamous Walther PPK… A subtle diamond pattern is debossed on to the boards, which combined with deep burgundy endpapers evokes the discerning elegance of Bond’s world. An embossed manila bellyband with typewritten cover information on the label evokes the official documents of the period.”

Appears to be available only in the U.K.; American customers must abide with this plebeian, retro-minded edition.

“All in all, it is, once again, a pitifully bad installation experience. Adobe’s engineers have not learned any lessons from the experience with previous versions. And I suspect that the experience with incremental updaters for CS4 is going to be just as bad as it was with previous versions… Just what will it take for them to address this?”

“CRW’s management has a longstanding, international experience in the risk consulting sector.” Um, yeah, whatever. All I know is the design for this site is superb. The unexpectedly bold navigational roll-overs are fantastic, and the hand-drawn underscores balance the modernist coldness aptly. Via Mike Rundle.

Art exhibition opening tomorrow night at Pierogi 2000 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “Working with laser cut museum board and materials typical to architectural model making, Joel Stoehr has created a sculpture inspired by New York City entitled ‘Tower of Babel.’”

If you find intricately built models strangely satisfying, this show looks worth the trip to the gallery. Via Manhattan Users Guide.

“We’ve scientifically determined the maximum amount of time that you should need to make a layout work in CSS: it’s 47 minutes. When your time is up, we’ll even give you the table code you need.” Nine months late on this link, but then again it would’ve been funnier a few years ago anyway.

Hand-crafted, three-dimensional rendering of the famous interface. Pretty charming.

Video preview of a first-person “painting game” set in an abstract, featureless environment. Players must “splatter” black paint in order to make their way to their destination. No idea if the game play will be any good, but aesthetically it’s gorgeous:

Yes, I’m a sucker for black and white.

Your chance to weigh in, courtesy of Mr. Essl.

It’s remarkable how this politician has inspired the world of design: an enterprising freelance graphic designer created these twenty-four illustrations of President-Elect Barack Obama and packaged them as a TrueType font, free for download.

Just one of many forthcoming graphical immortalizations of this man, I’m guessing. Unless he disappoints in a major way.

“[The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center]’s work with IDEO comes as businesses increasingly tap the design world for fresh ideas on management. Some are struggling with new business models and unexpected rivals; others seek new approaches to old problems.” Heaven knows I hope this is in actuality a legitimate trend, but this article reads more like a press release from the remarkably effective IDEO publicity machine than accurate reporting. Not a single additional design firm is mentioned.

Though I’m not quite as enthusiastic about the design of the identity as a whole, I think this is probably one of the best new logos of the year.

Hinrichs is one of my design heroes. If you can find it, his regrettably out-of-print book “Typewise” is essentially a full year᾿s worth of an undergraduate typography course encapsulated into 160 pages.

Several series of airplanes and related imagery. Fans of big toys, you will enjoy these.

This has probably happened to you, too: the past two days, I’ve been taking election-related pictures, and whenever I’ve gotten shots that I think are really good or unique, I soon discover that plenty of other people have taken very similar shots. Well, the amazing Joe Holmes came up with this terrific shot and no one else has it. A gem.

Paul Schrynemakers talks to Lori Richmond, Design Director of Online Editorial, and Kristen Dudish, Online Designer for the cross-media wedding brand. It’s a nice interview, but I mostly wanted to point out how impressed I am that The Society of Publication Designers, an organization that could easily succumb to the misguided temptation of turning its nose up at digital media, is making a real effort to understand and engage digital audiences. Hats off, particularly, to Paul, who has been writing about Web sites extensively on the organization’s blog.

When grouped together, this trend of omitting the title and author from book covers and deferring to pictorial language for maximum impact seems more trivial than it really is. Several of them are fairly powerful designs though. What’s more, they can be thought of as a kind of response to the text-everywhere environment of digital media: there’s no competing with the Internet for the sheer abundance of words, so marketing the idea behind a book as being so powerful and engrossing that it needs no words is a fairly shrewd strategy. From The Book Design Review, which in case you’re not already reading it, is a very entertaining blog about packaging books.

I’m still having a hard time admitting to myself that Apple Mail is my primary RSS reader now, and that I hardly ever open NetNewsWire any more. Still, this new theme from Antonio Carusone, based on his excellent design blog AisleOne, is very well done and a joy to use.

As you head out to vote tomorrow, remember to bring along your digital camera to take snapshots of your polling place. Not just for posterity, but also so that you can contribute to this community-driven photojournalism project, which is a collaboration between William Drenttel, AIGA and The New York Times. Read more at Design Observer.

Wow, the preeminent design blog is five years old! Party this Wednesday night in New York City; come celebrate and/or drown your post-election sorrows.

Another increment of finer typographic control for the Web: an apparently effective, server-side plug-in for WordPress that enables elegant and automatic hyphenation of words. “The end result is text that can be jus­ti­fied with­out ghastly word spacing.” Supposedly works with left-aligned blocks of text, too. It’s a step forward, but it may not be the full step forward some might hope for. Unfortunately, I don’t use WordPress so I won’t have the opportunity to put it into practice.