christophe thinks out loud

Oooh, Shiny

A List Apart and Speak Up are very beautifully-designed blogs.

Cool DVD Cases

DVD cases suck. Big time. They are cheap, nasty things with completely inadequate central hubs that allow the DVD to come loose and rattle around inside, scratching the sucker up and making it completely unplayable: In the jargon of the industry, what you then have is a “shaker.” Shakers are defectives, even if porn video manufacturers, skinflints one and all, try to persuade you otherwise. (“Oh, just push it back on. It’ll be fine.”)

At Blowfish, we inspect every single DVD that comes in to make sure it isn’t a shaker, and even so, some manage to get on the shelf (we also check them before we pack them, just in case). We get about 1-2% shakers, which is a ton of returns we have to send back to the manufacturer. DVD cases suck.

It looks like these cases may not suck. They certainly look cool. I’ve ordered some, and we might use them for future Blowfish Video productions. And if you need to re-box a DVD or CD, or put out a short-run title (attention, Apple Garage Band users!), this may be just the thing for you.

Type

Blowfish is getting ready to publish its first book (not counting the catalogs), and I rather splurged on type from Emigré for it. (Our house standard type faces are Myriad and Minion, both from Adobe, and they’re fine fonts and all that, but you get a bit bored with them after 10 years.)

Along those lines, TypeCon 2004 will be in San Francisco at the end of July, and I’m hoping I can spring the time to get to it.

A Better Brief

Greg Storey of Airbag (a great blog I just discovered via this link) redesigned a now-infamous White House intelligence brief in a superior, easy-to-follow style.

Would it have a made a difference come 9/11? Impossible to say. But this provides a wonderfully brief (so to speak) and relevant discussion of the importance of good design.

Myco-Art

A few weeks ago at the SF Farmers Market, I was looking through a stall filled with all sorts of wonderful kinds of mushrooms and other fungus, and thinking, "What in the world do you do with all these?"

It did not occur to me to grow them into artwork. This is what separates me from the artists.

However, this did occur to artist Philip Roth, and the result is his show "Organized," at Machine Project in Los Angeles (via Boing Boing).

(Did you know that mushrooms will save the world?)