I’m a sucker for this kind of mechanical illustration.

On Monday, Condé Nast shut down its fledgling business publication after just two years, due to a precipitous drop in advertising that magazines everywhere are experiencing. What’s amazing, though, is that the company could launch a print magazine as recently as two years ago — at a time when publishing was already clearly moving online or at least changing according to Internet-age economics — and pay so little mind to costs:

“Despite cuts at Portfolio, some of the old Condé Nast ways remained. To illustrate a November 2008 article arguing that credit derivatives were ‘the elephant in the room’ at JPMorgan Chase, the magazine spent what one staff member, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said was US$30,000 to procure the services of a real elephant to menace a model at a photo shoot.”

A handsome new poetry magazine that aims “to bring poetry to a wider audience and attempt to steal it back from school anthologies and funeral readings” — with the help of some beautiful contemporary illustration.

“Each issue contains a collection of poems written to a theme. These selected poems are individually sent out to a collection of illustrators who then illustrate the poems according to their interpretation of the piece. These illustrations are then bound together with the poems and printed onto sheets of tree pulp for your enjoyment.”

“Over the course of several months beginning October 2008 to April 2009 I’ve spent some of my spare time between commercial projects searching Google Maps hoping to discover land formations or buildings resembling letter forms. These are the results of my findings limited within the state of Victoria, Australia.”

A set of fourteen clever stickers for iPhone and iPod touch. Each sticker features a trompe l’oeil-style image of an old, out-of-date mobile phone. Affix them to the back of your iPhone or iPod touch, to make it look like you’ve downgraded your 2007/8 hotness to some pre-iPhone antique. Really useful if you’re into being ‘funny.’

The blogger and Principal Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop discusses the possibility of a document-centric approach to computing, in which software applications are oriented around the data, rather than vice versa (which is the paradigm we have now). Rather than opening up a document in say Illustrator and then opening a second one in Photoshop, this approach would allow a single document to possess qualities of both applications, and to trigger the appropriate functionality at the right time within a ‘grand unified’ program. Just goes to show that if you listen hard enough, you can often hear faint whispers of the ideas underlying Apple’s aborted OpenDoc framework among the tech faithful.

A look at the prevailing enmity for the typeface Comic Sans. Interesting factoid: its designer, Vincent Connare, drew inspiration for this least serious of all fonts from two of the most serious comics ever printed. “Mr. Connare says he pulled out the two comic books he had in his office, ‘The Dark Knight Returns’ and ‘Watchmen,’ and got to work, inspired by the lettering and using his mouse to draw on a computer screen. Within a week, he had designed his legacy.” That probably says something about either comics or typography taking themselves too seriously, I’m not sure which.

An excellent, inconclusive exploration of how we might — or might not — move beyond the interface paradigms that dominate desktop, browser and mobile software today. The author, a member of the Panic software team, posits that forward progress may be inextricably hampered by current conventions.

“As amazingly revolutionary and beneficial as your new idea may be, you can’t escape this albatross of legacy data. Unless your new metaphor presents a new way of working that is such an obvious and dramatic improvement over the status quo (like pinch-to-zoom) then there’s no compelling desire to laboriously learn, adapt, and migrate to the new environment.

“It seems a bit fatalistic, but I can’t think of a way that the entire desktop metaphor can be overhauled without either everyone in the world switching over at once (which won’t happen), or becoming a ‘data island’ like the Newton or Classic Mac OS.”

A new, print-on-demand publication about design from bi-coastal design studio Fwis. It’s targeted at working practitioners and promises “simple, pragmatic advice on the business of creativity. Our readers will gain a strategic advantage in their profession by learning how to get a job, win clients, and survive the recession.” The first issue is on sale now for US$13.50. Via AisleOne.

Founder Armin Vit decides to call it a day on this influential and long-running design blog:

“I always believed that the amount of time and energy that we — authors and commenters alike — were all investing in Speak Up would be impossible to maintain in the long run, it was bound to crash at some point. And it did… I also strongly believe that the kind of general-topic and long-form writing of Speak Up is just not as appealing as it used to be. With so many Web sites devoted to quick bursts of visuals and the proliferation of short-message communication enhanced by Twitter and Facebook, it becomes increasingly hard to hold the attention of anyone… And since the end of 2008 we have had this nagging feeling that its time had come.”