This cover for the second record from Swedish chanteuse Frida Hyvönen really shouldn’t work. The comically wild typesetting for the word “wild,” the bland inset layout, the histrionic equine imagery, the leopard print… nearly everything about it offends my sensibilities. And yet I think it’s really something amazing, a piece of design that transcends pretension and slips into ‘art’ without fuss. I want it blown up big and framed on my wall. And the music is good, too.

The renowned type foundry discusses their Girard, their new typeface and product line based on the work of modernist master Alexander Girard.

Henry Sene Yee reveals the creative process he went through to arrive at an appropriate cover image for this account of the 1999 shooting tragedy in Littleton, Colorado. Along the way, he includes and discusses the rejected covers.

A surprisingly detailed post about every child’s favorite coloring tools, including — somewhat insanely — hexadecimal and RGB values for each color. Because you needed that. Via Kottke.org.

These camouflaged stickers were placed on sidewalks so that they would stick to the soles of unsuspecting pedestrians’ shoes. The randomness and ease with which passersby picked up the stickers simulates an accidental tripping of a landmine — without the destructiveness, obviously. The copywriting could be a little gentler, but overall it’s a smart idea. Via Capn Design.

Animated primer on how the credit markets blew up by Jonathan Jarvis. “This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.”

There are a lot of interesting ideas that I heard at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival that I’m still turning over in my head even now, a week after the conference ended. But silly as it may seem, the one thing I really can’t stop thinking about is how bad the conference schedule, map and badges were this year.

I don’t mean to impugn the hard work that went into designing and producing those printed collateral items, or to underestimate the crazy logistics and coordination that must have been necessary to get them written, designed, printed and into conference-goers’ hands on time. Nevertheless, I found them basically unusable. They were awkwardly sized and awkwardly conceived; once you decoded the hard-to-read sessions schedule, for instance, you’d have to refer to a map that failed to carry over any recognizable color-coding — and was printed upside-down. I’m sure my blood pressure went up a bit every time I had to refer to them.

Actually I find the name a little snotty, because some of the paintings are really kind of wonderful.

Fun fact: page A20 of today’s New York Times features an illustration that I did for the letters column. It’s my first illustration to appear in the paper — not that I really consider myself an illustrator, but I did study the trade at art school, so I’m pretty happy when I can provide some resolution to those hopeful early years of dreaming about appearing in the Times. This piece accompanies reader letters responding to an article that ran on 18 Mar about jurors triggering mistrials through unauthorized use of search and social media. It’s a simple idea executed as simply as I could manage.

If you’re considering adopting a dog anytime in the foreseeable future, you might consider helping to counteract a terrible trend at animal shelters: large dogs with black coats, when given up for adoption, are euthanized at a much higher rate than smaller or fairer-coated dogs, essentially because the public have an irrational fear of them.

“‘Please don’t overlook our black dogs,’ rescue groups pleaded on their home pages above pictures of Rottweilers, Chows and Labs sporting bright bandannas. One shelter’s website just came right out with the grim truth: ‘The general public is not aware of how doomed black dogs are when they are brought to a pound.’…

“Most black dogs have to rely on shelter staff and volunteers to steer potential adopters their way. And indeed, many shelters take extra steps to make black dogs more adoptable, according to Kate Pullen, director of animal sheltering issues at the Humane Society of the United States in Washington, D.C. Teaching the dogs tricks, putting placards on kennels highlighting the dog’s personality (‘I may just be a black dog, but I know how to balance a biscuit on my nose.’), making sure multiple black dogs aren’t kenneled next to one other — anything to catch the eye and imagination of potential adopters.

“‘I’ve had to turn away many black dogs because I can’t fill the place up with them,’ says Jill Wimmer, shelter manager at PAWS Atlanta, that city’s oldest and largest no-kill shelter.’ And every one I turned away had a great temperament.”

Sorry, just a little bit of off-topic editorializing there.

Oof, I’m embarrassingly late on posting about this: English-born, Barcelona-based illustrator Patrick Thomas will be featured in a one-man exhibition at The New York Times building here in New York City.

This is something that is going to happen very soon. And when you see me say “very soon” in this context, you should read that as “The show’s opening reception is tonight, at 7:00 PM, hors d’œuvres served.” So if you’re here in the city and have a penchant for gorgeously screened, conceptually challenging graphic design as commentary, you should R.S.V.P. and come on by, meet the artist and mingle a bit with the Times art department. I’ll be there.

Noted designer Cameron Moll examines the would-be alternative to the sIFR Web typography technique and reports on its relative merits. “I personally see Cufón as a good interim step between sIFR and @font-face.” However, Moll notes some nontrivial drawbacks, including Cufón’s inability to allow text selection and the lack of a hover state.

Photographer Matt Siber’s two series of gently manipulated photographs transform the very tall roadway signage found in the Mid-west into eerily beautiful commentaries on advertising. “Elimination of the support structure in the photographs allows the signs to literally float above the earth. In some cases the ground is purposefully left out of the image to further emphasize the disconnect between the corporate symbols and terra firma.” Be sure to see both the first and the second series.

Terrific idea: this utility puts five days’ of weather forecasts right into iCal. However, I’d like a little more detail than the topline it seems to provide.

Emily Gordon exposes the truth. (Correction: this post was written by Martin Schneider.)

I’ve learned my lesson when it comes to the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. When I first started attending, five years ago, the conference was more than just a critical gathering for everything webby; it also drew considerable power from its intimate scale, from the way it provided an environment in which people normally separated by the far reaches of the Internet could meet and interact on a very human level.

Last year, owing to a hectic travel schedule and personal obligations, I was forced to skip the festival. But secretly, I was somewhat glad to have stayed home. SXSW Interactive had grown so large in the prior year that I worried it might have outgrown its usefulness. My last time attending, the crowds had been bigger than I’d ever seen before, causing the session rooms to be spaced at awkwardly and frustratingly opposing ends of the Austin Convention Center. I couldn’t imagine that the intimacy I found so valuable would survive the ever-growing crowds, and I remember returning from Austin exhausted and feeling as if the book had closed on something special but already receding into the past.

A few dozen, death-defying examples of the illustrator’s custom hand-lettering.

Clever concept for a browser-based sticky post from Jack Cheng

Simple, elegant, browser-based tool for viewing front pages (the printed ones) from newspapers around the world.

In this installment of Breakfast At Sulimay’s, a Web video series in which three senior citizens listen to and critique contemporary music, the Animal Collective track “My Girl” gets the once over. “This group is not gonna get very far…”

I’m completely unqualified to objectively judge director Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of “Watchmen” because, between the ages of fifteen and sixteen, I formed a lasting and surely prejudicing bond with the original Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons comic books. While most of my schoolmates were preoccupied with less insular pursuits, I paid good teenage cash for each issue of the mini-series as it was published, rapturously devouring each chapter and patiently, faithfully enduring the long publishing delays that beset the series between chapters.

In spite of all the growing up I’ve done since, all the revelations and disillusions that I’ve been through, I’ve never lost an ounce of admiration or affection for the “Watchmen” story or its characters. For twenty-plus years, I’ve considered it one of the most thrilling, satisfying experiences I’ve had with popular art; it’s still among the best things I’ve ever read.

This then predisposed me to an approving regard for the movie before even taking my seat in the theater last night; as long as what followed was minimally half-good, competent and moderately intelligent, I was sure to be pleased. As it turns out, I enjoyed it not just a little but ecstatically, too. I found it utterly engrossing if glaringly imperfect, and surprisingly smart if heavily grandiose.

“Comics have finally joined the mainstream… And today The Times introduces three separate lists of the best-selling graphic books in the country: hardcover, softcover, and manga.” Geeky but extraordinary.

Cochran’s wonderfully raw, vaguely Ben Shahn-esque drawing style is a wonderful complement to John Huston’s 1972 movie. Of particular interest here are the concept drawings that he shows; they’re beautiful in and of themselves, but offer such a fascinating if brief insight into the creative process.

Let’s say you’re one of the many people out there for whom the current dissatisfactory state of RSS readers effectively prevents you from using this site’s feed to keep up with what I write here at Subtraction.com. Or, let’s say my rather erratic publishing habits — sometimes several times a day, and other times not for days on end — make it difficult for you to remember to tune in on a regular basis. Well, have I got the solution for you.

For several months now I’ve been testing a new feature over at the just plain cute MailChimp service that they call RSS-to-Email Newsletter; which does exactly what the name implies — automagically convert what I publish on this blog into email form. And now it’s finally ready for the public.

A fascinating exploration of the origins, challenges and evolution of these seminal information graphics from two major urban transit systems. Having employed modern mapping abstraction to great effect in London, the designer Harry Beck was hired to do the same for Paris. His final submitted version was ultimately rejected, in part because it was too evocative of the London map — or not distinctly Parisian enough. But after decades of additional design revision, the current Paris Metro map is essentially the same as what Beck designed.

The design and letterpress blog of Studio on Fire, a letterpress printer based in Minneapolis. Full of rapturous, close-up photography of luxuriously printed letterheads, business cards and other samples. For those who fetishize the tactile quality of letterforms and shapes pressed deeply into thick, fibrous papers, this could be NSFW.

For those looking to self-publish their literary opus, brief reviews of BookLocker, Lulu, iUniverse, BookSurge and DogEar Publishing.

It’s probably unrealistic to expect to ever find the perfect RSS reader for my own feed consumption habits, but boy is it frustrating that I can’t. I’ve been looking for years, trying every solution I can get my hands on. But compared to the feed management tools that were available as long as five years ago, it feels as if there’s been only incremental progress.

This is at least partly due to the essentially non-industrial nature of RSS reading. Whether you’re a casual RSS consumer or an expert, the majority of feed consumption does not directly produce income or revenue for the consumer. Rather, it’s an activity that’s highly personal in nature, and so naturally subject to a greater variety of individual whims and preferences than, say, word processing. This is why we have RSS functionality in so many different forms: as dedicated desktop clients, embedded in email clients, grafted onto browsers, bundled up as widgets and remotely rendered as Web applications. Not inappropriately, there’s no consensus on how to use this stuff.