If you’ve heard recently, the Old Spice guy Isaiah Mustafa is back. His return makes this the perfect time to share with you a project that I (Shelby) completed a few months ago for fun. The goal was to create a refined and informative infographic. At the time of creating this the Old Spice campaign entitled “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was in full swing. Wieden + Kennedy were the brains behind the whole campaign and the results of their vision led to an exponential amount of social media buzz, exponentially exceeding the expectations.
The question was how do I design for this. Do I pair the design with what the brand has established or do I take an alternate route? At the time I was heavily inspired by the international typographic style and Massimo Vignelli. This explains for the minimal layout and geometric line angles similar to the New York City subway maps. This direction didn’t come immediately. I had toyed around with various versions that were far from being relevant to Old Spice or being easily readable. Although with the final version having the least amount of information, it felt the most appropriate.
Data was collected from the marketing firm Symphony IRI.
Typeface used: Helvetica Neue Ltd Std
Nearly ten months ago, I (Shelby) had an idea that was inspired by the design community, one that I became very passionate about. The idea was to create some sort of platform to share what inspires you. We’ve seen it done before, but what I have for you is something I hope and believe you’ll really enjoy.
Designspiration is the outcome of my efforts to realize my idea, evolving into a site occupied by a diverse range of inspiration curated by its users. Designspiration or DSPN for short, focuses on the core principles of sharing inspiration and utilizes some great features; like a search function that works like a Swiss army knife, which I will discuss more in the post. Little did I know when starting this project that I would be clocking in more than 1,000 hours over the past ten months.
If you’re eager to check out the site, you can hit Designspiration.net or Ds.pn. With that said, I’m really excited to share this project and process with you…
Beautiful Bells doesn’t just sit down and work on one song, he experiments past what most producers even try to make and rides that out until he feels that journey has hit an enjoyable time for himself. That journey can be 20 mins or hours i’m sure but when it comes down to having a song I have a feeling its kind of fun digging thru that material, seems like an satisfying process. When it came down to picking a song from his album it was a bit hard since I think of the album as a listening session but I do find myself nodding my head to one of his more straight forward beats called Purple Topped and Flagrant.
Atlas Sound is giving away a free EP right now – DOWNLOAD IT HERE
My favorite live techno act is Portable, he’s miles ahead of most producers in that world, last time I saw him singing in a CV radio and in a Cosby sweater on a Manhattan rooftop in the rain. I saw Alan Abrahams aka Portable/Bodycode in 2005 in Detroit, he had long braids and had this amazing techno/tribal dance he was doing while he was playing, pure body music, dancing better than anyone that was on the dancefloor, so happy to see him remixing The Knife.
Banjo or Freakout, if your band name was different I would have probably checked you out earlier but i’m glad I finally did thanks to a few friend recommendations.
Up above is a full album stream of the new LP by Gold Panda, we got the exclusive stream because you guys seemed to love it soo much on a recent post, nice one ISO50 readers! below is a small blurb about the UK producer.
““I didn’t want to write ‘beats,’” says UK producer Gold Panda, “I didn’t want bangers. I wanted songs with structure.” And yet, despite the artist’s protests to the contrary, his debut album, Lucky Shiner, is full of bangers—of a kind. “Lots of factors affected the way it came together,” he explains, “touring, mixing, moving houses and splitting with a girlfriend. Family, friends, and lovers, places I’ve never been.” It’s that mix of directness and emotion that characterizes Lucky Shiner, an album of beat-driven electronic music that’s easy to fall in love with, and to. In Gold Panda’s world, vinyl-static beats and heart-on-sleeve melancholia collide, and the results are breathtaking.”
I’ve had these images laying around for ages and stumbled across them again tonight. This is a prototype digital camera Kodak produced way back in 1975. The “toaster-sized” system relied on a cassette tape for recording data. The digitized images took 23 seconds to record to tape which then had to be played back using a specialized system (shown in the second photo — note the name of the Motorola computer, “EXORciser”). This is one of those times where I’m tempted to say “look how far we’ve come in such a short time!”. But damn, 1975? I wasn’t even born. I never would have guessed they had this sort of tech back then.
I’m really not sure I’d be doing the things I do now if I was coming up back in those days. Either computers have made me lazy, or I’m just inherently lazy, but I honestly can’t imagine dealing with 23-second-per-image write times and cassette tapes.
Check out this piece about the process of creating the prototype by one of the original team members, Steve Sasson: “Plugged In – We Had No Idea“
It’s been almost a year now since I wrote my first post on data backup so I thought I’d do a follow-up and detail the backup scheme I ended up going with.
The original scheme was fundamentally flawed in that the off-site backup was still pretty susceptible to loss, damage, or theft and wasn’t truly off-site in the broad geographical sense. I was simply storing it at a house about three blocks away. Given the spacing (or lack thereof) of buildings in San Francisco, a few blocks means very little considering the ever-present threat of earthquake and/or fire.
So with that in mind, and after reading through the comments of the original post, I took Eydryan’s advice and looked into Backblaze. Backblaze is an online backup service for PC and Mac that allows unlimited data storage for $5/month per machine. This seemed a little too good to be true but I gave it a shot anyways. Much to my surprise, the service not only works, it works flawlessly and is about as dead-simple as anyone could ask for. It’s a little oversimplified for my tastes — being a PC user I’m more accustomed to layers-deep menus with infinite settings and options — but it does its job and does it well.
Backblaze in action (Also available for Mac)
I’ve been on Backblaze for around three weeks now and I’ve pushed up about 400GB of the 987GB total I have set to backup. Obviously the initial backup is pretty slow and depends a lot on your connection speed (I’m on Comcast), but I just allow it to crank away all day in the background and it hasn’t yet interfered much with any of my day to day activities. The internet has been a little sluggish lately while it’s moving everything up for the first time, but it’s a temporary annoyance and well worth it. I suppose I could just run it at night, but I’ve opted to let it go 24/7 to get the initial backup out of the way as soon as possible. I’ll probably be done backing up around the two month mark at which point Backblaze will begin incrementally updating files I’ve changed on my side. All the backups are encrypted so only I can view or access my files, which is a good feeling when you’re posting your life’s work to someone else’s data center.
As for local backup, I’m running an internal mirror drive which I then backup to an external which is still stored off-site. That’s a total of three physical copies of the data to which I have easy access. Backblaze is great for peace of mind in case of catastrophic loss, but when you just screwed up a 3GB PSB and need to go back a version, you really don’t want deal with the downtime involved in pulling it down from a server.
I’ve never felt this confident in terms of data security, the combination of local and online backup is virtually foolproof and gives me the best of both worlds in terms of ease of access and security. It’s actually sort of scary looking back at that first post and realizing how long I lived with the old system, catastrophe was just a careless neighbor away.
catalogtree is a multidisciplinary design studio based in Amsterdam. Their work is instantly recognizable for its complexity and exceptional clarity; a combination not easily achieved. Their ability to compress large amounts of data into these gorgeous infographics is unparalleled. Joris Maltha and Daniel Gross are the designers behind catalogtree and I had the pleasure to ask them a few questions before I left for Tokyo. Their answers and some example work after the jump.
What were your goals when you initially set up shop?
We never really set up shop and in a way this is our goal. To not have a shop and be amateurs at what we do. Right now we’re working on a 232 meter long radio antenna and are building a crystal radio to receive a local pirate station. We have never done this before and have no idea if this project will succeed.
Gizmodo has an interesting piece up about a top-secret digital version of the now discontinued Nikon Nikonos waterproof camera that was developed for use by Navy SEALs.
This Nikonos was a total mystery. A secret that not many people knew about until recently. In fact, its existence was repeatedly denied by the manufacturer, even after the US Navy published this photo, showing a member of SEAL Team One equipped with one and the following caption:
980608-N-3236B-003 NAVAL AIR BASE CORONADO, California (June 8, 1998) — Navy SEALs attached to SEAL Team One, Naval Air Base Coronado, CA, conducts training using the Nikon/Kodak DCS 425 underwater digital camera which can send real time digital images to decision makers, and an LPI LPD tracking device uses brevity codes to send both mission status and precise longitude/latitude. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer Mate 2nd Class Ted Banks. (RELEASED)
– Gizmodo
Pretty interesting stuff and kind of odd to see the branding intact on the model used by the SEALs. The Gizmodo article makes a good point that it’s a shame the consumer version was discontinued; even if you don’t do underwater photography, it would make for an excellent no hassle all weather setup. More info and links can be found in the original article.
Apparently there’s a pretty good used market for these; all you aspiring SEALs can start planning your beach assaults with a nice rig like this. I’d like to see a digital model, but aesthetically I’m still partial to the original 35mm version:
