Over the festive period I discovered two of my favourite magazines are to close.

This interview in Magtastic with Amelia was the first I had heard that she would be finishing after Issue 10. I’ve been buying Amelia’s Magazine since Issue 2 in 2004, and it really is a breath of fresh air, combining music, fashion, photography, illustration and plain weirdness. Make sure you pre-order Issue 10.

This morning Photojojo alerted me to that fact that JPG magazine is to close (and very quickly!). A photography magazine of the highest quality, each issue is themed and contains amazing photogrpahy from the community. Luckily, you can now download PDFs of all the back issues, and you can help to save JPG.

Whether these closures are anything to do with the c****t c****h or not is not entirely clear, but sad news it is anyway. It always looked like these bad economic times would be the end of some print media, but I had always focused on larger newspapers and magazines. The reality is that the small ones will inevitably start to go first.

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. Here’s a fun little video for you.

Thank you for being a great client.

Thank you for all the important projects you have trusted me with this year.

Thank you for connecting with me, online or off.

Thank you for the helpful hint you gave me when I was stuck on something.

Thank you for that blog post you wrote that inspired me to do something better.

Thank you for that link you posted that blew my mind, or made me green with envy.

Thank you for sharing a few beers and a few laughs.

Thank you for being interested.

Thank you for being interesting.

Thank you for reading this blog.

Thank you for subscribing.

Thank you for downloading my little projects.

Thank you for linking to this site.

Thank you for the messages and emails you sent to tell me you liked something.

Thank you all for being you.

Merry Christmas.

Joseph Sullivan has published his list of the best book covers of 2008 at The Book Design Review. Some absolutely lovely covers to feast your eyes on.

I love my Acer Aspire One netbook. It really is so much eaasier to carry around with you if you’re just gong to a meeting, or travelling and only need email, web surfing and some other small tasks.

However, the default desktop is pretty ugly. And being the sort who doesn’t like ugly, I whipped up a ‘theme’ that can be easily used to pretty up the default desktop. It’s hardly perfect, but it’s about the best that can be done with the cumbersome system the desktop uses.

Hopefully it will be useful to someone.

Visit the ‘Theme for Acer Aspire One desktop’ page.

A newly designed commerative Dutch 5 Euro coin, designed by Stani Michiels. The whole design was created using only free software. A design to rival the new UK coin designs.

(Via Burstoid)

As real as it gets…

Excellent print and poster work for software-asli.com based on a real life example of the Photoshop interface. Best viewed large.

Designing Better Email Messages
Zurb have written a really good piece on designing text only emails. Simple points, but they are often ignored.

2008 Election Maps
Kottke has a round up of US election maps used by different news agencies. It is interesting to see the difference in styles across different standards and types of media. Although it’s quite ugly, I love the BBC map that shows states made up of squares, with each square representing one Electoral College vote. Talking of which…

ObamaBats
Well it had to happen really.

Is graphic design art?
Um…no.

And finally…
The Couple
My friends at Stalelife have an interesting video by Geert Desager about advertiser/consumer relationships in the new connected world.

MultiColr Search Lab is an Idée Inc toy which allows you to search over 10,000 interesting photos from Flickr, all licensed under Creative Commons. The difference with this service is that you search photos by colour combinations. As a source of colour inspiration for design, this service works really, really well and could be very useful.

The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

Above is a video of gameplay from indie game The Unfinished Swan.

From the official site:

The Unfinished Swan is a first-person painting game set in an entirely white world. Players can splatter paint to help them find their way through an unusual garden. The game is still in development and no release plans have been announced.

This looks amazing, but is enough to give nyone nightmares of a colourless world.

Via the directory of pretty thing, Paper Cut Panic:

Industrial designer, Ignacio Pilotto, gives the classic Rubik’s cube a colourful twist.

Huffduffer is a (gorgeously designed) service recently launched by Jeremey Keith. Huffduffer allows you to bookmark audio files on the web, in a similar way to Delicious. The difference is that Huffduffer then creates a podcast from those audio files. Always wanted to inflict your musical taste on others but didn’t have the time/drive to create a podcast? Huffdudder does it for you. Users subscribe to your podcast in iTunes, and fresh content is delivered to them whenever you add some, without them having to do a thing.

So if you want to have my taste inflicted on you, visit my Huffduffer page to subscribe to my podcast. I’ll be posting songs I find and like as often as I can, but only files legitimately posted by the band or their people. So far acts include Bishop Allen, Dntel and M. Ward covering Bowie.

A couple of other podcasts worth checking out so far are Si and Samuel Cotterall.

ONE Magazine, which I worked on as lead designer for the first three issues, has been nominated for a PPA Scottish Magazine Award 2008 in the category “Best Magazine - Small Publishing Company”.

Congratulations to Polwarth Publishing on the achievement.

We now have to use phonetic spelling on film posters for kids? Come on.

This Wednesday (8th October 2008) in Edinburgh, a few of us are getting together. We’d love you to join us.

From the Upcoming page:

A few of the Scottish/Scotland-based survivors of dConstruct are meeting up for a bevvy or two having lamented the relative absence of geek socials north of the border.

Freelancers, full-time web monkeys, anyone interested in the interweb do come and join us for a beverage and blether.

Wedneday from 6pm at City Cafe, Blair Street.

30 Reasons is an interesting project where 30 designers create a poster each, with one released per day from 5th October right up to the US elections on 4th November. The idea of each poster is to give viewers a reason to vote for Barack Obama.

The designer line-up looks great, so it’s well worth signing up to receive each poster by email, whatever your political ideas.

Sign up for email updates at 30Reasons.org

Not Paper is a lovely blog about collage.

Love him or hate him, Gary Vaynerchuck is quite the motivational speaker.

As I commented on Sam Brown’s post:

Having had the pleasure of hearing Gary speak at SXSW, holding court in the hallways, the guy is an inspiration. I am in awe of people with so much self confidence, but no arrogance.

America Is F*cked…….(Graphically at least) from Jess Gibson on Vimeo.

I’m currently on a train heading towards London. After a quick lunch meeting, I’ll be heading to Brighton for the dConstruct 2008 conference. I’m pretty excited, as not only am I visiting one of my favourite cities in the UK and staying with my cousin who I don’t get to see enough, but the conference looks like it’s going to be really great. I’m looking forward to some interesting looking talks from the likes of Daniel Burka and Jeremy Keith (and many more), as well as meeting some new people, and finally meeting some of the Edinburgh crowd (it seems mad that I have to go all the ay to Brighton to meet people from my own city).

So if you see me, come and say hello. (Please, I don’t know anyone ).

A wee while ago, Sam and I were alerted to the fact that Coda 1.5 would soon be available, and that there would be clip management built in. Coda 1.5 launched yesterday with many great new features, including Subversion support and find and replace across multiple files. It turns out that there is the ability to import clips via URL, which makes me very happy. It makes Coda Clips, which Sam and I launched a while back, a much more useful site. We released a new version of the site with ‘Install Clip’ links for each clip, so now all you have to do to install a clip from our site is to click the link. Your browser and Coda will do the rest!

Download Coda 1.5 (Free upgrade from Coda 1.0)

Visit Coda Clips

Don’t forget to submit your own clips which you find handy while you are visiting!

I know I’m very late with this, but I have been away, and I couldn’t let this pass without saying something. Isaac Hayes, who passed away on Sunday, will be sorely missed. Most people are talking about the theme from Shaft, and Chef in South Park, but neither of these were even close to his best work. Check out 1969’s Hot Buttered Soul if you haven’t already.

The photo above was taken when I had the honour of seeing him appear, briefly, at the Stax 50th Anniversary Soul Revue at SXSW 2007. He didn’t look too well then, and had to be helped on and off stage. He only co-sang one song, Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, in tribute to Otis, but before any of the artists played, Isaac appeared on stage and said a few words about Stax and soul music. That voice gave me goosebumps. It was a night I’ll never forget.

So rest in peace, Isaac, you will be sorely missed.

A List Apart are conducting their annual survey for people who make websites. The results were interesting last year, and I’m sure they will be again this year.

When I was at SXSW 2007, I was lucky enough to attend the world premier of Helvetica, a documentary by Gary Hustwit about typography and design, centred around designers’ love/hate relationship with Helvetica. It’s a really interesting documentary, and not just for design nerds. Hustwit also produced, among other films, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, possibly my favourite music doc.

Gary has a new film coming out in early 2009, entitled Objectified. There is a website up already where you can see some stills from the film, as well as the gorgeous logo by Michael C. Place.

From the site:

Objectified is a documentary about industrial design; it’s about the manufactured objects we surround ourselves with, and the people who make them. On an average day, each of us uses hundreds of objects. (Don’t believe it? Start counting: alarm clock, light switch, faucet, shampoo bottle, toothbrush, razor…) Who makes all these things, and why do they look and feel the way they do? All of these objects are “designed,” but how can good design make them, and our lives, better?

There seems to be a pretty amazing cast of design folks involved:

Paola Antonelli (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Chris Bangle (BMW Group, Munich)
Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec (Paris)
Andrew Blauvelt (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis)
Anthony Dunne (London)
Naoto Fukasawa (Tokyo)
IDEO (Palo Alto)
Jonathan Ive (Apple, California)
Hella Jongerius (Rotterdam)
Marc Newson (London/Paris)
Fiona Raby (London)
Dieter Rams (Kronberg, Germany)
Karim Rashid (New York)
Alice Rawsthorn (International Herald Tribune)
Rob Walker (New York Times Magazine)

…with more to be announced.

Keep an eye out for this, It’s going to be great.

Lovely illustration work by Paul Antonson. His portfolio features work for publications, illustrated patterns and images hand drawn from Google Earth shots of famous landmarks. He also has prints for sale. Go look.

This is an actually message thrown up by the Plaxo sync software. Is this supposed to be a joke?

Lovely poster. TERRIBLE type.

• Shortwave
  An extensible quick-search and shortcut system from Shaun Inman
• 37signals Product Blog: Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products
  A bold move, but I think a good one
• Winning a Design Argument by Bryan Zmijewski | ZURB
  Some good advice, funny too

If anyone has a spare invite for FFFound! I would really, really appreciate it.

Thanks