Illustrator Adam Sidwell is creating a new illustrated portrait of a (usually) fictional bad guy once a week. Some of my favorites include Tyler Durden and Locke from “Lost”. He’s also selling limited edition prints of the illustrations.

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A mathematician from Kent State University, an engineer at Google, a math teacher from Darmstadt, Germany, and a programmer from Palo Alto, California arrive at some definitive conclusions regarding the thirty-six year old Rubik’s Cube puzzle:

“With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik’s Cube, and shown that no position requires more than twenty moves… There are many different algorithms, varying in complexity and number of moves required, but those that can be memorized by a mortal typically require more than forty moves. One may suppose God would use a much more efficient algorithm, one that always uses the shortest sequence of moves; this is known as God’s Algorithm. The number of moves this algorithm would take in the worst case is called God’s Number. At long last, God’s Number has been shown to be 20.”

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A great blog from artist Cole Pierce, designer and Twitter pal o’ mine Able Parris, and my friend and former design colleague at The New York Times Jeremy Zilar that collects recordings of “sound from the field.” The Chicago Reader recently voted it “best amateur music blog” and describes it this way:

“That means several posts a day that range from performances of music by little-known contemporary composers to video of oddball circuit-bent instruments and elaborate mechanical ensembles that play themselves, along with the occasional dude-and-guitar clip or actual music video. The blog is ecumenical in its tastes, though it leans a little toward the electroacoustic and ambient — and there are absolutely no reposts of clubby remixes of popular indie bands.”

It’s a nice little project, plus it uses Robbie Manson’s nicely done Vignelli theme for Tumblr. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony that, just a day after I posted about Tumblr’s propensity for shallow identity that I’m citing two instances where that’s not the case.) Read the Chicago Reader write-up here or visit Field Mic here.

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A superficial but well-executed student project that plays with typography, architecture and vantage point. I like it.

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A handful of simple, beautifully designed and helpful primers on great typography — free for download.

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A reporter from Manhattan’s upper crust weekly interviewed me last week for this short article about my recent departure from The New York Times. Its contents will be mostly familiar to most readers of this blog, but then again Observer readers probably don’t read this blog.

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Photographer Peter Belanger took a picture of Apple’s new iPhone 4 with another iPhone 4. He also restricted himself to using only the output of the camera, with no retouching or Photoshop trickery, techniques almost invariably employed when shooting with more capable and more professional cameras. The result is impressive, though speaking from personal experience I find the camera inside the iPhone 4 to be challenging to control: if you have just the right shooting circumstances — or an aggressively managed lighting environment as Belanger does — it can of course produce remarkable images. But given more realistic and random lighting situations, I’ve only been able to produce mediocre pictures.

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The director of the excellent documentaries about design “Helvetica” and “Objectified” plans to complete his trilogy with a film about the design of cities. Alissa Walker writes:

“While ‘Urbanized’ will feature the signature superstar architects and city planners and politicians and commercial developers, Hustwit says he will also feature non-designers who have had a role in shaping their communities. ‘People take it for granted that they have to wait in traffic or that a certain part of the city will always be run-down,’ he says, noting that it’s those empowered citizens who often originate ‘really creative, modest but brilliant solutions.’ Hustwit stresses that ‘Urbanized’ will focus on getting people to understand that they can change their cities themselves.”

Read the full Fast Company exclusive here, or follow Hustwit’s progress over at the official site for the film.

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