A revival of a wonderful typeface from the design master Milton Glaser. Looks completely at home in 2010.

Available for sale from You Work for Them .

Vahram Muratyan of Parisian design studio ViiiZ has been producing these terrific diptychs that contrast various aspects of Paris and New York. My father lives in Paris and so I go back and forth about twice a year, and so these visual observations strike me as charmingly canny.

See all the illustrations on his full blog here.

An audio interview (and transcript) with the former creative director at Digg who is now working on a gaming startup. By now it’s obvious to everyone that gaming is the next great frontier for user experience design. Burka has some interesting insights to offer on what this means for the field as a whole.

“I think the idea that Web applications are now becoming mature enough that we can start thinking about joy, and about surprise, and making a much more rounded experience than just one that’s usable, I think that’s really exciting… there are a lot of places we’re going to see game ideas put into applications in ways that we’re not going to see it and say, ‘Hey, that’s just like a game.’ So it’s going to be in much more subtle ways and much more disparate ways than building a full integrated game into an application.”

I think that’s exactly right. Read more here.

The author and mastermind of the whole Harry Potter universe uses plain old notebook paper and a ballpoint pen to develop the intricate plot structures of her books. Down the y-axis, she lists chapter numbers and a month-based chronology, and along the x-axis she lists various attributes of each chapter like title, events and even prophesies integral to each segment of the book.

I think this is fascinating and I’m so curious to know what other authors use similar, low-fidelity planning methods. Also, it goes to show that even in a multimedia age, most good ideas start with a pen and paper. More about the spreadsheets here.

Here’s another project that I’ve been involved with that went live this week — and this time I actually did some design work on it. Several months ago the awesome mailing list service MailChimp invited several designers to create premium templates for their paying customers. Aside from myself, there are designs from Jon Hicks, Veerle Pieters, Elliot Jay Stocks, Dan Rubin and several others. We each produced three templates: one for a newsletter, one for product announcements and one to promote an event. Here are two of mine:

Have a look at all of them here.

Here’s one of the several projects I’ve had my hands in over the past several months: the Design Observer iPhone app debuts this morning over on the App Store. The app lets users download a wealth of the world’s best design commentary on the go. I played a bit part in helping to guide the whole process, but the credit really goes to the good folks at Small Planet Digital in Brooklyn who designed and developed the app in conjunction with Betsy Vardell and (of course) Bill Drenttel over at Design Observer.

You can read more about it here or you can download the app on the App Store for the awesomely low, low price of free.

This 1987 James L. Brooks comedy is one of my favorite films of all time, and certainly one of the best movies about the news business ever made. It has a pitch perfect script loaded with hilarious, smart and memorable lines, not to mention three exceedingly fine performances from Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks and William Hurt. Criterion’s new, extras-laded, director-supervised restoration arrives on Blu-Ray and DVD in January (it would’ve surely been on my holiday list this year if it had been released this fall).

Find out more about the movie and pre-order it over at Criterion.com.

Australians and friends-of-the-blog Inventive Labs have just launched this awesome project: an HTML5 e-book reader that works on pretty much everything: iPhones, iPads, Kindle3s, even that antiquated technological mechanism known as a desktop Web browser.

Book.ish is based on the Monocle open source e-reader platform, meaning it requires no installation of any kind. Just point your browser there and start reading. You can even continue later whether you’re online or offline.

It’s pretty neat and will only get neater as more titles become available. Inventive Labs also have plans to build a publishing platform on top of Book.ish that will connect publishers and booksellers, so the potential is there for it to be more than just a reader but also a new distribution method for digital books. Read more and sample a handful of free books at Book.ish.

In 1981 animator Mike Patterson made this remarkable short student film in which thousands of hand-drawn cells were combined to create a distinctive animation style. Warner Brothers records hooked up the Norwegian pop trio A-Ha with Patterson, and together they created one of the earliest and most influential gems of the music video form. If you’re not familiar with the video I’m talking about, don’t worry. It was a long, long time ago. John Nack has the short film and a link to a BBC article here.

Along with Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug, I think my favorite running comic strip is Kaz’s Underworld, a sublimely disturbing series of riffs on classic cartoon tropes (strangely humanoid rodents, diminutive and bizarre sidekicks, and tough guys with balloon-like forearms, all engaged in short, almost banal slapstick gags) that makes you want to cry a little even while you’re laughing. Now Kaz has teamed up with The Comic Book Factory to produce a series of animated versions of his strips. There are eight of them so far and they’re entertaining enough to be worth a viewing (they’re each very brief). I have to admit though, as special as I think Underworld is, the effect of these is still a little like seeing most any other comic strip in animated form — it looks like the original, but it’s somehow less funny.

Watch all eight cartoons at mylittlefunny.com.