Category: Design

Remember that Kickstarter the other day to reprint 1975’s NASA Graphics Standards Manual? It’s been funded, but if you want to get your hands on the content now, NASA has released the book as a PDF.

If you’re looking for more NASA logo history, the agency has also published Emblems of Exploration:

This publication concentrates on the rich and interesting history of the conception and implementation of the world-famous NACA and NASA seals and insignias that have been displayed for decades on aeronautics and space research vehicles and facilities, as well as those proudly worn by flight research pilots, astronauts, and the dedicated employees of these two world-class organizations.

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Earlier this week, news broke that the Memphis Apple Store is moving to a new space around the corner from its current location, and will be one of the company’s first stores to sport a new design. Here’s what the store will look like:

Image credit: The Commercial Appeal

In a video hosted on the City of Germantown website, (skip to 1:30:00) plans for the store are shared. The new storefront will use ground-roof glass panels, surrounded by matte granite, with no visible supports or joints.

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I don’t use Tumblr a whole lot, and while I know this is a good change, it is a little sad to see a weird part of the network’s UI go away.

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This morning, Google rolled out their new logo. The new look is flat and crisp, but still retains the colorful look we’ve come to expect from the company. This lengthy blog post goes into the choices behind the redesign, and is a fun look at how you go about reworking one of the most-viewed logos on the planet.

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I’ve linked to the NASA Graphics Standards Manual before, but now there’s a Kickstarter project to re-print it. I would love to have this on my bookshelf, so I backed it already. I sure hope the team behind this can meet their goal.

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I’m not a huge Porsche fan, but the 911 is a fascinating study in how a design language can work for decades.

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Michael Bierut:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Design Program is a modernist vision for an optimistic future. The logo (often referred to as the “worm”) evokes qualities of unity, technical precision, scientific capabilities and uniqueness. Reduced to its simplest form; the one width, continuous-stroke letters are as contemporary today as when the logo was first introduced by Richard Danne (Design Director) and Bruce Blackburn (Designer) at Danne & Blackburn, New York, NY) more than 37 years ago. How then, in 1992, after 19 years, did such an emblematic design program for a future-oriented Federal Agency be dropped for it’s previous (now current) Insignia (the “meatball”)? What follows is a heartfelt personal account from Mr. Danne on the obstacles and achievements of one of the century’s most important and widely published design programs.

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This may win for my favorite “how big is the solar system?” demonstration.

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Sarah Perez at TechCrunch:

There aren’t a lot details being offered about the analytics service’s feature set at this time, but Apple says the service will offer developers the ability to track how often customers visit an app’s page on the App Store, find out how many users open the app over time, check on app and in-app purchase sales, create custom campaign links and follow the success of marketing campaigns, and understand which websites refer the most users.

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Wired’s David Pierce, describing a conversation with Apple’s human-interface boss Alan Dye:

He flips a few pages further into the making-of book, onto the first of several full-page spreads with gorgeous photos of jellyfish. There’s no obvious reason to have a jellyfish watch face. Dye just loves the way they look. “We thought that there was something beautiful about jellyfish, in this sort of space-y, alien, abstract sort of way,” he says. But they didn’t just visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium with an underwater camera. They built a tank in their studio, and shot a variety of species at 300 frames-per-second on incredibly high-end slow-motion Phantom cameras. Then they shrunk the resulting 4096 x 2304 images to fit the Watch’s screen, which is less than a tenth the size. Now, “when you look at the Motion face of the jellyfish, no reasonable person can see that level of detail,” Dye says. “And yet to us it’s really important to get those details right.”

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Honestly, it’s a lot simplier inside than I thought it would be.

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With Mad Men’s final run starting a week from today, The New York Times has published an interview with John Hamm, focusing on some key moments in his character’s time on screen. The first story is about one of the best moments in the show:

Here’s what Hamm says about it:

It’s an important moment in the development of the character, where people go, ‘Oh, this guy’s not just a sweet-talking guy in a fancy suit. He’s a soulful person.’ It was beautifully shot. We didn’t really want to use a working slide projector, they’re crazy noisy, so we had some digital thing. But the slides looked wrong somehow. We had to fix that and make them smudgy. At some point we ended up just running the slide projector in the room. I don’t know [how people were reacting to the speech]. I wasn’t exactly running back to the monitors, seeing how every line was landing. I was pretty focused on myself.

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