Whether France’s proposed Photoshop retouching notification law is a valuable idea in the interest of the public good or a misguided example of government overreaching, I can’t say. But I’m pretty sure that it’s a debate worth having. In case you hadn’t heard, earlier this month fifty politicians put a law in front of French parliament under which digitally manipulated images would bear the somewhat rueful label “Retouched photograph aimed at changing a person’s physical appearance.” The goal is essentially one of public health and consumer expectation: don’t try looking like this at home.

The creator of “Ren & Stimpy” and an unsparing critic of substandard animation takes on last weekend’s box office champion. Even if you have no interest in this minor children’s movie, this review is notable as a fascinating look inside an animator’s brain. Kricfalusi views “Meatballs” through a real craftsman’s lens, revealing much about what makes for ambitious animation. And he casts a cold eye on how the prevalence of mediocre cartoons has lowered our standards.

“I would give this an even zero — which is leagues ahead of any other animated feature today. Most cartoon features are thousands of points in the negative.

“It’s not like the old days, where cartoons were expected to be entertaining. In the 1940s you might rate cartoons between 50% and 100%, because they had higher entertainment standards to begin with. Even a Terrytoons has some entertainment value — because it’s not purposely trying not to, unlike modern animation.”

A sad loss. Fuchs was one of the defining voices in mid-20th century illustration, synthesizing abstraction, realism and commercialism in a manner uniquely suited to the character of American life. Obituary at The Washington Post, and see some examples of his work in this Flickr set.

Update: As is to be expected, Steve Heller offers the definitive obituary in The New York Times.

An eye-opening look at how our insatiable demand for gadgets, and our inattention to their power consumption, have dramatically increased demand for electricity. “The proliferation of personal computers, iPods, cellphones, game consoles and all the rest amounts to the fastest-growing source of power demand in the world. Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980… [the nation’s gaming consoles] now use about the same amount of electricity each year as San Diego, the ninth-largest city in country.” Ouch.

“I think it’s indicative of a VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation. I don’t know the full backstory, but I’d bet this sale was encouraged by a Mint investor… But here’s what happened: Intuit, last decade’s leader in personal finance, just became the next decade’s leader in personal finance. Mint had their number, but they sold it for US$170 million.”

As a Yankees fan, I should say that the fact that I’m posting this is not intended as schadenfreude, because I honestly have nothing against the Metropolitans. I only wanted to point out how devastatingly Sean Engelhardt’s well-executed information graphic paints a portrait of a disastrous season — I mean just look at those long swaths of red and the big names next to them. And that’s without even including visual data for their abysmal won/loss record. Though maybe that omission is for the best.

The cover story for the September 2009 issue of Wired takes a look at the current state of Craigslist and the challenges it faces as it continues to evolve. In a sidebar, the magazine’s amazing art director Scott Dadich invited several designers to re-imagine and redesign Craigslist itself.

In addition to inviting contributions from SimpleScott, who was the former design director at BarackObama.com, Matt Wiley of Studio8 Design, and Luke Hayman and Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram, Scott was kind enough to ask me for my take as well, and I leapt at the chance. I conscripted two colleagues from my design team at NYTimes.com to help me: Anh Dang who provided an invaluable sounding board for the information architecture and interaction design, and Paul Lau, who helped turn around the visual design literally over a weekend. You’ll see the mock-ups we submitted on page 104 of the magazine or, here at this link.

A magazine sidebar of course has a finite amount of space in which to show and explain the ideas that went into this design. Thankfully, someone invented blogging, which is not similarly space deprived — and so I shall now use the medium to indulge myself accordingly. Here, then, is a closer look at the mock-ups we submitted.

“…an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.  We do this because we believe that any data that you create in (or import into) a product is your own. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to ‘liberate’ their products.”

Notepads shaped like an iPhone and pre-printed with an iPhone bezel design, ideal for sketching up app ideas. Pretty clever idea from my friends at Inventive Labs and The Jacky Winter Group in Australia.

Writing in Chicago Lawyer Magazine, two attorneys raise serious questions about the accuracy of the definitive book on the Black Sox scandal: “The lack of supporting information in [the author’s] meticulously indexed notes suggests that the book may not be much more than fiction, or, at the very most, a summary of inflated press accounts.” Though the book was published decades after the fact it is historically critical to the details of this scandal because it forever cemented the eight team members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox as cheaters, and inspired the 1988 movie “Eight Men Out.”

An unexpected look at the design of passageways in a somewhat random selection of science fiction movies from the past several decades. While entertaining, this smart, brief write-up only whets your appetite for a more in-depth look at the subject. Via Daring Fireball.