Archive for January 2008

A new drink is rising up in the bars of LA, Tequila Espresso. Served over ice and in a rocks glass, it’s an interesting alternative for anyone looking for the simultaneous caffeine and alcohol buzz. As for the origins of the drink, the farthest back we can trace it is to a rather mischievous bartender at the Chateau Marmont, where many a great thing has begun and ended.

Directions are simple: Pour your choice of tequila over ice, pull a fresh espresso, and pour the espresso into the glass.

The drink often creates a polarizing love/hate reaction depending on your passion for the ingredients. Word of caution: drinking more than 2 of these is probably not great idea if you plan on getting any sleep that evening. Also, apparently Patron has even come out with an espresso flavored Tequila as well.

When MessageLabs, an information security company who specializes in scanning for viruses and other various cyber threats, was challenged with the proposition of communicating the severity of these digital parasites, they turned to Romanian artist, Alex Dragulescu to develop images that showed what the threats look like graphically.

Using the actual code provided by MessageLabs from each of the threats, Dragulescu created images that fell into one of six different categories: viruses, phishing attacks, malicious web links, spam, trojans, and spyware.

According to the MessageLabs site:

Dragulescu’s projects are experiments and explorations of algorithms, computational models, simulations and information visualizations that involve data derived from databases, spam emails, blogs and video game assets.

Check out the final advertisements here.

MessageLabs: Know Your Threat

Read the rest of this entry »

In his blog CultureBy, Grant McCracken offers an interesting perspective on the changing of guards in the overlapping worlds of media and commerce, authority shifting away from large institutions and corporations and congregating around smaller networks and individuals (the Tim O’Reillys and other, dare we say, influentials of the world). McCracken compares this power dynamic, though still very much in flux, to a medieval model of government: the large entities act like nation-states that operate “order-in,” with “an embracing idea, and an embracing bureaucratic order” while new media and influencers (and the events they hold, like O’Reilly’s FooCamp) reign as “order-out” city-states, “[existing] in a larger domain that is relatively chaotic.. [creating] order, most intensely within the walls of the city proper, but also in the concentric rings that run out into the ever more lawless countryside. ”

He continues:

… The question is why this order-out model should now be flourishing when indeed we have magnificent post-monastic institutions in place, richly founded, magnificent in their gravitational powers, indubitable in their authority.  In the words of Max Weber, the great scholar of the modern world, “What gives?”

The answer has got to that the knowledge produced by these events [like FooCamp] is newly nimble, spontaneous, improvisational, responsive, in a word, liquid.  Big institutions can’t produce this kind of knowledge because they are predicated on another model of knowledge, one that is, for all the many things it does well, inclined to grind fine and slow, and mostly slow.

In the Foo Camp and its many counterparts, we are looking at an adaptive response to a world that is itself newly nimble, spontaneous, improvisational, responsive, in a word, liquid.  Large institutions are being in the words of Thomas Kuhn, “read out” of the field.  The knowledge required of a liquid world must almost necessarily come from liquid events, the only places, we now suspect, that liquid knowledge and news of the future now consent to gather.

McCracken’s compelling analogy left us wondering though  - if this is the Second Middle Ages, what will our Hundred Years War be? And what then?

CultureBy: Tim O’Reilly: Now Shall I Compare Thee to a City-State

Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far, an interactive exhibition by Stefan Sagmeister, opens at Deitch Projects on January 31, 2008. The exhibition will include works that have a life of their own, transforming throughout the exhibition as viewers engage with them. Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far is timed to coincide with the release of a new book of the same title, which surveys Sagmeister’s illustrious career.

Stefan Sagmeister is one of today’s most innovative and influential graphic designers. His conception and application of graphic design goes above and beyond traditional notions of the practice, taking it to the realm of performative and conceptual art, painting and sculpture. Sagmeister is most widely known for his album cover artwork for bands like The Rolling Stones, Talking Heads and Lou Reed, and for books, like Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO for the Kunsthaus Bregenz, which function as sculptural objects.

As a prelude to the release of his new book, “Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far,” the inimitable Stefan Sagmeister is offering a collection of his work for view in his exhibit of the same name, opening tonight at Deitch in NYC. While many immediately associate Sagmeister with his more outrageous design work (like this poster for AIGA he created by physically carving the text into his chest with a scalpel), the designer is also known for dedicating much of his craft to supporting good causes (like the WorldChanging Book and True Majority).

You can pre-order Sagmeister’s book on Amazon, and check out his work at Deitch at tonight’s opening reception, from 6-9PM.

Details at events.psfk.com

[via CoolHunting]

Color is a very powerful force not only in design, but in life, and color palates have a singular (if subtle) way of capturing, reflecting, and impacting the cultural zeitgeist. That’s particularly evident in fashion, where color is a crucial element to design. Going way beyond “pink is the new black” and “this season, everyone has to own something yellow,” it’s fascinating to witness how an entire industry’s color choices can shift and sway with the changing times.

Women’s Wear Daily today published the top 10 Pantone colors chosen by designers this season for the Fall/Winter 08 collections being presented in New York next week (stay tuned for PSFK’s coverage of the event):

There’s change in the air for fall, and it’s not just a political one. The warm, subdued colors that typically make up a fall palette have given way to rich blues, greens and purples. “It’s a big change for the season,” agreed Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of Carlstadt, N.J.-based Pantone Color Institute, which supplied WWD with its top 10 colors for New York designers for fall. “The bottom five colors are the warmer colors we’re more accustomed to seeing for fall. The dominance of blue, purple and green really makes a statement about how influential they are for designers this season.”

Pantone’s 2008 Color of the Year 18-3843 Blue Iris, pictured above, was chosen by 13.95% of designers this year, making it the most popular color of the season. Says Pantone’s Leatrice Eiseman:

“Each year, Pantone chooses a color that we think represents what the year is about. What’s the message this year? People are looking for calm in such a volatile year — especially now, with the election and the turbulent economy. We need that element of calm, but at the same time, this color also has some strength to it.”

WWD: A Season of Change (subscription req)

It’s Sydney’s most famous beach and it’s one of the cities’ iconic sites, just as the Opera House or the Harbour Bridge. The news of the beach’s inclusion in the National Heritage Listing provides protection with criminal sanctions for any damage caused to the site.

Bondi Beach is the quintessential Australian beach in the imaginary of many. As Peter Garrett, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts puts it: “you can’t get more Aussie than Bondi,”

SHM: You can’t get more Aussie than Bondi

-contributed by Sara Francia

We came upon this video on NewTeeVee, not sure how a Google Maps tutorial made it to their front page. Thankfully, we clicked on it and were pleasantly surprised. The funny, faux-horror short comes from the Vacationeers Series, which until this video, was pretty off the radar. But this cute take on Google = Big Brother paranoia has already seen more than half a million hits since its debut a week ago. Watch it below:

Photographer Bryan Derballa came by the office today and told us about the photos he took of a local wresting match he shot. For some inspiration, check out this slideshow from a night put on by the Boy Scouts of Brooklyn.

Bryan Derballa’s Site