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.

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 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?

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.

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.

One thing I kinda like doing is discovering an illustrator or designer after I’ve already purchased or enjoyed some bit of his/her work without knowing it, and then being taken in by the rest of their stuff. The latest candidate for this process of mine is Olly Moss, whose stuff I first saw on Threadless a long time ago. Specifically, that was this Spoilt t-shirt, which fit well with Threadless’s generally clever theme and plays on words.

Turns out this young designer (he’s 21) has also done some great re-imagingins of film posters, which for some reason is a tiny corner of the design world that I can’t help but be enthralled by every time. I have to say, if I was working in the packaging/publicity department of any major studio, I’d be out canvassing these guys and letting them do the hard work for me. Just looking back at Now Showing, any of the major studios have ready-made covers for any future blu-ray special editions, no problem.

Check out his awesome re-imagingings of the great film The Deer Hunter, plus Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. He’s also doing some good work with colour-layering, throwing a bit of typography-based information in there to boot. The “retro band/old song vs. new DJ/new beat = remix” illustration is fantastic, a nice simple encapsulation of where a remix lies, told through a design that stands out.

Then for the people who are somehow visually excited when they see mixing consoles (check), we’ve got his wonderful Mixer Shirt (called AV). Speaking of his shirts, he was also responsible for the Nintendo Family Tree shirt that I pointed out in the last month’s post on pixels. As seen below, his infographic stuff is playful without being overly coy–all fine examples of, say… the Threadless Aesthetic, if there is such a thing, only done right nearly every time.

I’ve seen his designs dozens of times and they’re still funny, which isn’t always the case with Threadless. Partially it’s the illustration, which holds up in a kind of aircraft-emergency-pamphlet way, but the typography and sense of visual timing (check out the rules of shotgun one) are spot-on. This kind of stuff is hard to do well, which is painfully evidenced by the mountain of threadless-imitation sites out there trying to turn bad puns into even crappier t-shirts. Here’s the winning formula: very, very solid joke + design that would make a good shirt even if the joke weren’t funny at all = memorable and funny shirt… maybe. Olly Moss knows how it’s done.

I’m one of those relatively new wine drinkers that knows next-to-nothing about actual wine, but just enough to pretend that I know what I’m doing when selecting one. If I’m with a group of people who don’t usually buy wine, they defer to me. This is about as good an idea as closing one’s eyes and selecting a wine at random, but hey, I’ll take the extra responsibility.

This is mainly because it lets me do that certain type of wine-browsing–you know the one–where you walk along the racks, picking up certain bottles, turning them over, and muttering comments to yourself that you hope your friends take for informed musings on a particular vintage. If they only knew I was just saying “this one is a red one…” or “this one is from France…”

Despite my solid sommelier credentials, I’m not above occasionally choosing wine based on its packaging. I once bought a bottle of Ontario wine with a twist-off top because it had a bunch of well-designed raccoons on the bottle. It wasn’t that good (at least… I don’t think it was that great), but what can you do when faced with an awesome bottle?

That’s the question I might have to ask myself when I finally happen upon these products in-store, three examples of great design applied to the wine bottle. Our first example is a Shiraz called Boarding Pass, and comes from Australia’s R Wines. It’s a top example of creative packaging design as applied to a pretty constrained medium–if you want to be taken seriously as a wine producer, wild innovations in bottle design and shape usually mean you’ll get looked over by serious buyers. This is a perfect compromise: the design is fresh and original, and the playful luggage tag around the neck is a great touch. I’d go out of my way to buy this just so I could take it somewhere.

The second bottle to catch my eye comes from Spain–it’s the Baud-designed Lazarus Wine, with its packaging done entirely in Braille. Another great piece of work that would have my cash if I walked by it on a rack, no questions asked. Again, it’s tricky with wine, as most innovative design skirts the original/gaudy line, and subtlety is crucial in putting out a bottle that’ll catch the eye without drawing a follow-up groan.

My last candidate isn’t a bottle design at all, but rather these custom wine tags from popptags. They’re funny, honest, and letterpressed on recycled paper. There are tons of well-written, witty cards out there now, but these are both seriously funny and beautiful to look at. I’d go nuts if I got a nice bottle of wine with a tag on it that said “Nothing Says Thank You Like a Bottle of Wine I Know Nothing About.” Plus “The Wine Store Guy Said This Was Good” is a printed version of the exact line I spoke when recently giving someone a bottle. I think my friends and family know what they’re getting this year–yes indeed, a bunch of hilarious tags attached to thick $5.00 bottles full of red liquid.

Once again MAKE Magazine turns us on to something fantastic: the sculpture of Susy Oliveira. I have to say I haven’t seen anything like this before, and there is something, like the original MAKE poster said, that reminds me of the dead bodies in various video games. While that’s just a fleeting reference–Oliveira is an new Canadian artist doing work across several fields, and this is just one of them–it’s the one that caught my attention.

What is it about taking computer-inspired shapes and forms, like the constrictions of polygons, and pulling them out into the open world? Why is this fascinating? Art historians (and I am definitely not one of them) could insert these works somewhere along the “history of sculpture” timeline, tracing influences of certain movements without ever touching the computerized aspect of it. But that very connection to computerization is what makes all the difference: these are photos, printed out and sculpted on top of foam in such a way that they resemble the simplistic polygons of the first three-dimensional games (think Virtua Fighter).

What I’d really love to do is have the chance to see this work in person, where I could walk around it and see it from varying angles, which is obviously a large part of the work’s significance: each piece of the surface has a series of separate angles created by the polygons, which make even something as simple as a pair of jeans seem strange and unreal.

The appeal of all these projects still gets me thinking: does their appeal come solely from their nods to computer-based design? Game designers had to use primitive, obvious polygons during the initial stages of 3d-game design, and 8-bit games were constrained into using the pixel as building block. Now, are the children who grew up with those generations clamouring for artistic representations of those childhood touchstones in a more mature context?

Well, that’s one way of putting it, and at the moment that’s how I approach these things at first–they hit a series of nostalgic buttons, and if the art can remain interesting beyond that, then I can cast any nods to a pre-existing, even video-game related concept aside and look for more. And there seems to be plenty here.

For some reason I’ve been seeing a lot of mention of Miroslav Sasek around various websites recently. What he’s primarily known for is the series of books called This Is…, which provide a children’s introduction to various cities, but also work as charming guidebooks/introductions to readers of any age.

His idea came from noticing that parents, when on various trips with their children, tended to stay absorbed in their various surroundings, leaving the kids to figure out exactly what the hell is going on for themselves. Writing from a child’s point of view, his books please everyone through sheer charm alone. The illustrations explain, from the first time you see them, exactly why these books aren’t just pedestrian stuff for your kids, but rather bewitching illustrative glimpses of each city they profile.

Some thoughts from his official website:

This is London is the second This is book and undoubtedly one of the best. Sasek concentrates on the things he likes best: people, costume, transport and local details that somehow come together to form a whole impression of the city that still seems quite accurate today.

Here’s a review of one of his titles from no less than the Times Literary Supplement:

The pattern of M. Sasek’s books is now firmly established. It would be difficult for him to introduce innovations, and these would not be welcomed by his admirers, who delight in the fixed conventions of his unconventional portraits. It is the more remarkable that each book is pure Sasek and at the same time each catches the characteristic atmosphere of his subject…

This is Venice has many of the artist’s gentle digs at tourists and at the vendors who feed on them. It shows, too, that M. Sasek is primarily an architectural draughtsman. His drawings of churches, palaces and odd corners are brilliant simplifications which never depart from the essential truths of building. That he draws buildings not in noble isolation but surrounded by the mess and muddle of a living city — washing on the line, telly-aerials on the roof — endears him more deeply to the reader.

His art style renders the cities immensely appealing to every reader, and these are some books that you’d do fine getting any kids or travelers in your family this year. His images are funny, and poke at the gawking tourists and the general things touristy families like to do (or feel terribly obligated to do) in each city.

He also did some other books not entirely focused on cities but sites, including This is the United Nations and This is Cape Canaveral (now called Kennedy), which are gold mines. Check out his great UN book here, and the Cape Canaveral image below.

While it’s only November, it’s always useful to collect various links in the endless lead-up to Christmas, in case you need some ideas for thoughtful, interesting gifts. As each Christmas passes, I always find myself increasingly obliged to find gifts for various kids in my extended family, and since I don’t have much experience with toy stores any more, and can’t buy children’s clothes to save my life, I generally try to find gifts that seem timelessly appealing and unique enough to mean something. Sasek’s books fit perfectly into this category. They’ll thrill any parent too.