Remember the iPhone, the smaller version of the iPad? In this amusing typographic exercise, five hundred and forty of its bajillion apps have been color-coordinated to form the alphabet.

Did you realize that a score of classic (and some not-so-classic) MGM films can be purchased on a burn-on-demand basis as of right now? The so-called “MGM Limited Collection” is available at this Amazon.com page. This seems like a fairly noteworthy innovation, though I’ve heard very little about it. That this collection brings back to light some obscure and little-seen films is a good thing, but unfortunately, the on-demand nature of the selection seems to preclude any of these movies from being rentable at Netflix or other sources.

Pursuant to my newly acquired, casual interest in “Lost,” I felt I should at least make note of this thoroughly great set of drawings by illustrator Michael Blaine Myers Jr. for a hypothetical Saturday morning cartoon-style version of everyone’s favorite island mystery drama. See the full gallery here.

The type site MyFonts poses questions to the man behind the Greek type foundry Parachute, and the creator of the wonderful formal script typeface Champion Script Pro. Big surprise: I very rarely find myself in need of the rich flourishes of a formal script face, but in the event that I ever do, Champion Script Pro would be at the top of my list; it’s gorgeous. Read the full interview.

An unfortunate loss for a great newspaper. Porter has at least two distinctions of which he can be very proud: first, he was responsible for the stunning and justly praised redesign of the printed newspaper in 2005; and second, he rolled up his sleeves and with great humility and earnestness learned how to design for the Web in order to helm the design direction of Guardian.co.uk for the past several years. Under his direction, that site has been a continual source of inspiration to me, and it’s still well worth studying for anyone interested in publishing design. For my money, he may have made one of the most successful transitions to the digital medium of any print designer ever; there are scant few print-trained designers of any caliber who can match his canny grasp of what it means to design for the new century.

Read the full farewell note here.

Not a British fan society for SixApart’s flagship blog engine, but rather a clearing house for completely free typefaces available for download. At first glance, I was a little underwhelmed at the originality of the typefaces on offer, but at closer inspection they’re of commendably high quality. The first and most prominently displayed in their gallery, Matt McInerney’s Raleway, shown below, is quite nice on its own and quite amazing when you consider that it costs a total of none dollars. See the whole collection here.

Thanks to Gong Szeto for the link.

Writing for Fast Company, design journalist Alissa Walker argues: “Architects are the original interactive designers. They’re skilled at creating navigable structures. They specialize in designing rich experiences for their users. But if architects designed their buildings the way they designed their Web sites, they’d all fall apart.”

I might say that the truth is that architects design sites that fall apart because they can’t design buildings that fall apart — and that they secretly yearn to do just that. Well, they don’t yearn to make unstable structures, but they do yearn to indluge their more fanciful ideas about spaces (albeit virtual spaces) free of the constraints of making them physically accommodating to real people. The Web is their opportunity to do just that, partly because a lot of these architects, in my estimation, just don’t take the Web that seriously, or at least seriously enough to really understand it before building for it. Read the full article here.

Nothing to do with MessagePads, but rather a clever hack in the form of a benign virus or screen saver that subjects all of the elements on your screen — icons, menus — to the forces of gravity, as if they were physical objects. The brief demonstration video explains it much better than I can. Via Creative Review.

A project dedicated to visually dissecting the Fab Four’s historical data. “These visualizations are part of an extensive study of the music of the Beatles. Many of the diagrams and charts are based on secondary sources, including but not limited to sales statistics, biographies, recording session notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings.” Some of the work is quite beautiful and, like an increasingly large portion of information graphics these days, quite useless, too. Also see the Flickr group. Via Information Aesthetics.

Starting last autumn, BBC Creative Director Ben Gammon led a global rebranding of the Beeb’s digital products, enlisting the help of Neville Brody’s Research Studios along the way. The effort was ambitious and the results are quite handsome; this post goes into quite a bit of detail about what they produced and give some insight into the challenges of undertaking such a massive exercise in digital branding. Truly worth a look. (Also, you can download the manual to peruse in greater detail.) Thanks to Nedward.org for the link.