The Donut Project

A beautiful new video from Pentagram celebrating their 40th Anniversary. Enjoy!

Familytree is a small creative studio that got its start in 2008. Over the last few years their posters have been popping up in familiar places like, PRINT, Apartment Therapy, and Under Consideration FPO

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An odd coincidence that this is being posted the day Facebook goes public. Rob Sheridan designed the album art for the Social Network, and many other films you may have seen, and I’m pretty floored with how he went about it. He and Trent Reznor, one of the composers for the film, wanted to make the album art similar to the movie but also “wanted to make it weird”.

An early idea I had was to digitally corrupt the images we had from the film, combining a “glitch art” visual aesthetic I’ve always been interested in with a metaphor for digital images shared on Facebook, the corruption they’re susceptible to, and the corruption portrayed in the film. This idea resonated with Trent, so I began experimenting with different ways to destroy the publicity stills Sony had sent me.

Rob went into the source code of each image in a plain text editor, like Text Edit, and copied pasted and deleted code to create the effects seen. By manipulating the code of the images by hand he was paying homage to the hacker mentality at Facebook. Its the perfect marriage of concept and execution.

See more from the Social Network and more of his work.

Writing for a blog is no easy task, especially if you’re putting in the extra effort to write about something you believe in, something organic. If you’re a regular to The Donut Project, you’ve probably noticed an increase in posting over the past few months.

The Donut Project is about opportunity, serving up ideas and bringing to light new possibilities. That being said we welcome a new batch of talented guest contributors, young creatives, aspiring to inspire others and find their own voice in a larger ongoing conversation of inspiration, design, and opinion.

We’re excited to introduce Casey Sandala, Jason Richburg, Eric Courtney, and Todd Wendorff, each bringing their own fresh perspective to our blog, broadening our voice in the design community.

Stay tuned.

A few of us TDP-ers have been working on a collaborative playlist and we thought we should share it with all of you. The playlist is what we’ve been listening to at work and all of the tracks fall in the ‘Future Garage’ genre. Give it a listen, let us know what you think.

The first tablet most of us ever owned wasn’t the iPad. It was the Etch A Sketch.

A new project up for funding on Kickstarter, the Etcher is an iPad case with functioning Etch A Sketch knobs that turn your iPad into a real Etch A Sketch.

Etcher adds functional knobs to the iPad. As a user turns these knobs, lines appear on the iPad screen, exactly like the original Etch a Sketch. Improving on the original, users can save their drawings in digital format and share with friends and family over email and social media sites like Facebook.

It even erases when you shake it! (Just like Mitt Romney! :p )

Funding just started, so get one of the early-bird pledge-points while you can → Etcher on Kickstarter

I would hate to be the person behind this algorithm, I’m sure it was one headache of a math problem.
Using the building height and the sun’s path, Bright Light calculates where the sun will be shining at certain times during the day. This application could also be used to locate groves of Hipsters as they will all be in the sun, wearing Ray-Bans, and in big cities, as depicted in the video. I don’t know if I love wearing my Ray-Bans enough to go chasing the sun with my iPhone, but none the less a pretty ingenius application. Nice work Ray-Ban!

While it may have been a rainy and unbearable Monday night in NYC, the auditorium at Cooper Union still managed to draw an impressive crowd of creatives. The crowd pleaser? Famed Italian type designer, Tony Di Spigna. His tales of working up the ladder within the Lubalin studio lead to his amusing, yet relatable tales of the designer within us all.

As a designer, he stressed, you should be able to design everything from a stamp to a battleship. Even after a client presentation gone wrong with Yellow Pages, his devotion and passion for typography remained contagious.

Enjoy a few slides from his presentation. His wit and approach to typography is a real aspiration.

“Develop the technology between your ears. Technology doesn’t make a bad idea better.”
—Tony Di Spigna