Artist Benjamin Lotan is offering a service where he can print a 20 x 40 in. poster of your Facebook friends’ avatars in a tidy grid on archival photo paper.

“The size of your friends’ photos are optimized to fill out the full space, so their dimensions will depend on the total number of friends you have. There are about 620 friends printed on the poster you see [below], but the code is optimized such that your poster will look fantastic whether you have 200 friends, or up to 2,200 friends.”

I’m not really much of a Facebook user but I think this is pretty neat in that it suggests that there will be interesting things that we can do within a social context where everyone is represented by a little photographic icon.

Find out more and buy one for yourself at PrintingFacebook.com.

I try hard not to just re-blog whatever John Gruber links to, but this one really deserves to be broadcast far and loud. Dating site OkCupid dug into their statistics (garnered from over 3 million users both straight and gay) to try and see if there are any truths to the stereotypes about gay sexual behavior. What results is highly readable and a remarkably calm and effective counter-argument to a raft of commonly held misconceptions. Also, it reaffirms for me the truth that politicians who use anti-gay rhetoric or who continue to oppose gay rights are on the wrong side of history.

Design student Joe Golike created this hypothetical festival of films by director Michael Mann for an assignment at the Academy of Art. The choice of Mann as the subject for this end-to-end identity design project was inspired in part by a blog post I wrote in 2009 about the director’s two most recent movies. Golike’s designed a whole slew of collateral including a poster, a catalog, schedules, DVD packaging, even a soundtrack. Be sure to see the process journal he created that describes the entirety of the project. Very nicely done.

See the project overview here.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t agree that Apple’s workhorse media application iTunes doesn’t need to be fixed. It’s slow, clunky and suffers by embodying a vision of how people manage and interact with their media that’s becoming more and more painfully antiquated every day. Over at Macworld Kirk McElhearn argues that what’s needed is a server version of the software, something that can centrally manage all of a household’s media. He sketches a picture of how such a device would work that’s logical but probably never going to happen — mostly because it’s disk-based. I’m pretty sure Apple has no further interest in helping people manage their media through the use of hard disks located in the home. The next truly significant revision of iTunes, whether in server form or not, will surely be in the cloud. Read the article here.

My good friends at Weightshift have just launched this real-world directory for designers and developers. Log in with your Dribbble or Github accounts and identify your location in New York, San Francsico or Chicago (more cities coming soon). It’s pretty neat to be able to see who is physically near you, neighborhood by neighborhood, and will be even more useful if it achieves critical mass. Nice idea. Check it out and register your location at Interhoods.org.

I thought this was interesting. Luke W. writes up some notes on a talk given last week in Chicago at the Design for Mobile conference by Dan Mauney, Director of Human Factors and Research at design consultancy HumanCentric. The subject was a study Mauney and his team did on what gestures forty people in nine different countries intuitively and comfortably use when interfacing with mobile devices. One point was particularly interesting to me:

“The study didn’t find see a lot of variability between experts and novices — move and zoom had the biggest variability.”

If true, that’s a world of difference from the paradigm of desktop computing. Hopefully Mauney will make his presentation available in full, but in the meantime you can read Luke’s notes here.

Happening in London at the Lucy Bell Gallery right now: a retrospective of the work of British photographer Brian Duffy, sometimes referred to as “The Man Who Shot the 60s.” Duffy captured indelible portraits of iconic figures and is responsible for the unforgettable “Aladdin Sane” image of David Bowie, among others. The amazing thing about his work is that, aside from the tell-tale fashions of the era in which he photographed, his compositions and sense of life remain remarkably fresh — many of them look like they were shot yesterday.

A beautiful cut of the classic typeface Franklin Gothic created by the Finnish company Suomi Type Foundry. Its almost excessively elegant details and availability in thin, light and ultra light weights are explained by the fact that it was originally commissioned by British Vogue, though the magazine ultimately never used it.

Their loss is your gain — the complete family is available for just US$200 from YouWorkForThem. A steal.

The design blog Grain Edit offers a quick write-up and some snapshots of the interior of “Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig” by Steven Heller and Lustig’s widow Elaine Lustig Cohen. I’ve been looking forward to this book since I first heard about the project, as there’s too little available about this Modernist master. However, Alvinlustig.com from my friends at Kind Company is a fantastic starting point. Read the full entry here.

Bassist Colin Greenwood pens a lengthy and very thoughtful reflection on the band’s experiences with the pay-what-you-like model under which their last album, “In Rainbows” was released, and how that experience informs their current thinking on ways to release its follow-up.

“Traditional marketplaces and media are feeling stale… and we are trying to find ways to put out our music that feel as good as the music itself. The ability to have a say in its release, through the new technologies, is the most empowering thing of all.”

It’s a very interesting essay on digital distribution from the vantage point of a content creator, albeit a highly privileged content creator. Definitely worth reading in its entirety here.

I’m not very forthcoming about my attitude towards Radiohead mostly because it doesn’t seem that interesting for one to declare that one is a fan of the band. But I’ll say: I can’t wait.