Tag Savage is a lucky person, because he has friends caring and ingenious enough to cook up this remarkable birthday present: a hardbound book full of 365 portraits of Tag commissioned via Mechanical Turk.

The project was apparently spearheaded by David Cole, who blogged about it here. There’s an online gallery of the portraits here.

Apple collector and mobile technologist Jonathan Zufi is assembling a collection of beautifully-shot photographs from 35 years of Apple products. Even though the site seems to have just gotten started, his aim, apparently, is to have shots of everything Apple has released. Here’s a wonderful detail shot from a PowerBook model that I owned a decade ago:

If he succeeds in building this out as a more or less complete repository of these kinds of images, this will be a wonderful resource. You can explore what’s there currently over at Shrine of Apple.

Steve Jobs famously said about iPad competitors that “If you see a stylus, they blew it,” alluding to his own belief that pen-based computing is a non-starter for the vast majority of users. Longstanding pen-and-tablet hardware manufacturer Wacom has a new product called Inkling (not to be confused with the textbook app platform) that suggests perhaps that computer-based pens might do better.

Inkling is a combination of a proprietary pen and a sensor that clips onto the top of any sheet of paper. The pen is used like any other pen (it’s even filled with ink) and the sensor captures the marks and strokes in digital form. When the drawing is complete, the user hooks up the sensor to the computer (inelegantly, a USB cable is required), the strokes can be translated into raster or vector art. The high-production value demonstration video makes it look very smooth, though videos like this always do. If the final, shipping product is able to produce faithfully rendered vector files, though, I’ll be impressed, even if I remain skeptical that this product really makes much sense for many people. Inkling ships in September so we’ll see. Find out more here.

Even though director Robert Altman is one of my favorite filmmakers — I wrote a little about him five years ago in this post — I wasn’t crazy for every single one of his works. His 1977 film “3 Women,” for instance, is one of the harder to parse entries in his canon. I came across this movie poster for it today:

What an amazing, visually lyrical, yet fully enigmatic poster. Like the movie, it demands closer inspection, even if it’s withholding in what it’s willing to reveal about the plot or even the damn point of the film. It’s true that “3 Women” wasn’t my favorite Altman film, but I’m glad I saw it, and I’m glad it was made, and this poster is a brilliant complement to it. I can’t imagine any contemporary film — even an independent one — being promoted with a poster like this in today’s film climate, just as I can’t imagine a movie like “3 Women” being made today.

Dan Hipp’s extraordinarily lively illustrations are borne of some mash-up universe in which comics, sci-fi and action-adventure fiction have both been flipped over on their backs, only to reveal their shockingly adorable undersides. Here’s an example in which everyone’s favorite boy reporter, Tin Tin wanders into Alien territory.

Hipp has tons of similarly playful and resoundingly vibrant works throughout this blog. Looking through them all, it becomes apparent that his is a talent that is truly only possible in this digital century, in which ideas can’t help but cross-fertilize, breaking the boundaries of franchises and intellectual property, and resulting in such agreeable end products. Check it all out here.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia-based illustrator Tang Yau Hoong is a master of warping negative-space to create surprising pictorial illusions.

Some of his work recalls the brainy, minimalistic surrealism of Guy Billout, of whom I’m a huge fan. This similarity is true occasionally in Tang’s style but more often in the sheer wit of the work. See his full portfolio here.

My friend Anil Dash is smart and eloquent and capable of writing blog posts that floor you with their insight and their almost pitch perfect understanding of the form. You can explore the entirety of Dashes.com to enjoy them all, but his most recent entry, published just today, has got to be some kind of high-water mark.

Anil argues that the single greatest entrepreneur of our time is a living refutation of the oft-touted conservative fallacy and propagandistic line that liberal values are bad for business. In fact, this individual personifies the successful realization of liberalism. I tried to choose an excerpt to quote here, but the whole thing is so good, it demands to be read in its entirety.

One of the things I like in imagery — photographic or graphic — is when an artist or a curator is able to capture the quietude hidden within moments of great activity. This is why I like photographer Carli Davidson’s shots of pets shaking their heads so much, and why I can’t stop talking about John Hilgart’s 4CP project. These bodies of work unearth the fleeting elegance buried in unexpected places and demonstrate that the more closely we look at things, the more likely we’ll see beauty.

This is also why I’m crazy for Space Trek an image blog that finds great, unexpected moments of quietude in the original “Star Trek” television show from the late 1960s. Here’s one example:

Space Trek’s purpose is to show us “The quiet despair of the Starship Enterprise,” and it does this by highlighting the transitional moments from the television show that we normally don’t pay much attention to. Each screen capture is like a little portrait of the show’s flimsily makeshift architecture and sickly technicolor lighting. They remind me how eerie the show felt to me when I saw it for the first time, in endless reruns, as a kid. The show was not just fantastic, it was strange and somewhat off, almost unseemly in its otherworldliness. That’s something that seems to have been lost in nearly every reboot of the franchise since. Anyway, Space Trek is worth a look; see it here.

A great gallery of photographer Carli Davidson’s shots of pets caught as they shake their heads.

It’s no secret that I’m a dog person, so of course I find these adorable, even the shots that completely distort the animal’s face. But what I really like about these images is the way they capture something hidden but that’s been right out there in the open forever, until technology came along and allowed us to see it. See the full gallery here.

An entertaining blog of vintage paperbacks — of the seedy variety that once allowed commuters and housewives to safely dive into the racier parts of mid-20th century Americana. Adhering to the dictum that one should not judge a book by its cover, blogger Rex Parker provides details on the plot, tone and unintentionally hilarious details of the book — he even posts back covers.

Part of the blog’s purpose seems to be to create a sales catalog for Parker’s collection of these paperbacks, as he lists prices with each post. The net effect, though, is that Pop Sensation is a rich trove of specimens from the tradition of truly commercial art. This is not high-minded design or illustration; this is down and dirty commercial work intended to titillate and rack up sales. Nevertheless, lots of these samples are fantastic works.

On a sideways note, the paperback featured here in the upper right is an early edition of what eventually became one of the strangest — and best — film noirs of all time, “Kiss Me Deadly,” which was recently re-released by Criterion. It’s a cynical and surprisingly satirical take on the detective genre, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring a captivatingly vain Ralph Meeker. Its ending, which had been mysteriously hacked by unknown hands, also inadvertently served as a critical bit of inspiration for a very different school of filmmaking. Read more about that here, or peruse the rich Pop Sensation archives here.

Would-be graffiti artists too timid to actually break the law can make use of this new iPhone app from the U.K.’s Channel 4, which lets anyone tag any real world location via augmented reality. The virtual tags are then available for viewing by anyone else running the app.

Read more over at Creative Review.

This thesis project from designer and technologist Frederic Brodbeck “is about measuring and visualizing movie data in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual ‘fingerprint’ for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.”

This is gorgeous work and much more thoughtful than most similar projects, too. But frankly I’m a little weary of infographics being applied to ‘unexpected’ subject matter. Yes, it’s visually amusing to see beautiful abstractions of the mundane, but not everything needs to be reductively interpreted into its most simplistically brainy-looking form. The world is not a dashboard nor does it really benefit from being portrayed as one; it’s more interesting than that.

See the whole project here.

Ghostery is a plug-in available for all major browsers that “gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, Web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.” It allows you to block or allow the many legitimate and not-so-legitimate tracking scripts, img tags and iframes embedded into Web pages of all sorts that are quietly collecting information about your browsing habits, interests and demographic information. I’ve used Ghostery in the past but was pleasantly surprised to see recently that it’s been polished up significantly and made much more user-friendly. It also has a great name. Download it here.

I try not to overdo it here with the super-hero stuff, but this I had to write about. Forbes reports on the reaction to Marvel’s recent — and typically gimmicky — decision to “kill” Spider-Man’s longtime alter ego Peter Parker and replace him with Miles Morales, a young kid whose ethnic heritage is half-black, half-Hispanic.

The article points to this post at I’m Not Racist But… which captures some of the public reaction to this decision. It’s not pretty.

Notwithstanding the fact that when comic book publishers sentence major characters like these to death, they never stay dead and they always return in some form, I think any furor over this is ridiculous. First, the original Spider-Man was a kid from Queens, New York, and it makes all the sense in the world that a kid from Queens, New York, circa 2011 would be half-black and half-Hispanic. Second, the beauty of these characters is that we get to constantly reinvent their origins in new and interesting ways. This may not be a great example of pop reinvention, but it’s a perfectly legitimate one.

Read the full article here.

Writer Sam Adams has an interesting perspective on Netflix’s recent rate hikes and the unintended consequences of pushing users away from discs-by-mail and towards streaming.

“As critic and historian Dave Kehr is often moved to point out, the prevailing myth that ‘everything is on DVD’ is hilariously wrong. Every time a new technology takes over, a chunk of film history gets left behind. Movies that were mainstays of undergraduate film classes have been marginalized as colleges and universities zero out rental budgets and build new classrooms that only allow for projection from digital sources.”

I actually don’t quite agree that some film history is lost “every time” there’s a technological shift, or at least I don’t agree that it’s quite that simple. The advent of home video resulted in an explosion of movie availability, and I have greater access to films today than ever before. But it’s also true that not every film on a reel made it to VHS, and not every one of those made it to DVD, etc. In this argument, it’s important to weigh the benefits of availability as well as the lost inventory.

Still, I think Adams is essentially correct in his assertion that with this specific shift, from discs to on demand services, there is a very real danger of losing a nontrivial subset of the films once available on disc. As he argues:

“The services offering access to a bottomless library of content continue to multiply, but for myriad reasons ranging from licensing restrictions to tangled chains of custody, these services are critically flawed.”

It seems inevitable that most of our entertainment media will soon be accessed primarily via subscription or via on demand purchases — via Netflix, Spotify and Kindle — and that it’s not a safe bet to assume that everything that was available to us in physical form will be available to us as bits.

Read full article here.

A great, fun poster from designer and illustrator Robert Ball that showcases fifty famous film villains.

He was selling prints, but unfortunately they’re sold out for now. Get a closer look at the art, and a key to who’s who, at Ball’s Web site.

The New York Times reports that of all of Condé Nast’s many splashy iPad magazine apps the relatively boring New Yorker is its most successful. It now boasts about 100,000 readers, 20,000 of whom bought annual subscriptions.

“…The figures are the highest of any iPad edition sold by Condé Nast, which also publishes Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamour and others on the Apple tablet… The New Yorker, a magazine that has always been heavy on text, took a different tack from its peers. Instead of loading its iPad app with interactive features, the magazine focused on presenting its articles in a clean, readable format.”

This is part of the strategy that I’ve been advocating for in my various critiques of Condé’s approach to the iPad. In short, the best way to serve a reading audience is to focus on providing a terrific reading experience and to de-emphasize the showy, buggy and difficult-to-use extras that have become synonymous with the ‘iPad magazine app’ format. And in fact, I’m a regular user of The New Yorker app, especially while traveling, because it gives me reasonably unfettered access to the only thing I’m seriously interested in: the text.

None of which is to say, though, that The New Yorker app is anywhere close to perfect. First, it could use a code refresh as it crashes so frequently as to be unusable; in my recent experience all it takes to induce it to unexpectedly quit is to launch it and let it alone for five to ten seconds.

Second, selling 20,000 paid subscriptions is fantastic, but according to the Times as many as 75,000 of the app’s customers are, like myself, originally subscribers to the print edition. So in fact the majority of customers do not represent an expansion of the market at all. None of these numbers are to be sneezed at, of course, and even transitioning a print subscriber to the digital edition can be counted as a kind of win. But it strikes me that the whole lot of customers would be better served with an HTML5-powered app, rather than the current native app. That way, it would be significantly cheaper to service those 100,000 users and significantly easier to keep it from crashing so much.

Read the full Times article here.