I can see these popping up all over San Francisco:

via Shane’s Blog

Until recently, there was a tendency to add as much glossy sheen to logos and graphics as possible, particularly in the technology sector. Perhaps designers and clients hoped that these tech-y stylings would help bring viewers into the world of the screen, as if through a modern-day equivalent of trompe l’oeil. Examples of this gimmickry are everywhere, from UPS’s ill-advised 2003 logo update to countless smartphone app icons.

To designers and clients perpetuating this style, I would say: the horizon highlight is no longer mandatory! We are not looking into the future with our icons. The future is here.

—Steven Heller

Remixing with new voices is creative practice…

—Shepard Fairey

Very smart and interesting developments happening right now at Amazon’s Kindle Event in LA.

They’re clearly putting a lot of thought behind what reading and video-watching experiences should be (and taking advantage of their properties like IMDB in interesting ways).

But the realization I’m left with is that Amazon (still) sees the tablet primarily as a consumption device. Yes, they include Exchange email support and calendar integration, but those are secondary. Perhaps this consumption focus is due to the fact that not only do they want to sell their own content, but also because they’ve forked the Android operating system and thus can’t guarantee Android applications (ones for productivity, not consumption) will work on it.

It will be interesting to see how well these new Kindles do in the market.

Really?
I’d love to call this guy and tell him my name was Peter Venkman and I was interested in buying all his equipment.

Hey iTunes, this isn’t Black Star:

(I already checked with Mos Def and Talib Kweli)
And this isn’t Al Green’s Greatest Hits:

I’m not sure who’s responsible for this—Apple or whatever database they’re pulling album information from.
I found the best response to this problem on an Apple Support Community forum:

When my iPhone 4 displays the wrong album art the inner psycho in me comes out.

I know you can manually override the incorrect artwork, but I want it to be correct in the first place.
Update: At least for the Black Star album, it looks as though the CD I ripped it from might be the source of the problem. The full (correct) album title in question is, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, while iTunes shows the title as only Black Star.

Beautiful work by Jean-Charles Desevre (via ShareSomeCandy)

A special thing happens when designers open up to code, or when coders gain a deeper grasp of design. Suddenly function and beauty start to blend naturally. This is where interaction design shines both as a creative pursuit and a craft

—Amit Pitaru, new Co-Chair of the MFA Interaction Design department, SVA

Some of you old school web designers out there will recognize Amit. He’s the co-creator of InsertSilence and an early experimenter in interactive design and art in the early 2000’s and someone who’s work I admired when I first started my career in web design.
Yes, Flash has gone out of fashion and wasn’t designed to make the jump to mobile computing, but the work Pitaru created would not have been possible without Flash. He, along with many other digital artists like James Paterson (creator of Presstube) and Joshua Davis (creator of PrayStation) helped lay the groundwork for for all the so-called ‘progressive’ interactions we’re now seeing done with JavaScript and HTML5.
Praising the great work being done in HTML and JavaScript today without acknowledging the work these guys did over 10 years ago in Flash is like being a fan of The White Stripes without knowing who Led Zeppelin was.

Is that Nokia’s new phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Oh wait, Nokia hasn’t announced a ship date, it couldn’t be a new Nokia phone in your pocket.
Seriously though, that is a big phone:

Beautiful new phones by Nokia. With no release date.
It’s clear all of Apple’s competitors are announcing their new products ahead of Apple’s September 12 event.
The thing is, whether or not Apple explicitly announces a new product event, everyone and their mother should know when Apple is dropping a new product. Their product refresh cycle is very regular. Hell, MacRumors has a Buyer’s Guide (for at least the 8 years I’ve been visiting their site) to find out when you should expect new versions of each device Apple makes.
So we’re now into year 5 of regular iPhone releases and these clowns still aren’t ready? No excuse.