All of these examples, plus countless others all over the internet (like the data presentation-as-movie-poster we featured here) hew to one specific purpose: compile data into various charts, graphs, or even just basic numbers. Design beautifully. Present to public.

What got me thinking about the popularity and formulas of infographics is a new exhibition currently running through April 12th at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, which has much of the same underlying philosophy: it uses data to create art, only instead of presenting it as attractive charts and graphs, it features actual art installations that were ‘compiled’ through the use of various types of raw data.

It’s a fresh idea very much in line with the zeitgeist: harnessing the massive amounts of free data available online and organizing it in such a way that its conclusions are displayed not as numerical tables but pieces designed for contemplation. While all art is a collection and re-interpretation of data (visual, aural, etc, filtered through the eyes and brain of the artist), I’m unaware of a previous exhibition taking the accumulation and presentation of raw information so literally.

Featured in the exhibition are plenty of works from the well-known Aaron Koblin, including his “laser ranging system” last seen in Radiohead’s House of Cards video, plus his project called “Ten Thousand Cents“, where 10,000 online users (all anonymous) contributed to a master drawing of a $100 bill. If you click on any of the 10,000 portions of the bill, you can see a division between the original scan and an animation of the drawn re-creation. While the final result is, well, what you’d expect (a slightly iffy $100 bill), the fact that as an artwork, and has 10,000 anonymous artists and all the steps they took in its creation, is fascinating use of the ‘hive mind’.

Also featured in the exhibition is the grandfather of all great data-posters, by Charles Joseph Minard: Napoleon’s March to Moscow. This and other works like it (it was done in 1869) are the direct inspiration behind the great poster work at sites like historyshots: presenting data in an large, easily-digested, arresting, and beautiful format.

There’s plenty of art out there that uses raw data in various ways: various contemporary installations have been doing it for some time, and we might even make the argument that certain memorials function as great artworks, too. I’m thinking mainly of Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial, which, while admirably serving its primary function as a memorial to the dead, also works stunningly well on an aesthetic level, taking the chronological names of the war dead and displaying them in a unique fashion.

Most of today’s exhibits strive for a higher level of automation and calculation (in the computerized sense of the word).

This exhibit reminds me of another piece of data-art that came from Flickr some months ago, when they took geo-coded tags from all the people who tag the location where they took a photo (or have a camera that does it for them), and created a series of continental maps based on those co-ordinates. The results were remarkably accurate, and all generated entirely from photographic metadata.

It’s not so hard to envision dozens of future projects along the same lines, pulling raw data from a variety of sources and going beyond just a clean API integration, taking it into a completely unexpected space where the data functions as the primary creator behind a piece of art. This is the ultimate in “Container Art”, in that the real artistry is in the intake and manipulation of otherwise random or unadulterated data.

Something less automatic but no less enjoyable: this project putting two years’ of Twittering into a book, which is plenty interesting on its own, and mines a data source for a type of journal or log you simply are not going to see anywhere else. This is another example of raw data being transformed into a strangely personal kind of art. People complain that no one keeps journals anymore (wait, do they?), but here we have exactly that. You just have to move it off your computer and onto some paper.

PROBLEM: WALLETS CAN BE CHEAP AND ANONYMOUS.

For me, wallets have always been about function over form. I have to take my wallet out of its resting place so many separate times in a day, that it’s got to hold everything perfectly and just plain work. Most wallets do this, to a degree—but do they do it for long?

Not really. If you’re the type that can’t buy an expensive wallet because you know you’ll be sitting on it, and moving your rear end in and out of various chairs all day, visiting god knows what sorts of stresses and strains on this little leather thing that contains much of your life—you know what a disintegrating wallet looks like. Leather that no longer seems leather, mysterious pockets that weren’t there a few weeks ago suddenly appearing as the material becomes shredded, torn; you’re likely destined to go through a ton of wallets in your lifetime.

PROBLEM: THEY CAN ALSO BE OVERPRICED AND EXCLUSIVE.

Or are you the cardinal opposite, the wallet connoisseur? Have you always splashed out for a top quality purchase, genuine, beautiful leather, something you can be proud of every time you pull it out of your pocket? If so, you’ve probably paid a damn lot for these things, and either way, used them into oblivion.

PROBLEM: WALLETS AREN’T SO INTERESTING.

While there are a ton of wallets out there, both cheap as all hell and expensive as some other, richer part of hell, most wallets follow the same form. A simple fold, wide enough that each side can hold various debit and credit cards, and the entire span will take your money and papers and put a nice crease right in the middle.

If you’re lucky—or not—your wallet might contain a little pocket for change, which, you will know if you routinely use it, changes shape depending on how many little coins you’re carrying around. Not always fun to have poking into one of your two cheeks.

PROBLEM: THE EUROPEAN-STYLE MEN’S BAG ISN’T REALLY A WALLET, EITHER.

So, is there a solution, a way out of this imaginary problem that I’ve sorta created here? Sure, there are plenty: abandon the wallet and use a sort of bag. If you’re in Europe and need to feel safe-in-numbers when it comes to fashion, you’re in luck, as plenty of people carry these around here, and there are tons of good models to choose from. If you can choose a kind of shoulder/purse/bag/pouch well and choose it with style, you’re set. This opens up a whole new world of accessorizing to you.

But what if you can’t really make that leap? What if you just want to get a damn good looking wallet, one that stands out and is strongly designed, but still functions, looks, and seems like the familiar wallet form you’ve been using your whole life? What’s out there?

PROBLEM: WALLETS DON’T LEND THEMSELVES EASILY TO FRESH, CONTEMPORARY DESIGN.

Not much. There are chain wallets, super-thick wallets, super-thin, minimalist wallets, wallets branded with various comic book characters that just don’t put in the effort, but there aren’t that many interesting wallets around. Sure, you might stumble upon a few fantastic specimens here or there, but most likely they’ll be one-offs, some kind of limited edition from a big designer that is so overpriced it’d be a shame to use it as a regular wallet.

And these are few and far between—you’re far more likely to find a $200 t-shirt done by an expensive designer’s hand, or even a designer canvas tote bag than you are to find a kick-ass wallet.

AND SO, A SOLUTION.

As a fun and exciting answer to all of these problems, I present Poketo. Their slogan: Art for your everyday. That’s exactly it, too: they make wallets that you can use as your everyday wallet, but they’re interesting enough that you can pull them out and simply admire them for their design, too.

SEE, WALLETS CAN BE AS NUMEROUS AND EXCHANGEABLE AS PURSES!

Besides just some great design work, in which Poketo have brought together a whole stable of illustrators and artists to do fantastic limited edition wallets, Poketo have also suggested a kind of revolutionary idea in their ‘surprise packs’. That’s the notion that you can have more than one wallet on the go, that the wallet should be enough of a minimalistic venture that you can switch the entire thing over to another one, just like many females cycle through various purses/handbags and their respective contents.

They do this by not giving you the option of fattening up the wallet too much—its design constricts you into eliminating every kind of card and addition you aren’t going to be using on a daily basis. And the great thing is that 10 of these wallets will only set you back $100. Ten wallets!

AND THERE ARE DOZENS OF NEW MODELS COMING OUT ALL THE TIME.

They’re also constantly producing new wallets from new designers, who are doing these designs freelance. This means the art is both recognizable if you follow illustration in any way, and wildly varied and exciting. Their site is overflowing with great designs.

The construction of the wallet itself is what allows Poketo to do this. It’s not a custom-crafted piece of leather, rather just a nice print, inserted into a piece of plastic, and molded into the form of a foldable wallet. Nothing fancy, no heavy custom printing or stitching jobs here. But it gives the company great creative license in the amount of models they can feature. It’s unlikely you’ll ever see wallets as varied as this, even if they all have the same external shell.

LIMITED EDITIONS DON’T NEED TO SIGNIFY RIDICULOUS PRICES.

Thankfully Poketo isn’t really overcharging for their product, but continues to produce limited editions, which is a concept that I absolutely cannot get enough of: the idea that limited editions don’t need to be expensive. They can be limited, sure, and once they’re off the market you can sell them for whatever the hell you want, but as these wallets keep coming out, they’re gonna keep costing $20 and nothing more.

THUS, POKETO IS GOOD.

And there you have it. Wallets that aren’t your father’s fine-crafted leather, but are instead something closer to a great stream of well-designed t-shirts: you change them up infinitely, they keep coming out, they look great, and they don’t cost that much.

Sure, they aren’t the most well-put-together things in the world, but they signify a big change. Now, pulling out your wallet isn’t just fun because you’re gonna spend some money—you get to stare at it, too.

Back in the 1970s, the French racer Herve Poulain came up with the great idea to have an American artist paint his car. Instead of choosing someone who would do a relatively standard, acceptable, and OK job, he chose Alexander Calder, who created the memorable piece of work you see above. Although Calder died just a year later, he started a movement in art and car design that continues to this day.

While it’s not a grand, sweeping, big-time art trend, it is something that marries the otherwise little connected worlds of professional racing and contemporary art. Although many modern car designers can rightfully be called artists, and many of the designers as far back as the 1950s were creating cars that still look like masterpieces today, it wasn’t until this pairing that we started to see the car-as-canvas.

BMW decided to remain in the spotlight, and comissioned several other prominent artists to do their own cars. Not only are the cars themselves fantastically adapted to this sort of thing (there’s just something about that 1970s BMW racing design that holds a coat of unconvential paint so much better than, say, a Porsche), but the works of art created are quite memorable, too.

Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol all contributed work, and at the moment there are only 16 of these BMW art-cars in total. They’ve recently been sent on tour, and after short residences in Korea and Russia, they’re currently in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. They’re staying just until February 24th, after which they’re headed to New York and Mexico.

These cars are normally on display at the BMW museum in Munich, and the coolest thing about them is that most were actually used in races. I would pay to see someone racing an Andy Warhol car, I would, even though the Frank Stella one (above) is actually the most impressive.

This put me in mind of some other recent “art cars” we’ve seen, and we thought it a good idea to round them up here:

The aforementioned Ferrari Testarossa from 1957 isn’t an art car, but it should be. Just look at that detailing: it’s a 1950s (Italian) idea of what the future would look like, except it hasn’t gone out of style in any way.

Some recent new forumla 1 rules mean that the cars have to be completed redesigned, but look, the McLaren team car actually looks pretty awesome! Straight out of the damn future, I say.

Chris Gilmour has done up some very fine cardboard models of the Fiat 500 and the Aston Martin DB5. No, these aren’t just little models, which wouldn’t be much of anything to pay attention to—these are full-sized recreations.

Here’s artist Romero Britto’s take on a recent Audi model. At the time Jalopnik reported on it, it was available for sale in Miami. Definitely inspired by the BMW cars, it doesn’t quite reach their level, but isn’t bad.

This one was pretty famous in the blogosphere last year: a Lamborghini made entirely of steel tubing. It’s amazing, because the photos look exactly like something done up in a 3d program, and then inserted into real-life photos, except the entire thing is real-life.

Any more amazing combinations of art & cars you know of? Let us know!

AIGA (The Professional Association for Design) does a yearly survey called AIGA 365: The Year in Design. They’ve chosen a whole series of top examples for 2008 to put into the archives, all sorted into 10 different categories. From their writeup:

AIGA’s suite of competitions is widely recognized as the most discerning statement on design excellence today, extending a legacy that began 90 years ago. By means of the competitions, AIGA creates a chronicle of outstanding design solutions, each demonstrating the process of designing, the role of the designer and the value of design.

Their 29th Annual Year in Design is online now, and I’ve sifted through the 10 categories and pulled out some of my favorite selections. And so, for your enjoyment:

Brand and Identity Systems Design: Bretenic Limited Stationary System

Here’s a piece of work from a Toronto design shop that uses good copy and comical prose to illustrate why a lawyer and specialist is good to work with. It’s well-presented and direct, and the approach of the piece matches the approach of the client, which is funny and down to earth.

Corporate Communications Design: Take Action Postcards to the Edge

There weren’t a ton of wonderful examples in here, I found, but this set of postcards about dissidents being persecuted in other countries is concise, catchy, and embodies a spirit of design slightly different than much of the NGO “design ghetto” (if such a thing exists, and from my impressions it sort of does).

Editorial Design: New York Times Magazine

These guys don’t quit. I’ve written about their extremely skilled lead designer before, and these two nominations here are making me think about a subscription. Consistently, eye-catching, and beautiful to look at, week in and week out. I missed the recent food issue, which I’m sure was full of various mouth-watering things alongside some fantastic articles.

Experience Design: Detroit Institute of Arts Interactive Installations

Although I can’t vouch for this, not having been to the museum, the idea of watching a period meal being served while you sit at a kind of virtual table, as a way of presenting silverware and other period flatware and furniture and cooking habits, is kind of awesome. Plus it’s easily the best way to answer that eternal question we’ve all grappled with: “how can I make my 18th century flatware collection relevant to contemporary youngsters?” Now you know.

Information Design: The Normandy Campaign

I wish computer technology was at this stage back when I was sent to museums on various school trips, although I remember the series of blinking lights and various switches that moved things were equally as enthralling as this interactive touch-screen map of the Normandy campaign probably is. Everything is fun when you’re a kid. Ah hell, it still is.

Motion Graphics: TV Land Refresh

This category, I’ve got to say, is lacking a touch–the nominations were fine, but not mind-blowing, and from a design standpoint I just don’t think Modest Mouse’s Dashboard video needs to win a prestigious design award. I know it’s motion graphics, but that’s a wide category, considering what I eventually chose at their best selection: this refresh of the TV Land network, which is clean, contemporary, and not annoying. For a retro network that shows nothing but old reruns, it’s great, actually. No old TVs with rabbit ears sticking out of them or bouncy retro graphics–although I’m an unabashed fan of vintage things, showing Brady Bunch reruns doesn’t mean you have to embrace the tv-in-the-60s aesthetic for your entire network.

Packaging Design: Ultrasilencer

Well I wanted Criterion’s Breathless DVD set, but the Ultrasilencer takes it. When the hell are you ever going to get a Vacuum Cleaner with modernist Helvetica styling on all its packaging? This wins my personal award for “making Jordan kind of interested in a product he wouldn’t otherwise give a crap about.” Thanks to this design I seriously started thinking that maybe this product was some kind of revolutionary thing, until I realized the object I was thinking about was a vacuum cleaner.

Promotional Design and Advertising: Planet Propaganda

The posters of Planet Propaganda, collectively, win this one. This is a massive category and it’s kind of ridiculous to choose one, especially since I just complained about ‘honorifics’ in another article, but hey, I’m not actually handing out awards here, just picking my favourites.

Typographic Design: Sculpture Today

This ‘Paper Alphabet for Sculpture Today’ is fantastic. Typography done with paper that looks beautiful. Plus the “C” looks like my cherished Commodore 64 logo.

Book Design: Underachiever’s Manifesto

While there are a ton of quality choices here, the Underachiever’s Manifesto gets my vote. It was a tossup between this and a few others (All the Sad Young Literary Men I really like), but the “mistake is the whole point” simplicity of the cover won me over.

I once had a Peugeot. No, not a car, but a street bike I bought for $80 at a garage sale. It was the best bike I’ve ever owned. A friend of mine had the exact same one, and we used to call them… wait for it… twin cobras. I have no idea why we came up with that name, or what the hell a snake and its brother had to do with an elegant French bike from the 1970s, but it made a fun bike even better.

Now I’m largely exposed to Peugeot through their numerous cars here in Europe, although for months I was confused by the Italian pronunciation, thinking these people were talking about some other, mysterious brand I couldn’t spell, and frankly I’m still not sure exactly how to say the name at all. Most likely my French Canadian education has had me pronouncing the name wrong all along, so what I thought was poo-zho is probably pyoo-zho or per-zho. Sometimes I don’t really know what the hell I’m doing.

Since phonetics prevents me from saying their name right and my driving license is no longer valid here, the only reason I’m writing about Peugeot is because their latest Design Competition caught my eye. From their site:

Create a Concept Car which is designed to evolve within the cities of the future, whilst retaining the key values of the 21st century. The projects should bear Peugeot’s stylistic codes and must contain the following four aspects included in this design competition: environmental awareness, social harmony, interactive mobility and economic efficiency.

They narrowed it down to ten finalists that you can view right here, and just recently chose their winners. In third place was China’s Lou Ke, who designed a sort of scissory-double-motorcycle thing. His wacky writeup:

I don’t think this type belonged “20?” “30?” or “90?”,so i give the name “x0x”,but the car shape is more like “oxo”,so it is. A electric power car.

The car looks like a toy,because the color is no stress just like tomorrow life,naive and freedom.

Then you must drive a car with out learning how to drive it. The “oxo” is one of this type.

Drive the car is easy than in games,with the “PEUGEOT Phone” help,the car can be controled or autorun. The “X” system inside is save the space when the car parking,and through narrow or crowded street. The car wheel allowed the car lateral movement,rotate in-situ,and so on..

With the nimble and smart friend help,you must have a perfect tomorrow.

Second place went to Emre Yazici of Turkey, with a sort of single-passenger two-wheeled car that isn’t a motorcycle and fits right with Minority Report. He says:

Peugeot EGO has been conceived as a lean vehicle in every aspect. It is easy to own, easy to maintain, and easy to operate. And, most importantly, it is easy on the environment. The majority of the vehicles at the rush-hour in a big city, carry a single passenger. EGO is designed for a single passenger [...] Steering is performed by independently changing the rotational speed of the wheels. So, u-turns at the same spot is possible. The agility of EGO has virtually no match. Say good-bye to the clumsy and unsafe steering wheel, and also to the pedals. The driver employs a joy-stick to perform the manoeuvres, and to control the speed simultaneously.

And our winner is Carlos Arturo Torres Tovar of Colombia, with his design called the RD, which is easily the best-realized out of all the entries. I’m not one that’s always too crazy about futuristic, curvaceous, speculative-looking design, but this is real nice. Unfortunately his writeup is entirely in Spanish, but it’s OK, the pics and video are more than sufficient.

You can see all the winners at Peugeot’s (that’s pronounced pee-you-gee-ott, I’ve decided) website, right here.

I was recently turned on to the absolutely killer commercial photography of Mitchell Feinberg. An American working in both Paris and New York, he does some of the best product photography around. Check out these examples.

I struggled to find my favourite examples from his site for this article, as there were tons of them. The most striking ones are these recent pieces of work for Muse Magazine, which are technically advertisements or product photography, for products that have been scultuped out of a kind of mold. It’s as though their imprint was left perfectly inside drying cement, only dozens of times more detailed.

The polo shirt is an especially striking example, and each one from this series gives a strangely satisfying emboss to these handbags, watches, and wallets. I love the fact that each product is entirely drained of colour and essential shape, and the photo is as much about the cracked texture and broken surface of the environment around the indent as it is about the prouduct being represented.

Here’s something I never thought I’d be stunned by: makeup and cosmetics photography. Feinberg makes this stuff look luxurious and entirely alien. Flipping through a fashion magazine, stuff like this might get missed, but when seen as part of his impressive portfolio, it’s some beautiful work.

This red/blue combination is especially beautiful–he’s turned lipstick and… that blue thing (what kind of makeup is that, anyway? I’m clueless) into what looks like an unconventional homage to abstract painting.

And then there’s his food photography, which I’m still unsure about. He approaches it with the same eye he lends to the cosmetics, which means much of it looks alien and interesting, and hits you with a fresh burst of the unexpected. That’s good, but does it make me want to eat what he’s shooting? Not exactly, but I don’t think that one set of criteria is all that matters. A lot of this work is for the New York Times Magazine, which publishes some of the best food writers in the country, and they’re not always writing about how delicious and fun it is to eat things.

For some reason the aesthetics of Feinberg’s embossed series made me think of this model by Hans Op De Beeck that I stumbled upon recently, which is just a rapid-prototyped (unless it’s entirely computer-generated–I can’t tell) model of a modernist, Le Corbusier-styled apartment flat, only with additional touches like satellite dishes on every balcony and the first signs of decay. It occupies the space between real life and Corbusier’s blueprints: a pristine white model of what his famous designs eventually became. De Beeck calls it a “silent witness to the crumbling of modern thought.” Sure, why not?

I’ve written about magazine stores before, about how the overflowing amount of titles on display, the remarkably specific nature of all of them, and the feeling of library anxiety that greets me when I think about all these people publishing all these magazines every month. How do any of them sell? How do any of these things make money?

In fact it’s becoming rather clear that a lot of print isn’t making so much money at all. The book industry is in some sort of crisis, newspapers are dying, and magazines aren’t having a great go of it at all, either.

So it’s encouraging to hear about new magazine shops opening up, ones devoted entirely to the idea of reading and buying those magazines that make the format worth it in the first place. It’s even better when the focus of these stores is largely on design and art magazines, which are some of the best and most tangible reasons to still be picking up print-based… well, anything. A well-curated magazine will still provide you with more solid information in one sitting than most of our hyperactive, ADD-inspired internet surfing can in a few hours.

A new Berlin shop has just launched with exactly this idea in mind. Called Do You Read Me,and definitely not just another overflowing magazine store, this is a highly curated shop designed with you in mind. Go there, browse, sit, read, explore, and then buy.

It was recently featured on one of the New York Times’s many blogs, and has me on the lookout for something even close to this nice here in Rome. Some of the shop’s better features include Eames chairs for lounging while you read, and no shrink-wrap to speak of. You’re free to browse and read all you want before buying.

There’s a lot to be said for specialization, in my opinion. Going into a massive bookstore and finding its massive magazine section doesn’t lead me in any direction, and doesn’t help me find what I want to find. The shelves are bursting, and somehow the inherent value of each title is diminished through the very overstocking of that particular section. That’s why the layout of this store is so appealing: minimalist shelves with great spacing, and wooden tables featuring mouth-watering stacks of what are surely interesting titles. It’s reason number 4,058 to book a flight for Berlin.

From the shop itself: “We provide a subjective selection of beautiful, sapiently written, well crafted magazines in the scope of art, culture, fashion, photography, design, architecture, literature, music, theatre, society, politics and business. We look forward to compiling, together with our clients, the most beautiful, most interesting and most innovative magazines available from around the globe.”

Miniaturization continues unabated, a ream of consumer products getting smaller and shrinking down to previously unthinkable new sizes. Our latest and slightly kind of amazing new example is the projector, that heavy, fan-blowing noisy thing you see hanging from the ceiling of a University classroom or sitting on the desk in a boardroom. Somehow, now, again, without any damn notice, there’s one that fits in your pocket and hooks up to an ipod. What the hell?

It’s the Optoma Pico, which hooks up to iPods, PSPs, Digital Cameras, and the like. If you’re an ad agency on the go and need to fire up a presentation to a client while you’re sitting in a bar, forget both crowding intimately over the screen of your iPhone. Pull this out, hook it up, and amaze everyone with an image on the wall.

The New York Times’s David Pogue, resident technology-for-the-masses guru, had an exclusive look at this device and wrote up a review of it, back on election day.

it produce[s] an astonishingly bright, clear, vivid video or still image. That’s right — from a projector you’ve pulled from your jeans pocket.

The minimum distance for this projector is eight inches from your “screen”; the maximum is 8.5 feet away, at which point you get a 65-inch image. And it really, really helps if you dim the lights or use a properly reflective movie screen.

Even so, the Pico projector is the first of its kind — other micro-projectors are on the way — and over all, it’s awesome. When it goes on sale in two weeks, it will give parents a completely portable backseat-of-the-minivan movie theater for the kids. It will let photographers display their portfolios with much greater size and impact than they’d get with a scrapbook — right from the digital camera, if need be. It will permit spur-of-the-moment demos or pitches for corporate presenters or independent filmmakers, wherever they happen to be, without having to set anything up or reserve a room.

Whether the consumer market will feel an urgent need for a pocket-sized projector is another thing: it’s easy to fall back on excitement and look past the notion of whether or not such a product is actually useful. But I’m sure it is–the very notion of miniaturizing projectors will eventually lead us to that golden, shining moment in the future, the moment wherein we’ll walk up to a touchscreen, press a button, and a tiny beam of light we can barely see will project some kind of spinning image of our dreams, right in front of us. Why is it that all my expectations of future technological direction can be traced back to 3 or 4 movies?

Getting back to the projector, though: it’s the versatility of it all that’s incredible. I think this is a ridiculous moment, overall, for the amount of new technology that is suddenly being crammed down into small spaces. We’ve got a full-fledged HDTV camera with interchangeable, pro-level lenses in the new Canon EOS Mark II 5D, the juggernaut that is the iPhone, a netbook revolution, and 3d Printers that don’t take up a room but rather just some space on your desk. The amount of time between these innovations keeps shrinking exponentially. What seems to be different this time is we’re not looking at leaps and bounds in say, processing speed, but in the physical nature of things: product size, digital imaging, incredibly small but still-usable products.

When the launch of the new Macbooks gets a video detailing the exact industrial design process as a crucial launch component, there’s some kind of new object-design era at hand, no? It’s a fun time to be buying stuff.

Here’s something different. There’s a flickr pool out there called The End, which collects all the end title screens from about 500 different films. Many of these are by necessity classic ones, since most modern films don’t often feature such a firm close–it went out of style, likely seen as a formal holdover from literature, from a time when films still weren’t accepted as a valid art form unto themselves.

Some filmmakers still use the device, of course, but it’s largely ironic. Last year’s great Ratatouille, for example, used it, but it was the famous French ‘fin’, which suited the movie perfectly, while standing out more as a nod to Paris and the idea of french-ness than any kind of homage to a filmmaking tradition.

There’s something about seeing all these titles in one place–it’s like repeating a favourite word over and over again until it loses its original meaning, and then suddenly ‘The End’ seems an entirely strange thing to say at the end of a film, too unnatural, overly obvious–a world of typographic artifacts we didn’t know existed until the strange ways of the internet brought them to us.

The end screen of The Man With the Golden Arm, done by Saul Bass, is a true classic (although it does make me think of Anatomy of a Murder, also done by him), and anyone interested in one of the most unique and talented film titlers and illustrators of the 20th century would do well to find some of his work. For anyone interested in typography, he was simply the best title designer around, and could do wondrous things with minimalistic animation and good type: just look at these examples plus some classic title videos below.

Logo design is crazy, as it’s extremely simplified work that gets crammed into finely-honed, pored-over design. If there’s any area of design where a company’s CEO is going to want to cast his judgement, it’s going to be here, and the pitfalls inherent in wanting something trendy or flashy, or listening to insane amounts of buzzwords from branding experts more versed in talk than in actual design runs extremely high

So the winners of the WOLDA awards tend towards simplicity, which is great. This year, the winner is the One Degree logo from Rupert Murdoch’s initiative. It’s a simple logo with a clearly-defined concept behind it, which sorta makes it one of the best in the world for 2008. Good logo design can be notoriously hard to judge, so sometimes you have to give these a bit of time. It’s hard to know what kind of logo will be instantly memorable, even if you’re a pro at it.

I really love this one, since it highlights the foreignness of something without resorting to silly cliche. It’s great and entirely typographical, and uses just a series of accents with a slightly foreign sounding name to get it all across. Foreign hats work like accents on your head.

This winner of the “Best of Europe” is perfect. I don’t think you could ask for a better wine logo. It’s not false-prestigious, even though the name could have easily made it so. It’s just simple, clean, and beautiful.

This “Best of Belgium” logo, for a handbag company, is also fantastic. It covers the idea using what seems to be only typography at the beginning, until you realize it’s also the product itself. Great work.

La Main Gauche from France is great, even though I don’t know exactly what it is (ah, I’ve since discovered it’s an events agency), but since it means ‘the left hand’ and since a ‘good left’ involves a punching bag, I’ll accept the connection. It’s not the best one here, but it’s memorable.

This one, for the British company Education International, works extremely well too–using lines and ultra-basic basic shapes to cover the fact that it involves reading and education and well, little else. Modernist design personified. Go-post-soviet design! (it was done in Romania.)

Switzerland Alps and Arts is an example of what I like to think of as classic logo design–no puns, no tricks, no obsessive study about what the meaning of it is and all the rest, instead it’s just some alps and some lines and a simple, straightforward logo that you’d get 50 years ago from a quality agency.

And if that’s not enough and you still need more quality logo design resources, check out this invaluable site.