No idea whether the vodka is any good, but what a great design for a super premium vodka that really breaks through.

It always amazes me how good industrial design can really enhance consumer products–both aesthetically and functionally. A few weeks ago, a friend was visiting from out of town. He had been interning at Apple computer over the past couple of quarters and had all sorts of stories to tell about how ID drives literally everything at the company. Everything. It wasn’t much of a surprise (it is Apple), but I wish other companies had the same mindset.

For too many manufacturers ID seems like an afterthought, and its really a shame. Their lack of attention to it makes for products that are too similar to competitors’, look dated, or have poor usability. It seems when retail sales are down, they’re too quick to blame everything but their product design. Again it’s a real shame.

In any case though, I managed to finish out the rest of the site’s templates today. Now all of the Archive and Search Pages should be displaying properly.

Check out this video by three graphic designers. It shows how they recreated the beach scene from Saving Private Ryan for another project. Seriously awesome. Found over at brandflakes.

It seems like text fields in the toolbar seem to jump around and not work as expected. Once you enter a value, it retains it even after trying to put in a new one. A seemingly minor problem, but really annoying. Makes cropping photos or constrained selections just about impossible. Hopefully Adobe and Apple can sort this problem out soon, as it’s stopping me from upgrading on my G5 at home that I do production work on.

In other news, I went to see Tori Amos Monday night at the Auditorium Theater with Clay and Paige. It was definitely exciting to see her live for the first time, and hopefully won’t be the last. We were kind of surprised that she didn’t sing Me and a Gun (along with a few others), but apparently she made up for that at the Vic the night after. Guns and all. Bummer we didn’t go to that show, too.

The attention to detail in the framework’s default typography is incredible–type aligns to a common baseline grid and there is even support for incremental leading. It’s not even v1.0 and it is already chock full of web design wonderfulness.

Massive kudos to Olav Bjørkøy for a job really well done.

…is the bane of my existence.

They’re time-consuming and tedious to research and produce, but the challenge of designing an arresting map (both visually and informatively) is a wonderful experience. With the potentially infinite amount of information present with a map, even the subtlest of aesthetic changes can vastly affect the information hierarchy and the effectiveness of the map.

A great example is the NYC subway map redone by Kick Design. The map contains massive amounts of information, but its extremely well designed, making the information easy to digest.

At Gams, we’ve been working on a web site for the past week for one of our vendors. I was pretty reluctant about working on the project, but now its really starting to come together. One of my initial design concepts was chosen and I’ve been putting a lot of time in on a few flash pieces that will drop into different sections on the site. We’ll see how it goes.

One of the cooler things I found online was graffiti archaeology, a really well-done interactive applet that shows graffiti in a place over time. Another great resource were all the photographs posted over at flickr.

Anyhow, check out two of the hat designs.

We’ve also been using the new version of Adobe’s creative suite. So far, the new apps kick some pretty serious ass. The new features in Photoshop and Indesign are useful, but Illustrator’s new features really take the cake.

LiveColor is delicious. So is the new UI. Being able to use alignment tools on individual anchors is heavenly. However, Adobe really took a few steps back when they added in isolation mode. It was touted as an exciting new feature, but all it’s done for me so far is suck. You can’t edit opacity masks, nor can you lock, hide, or switch to outline view (probably some other limitations). Real annoying.

We’ve been working on some cool projects and I’ve started to get some samples of the finished pieces. As they come in, I’m going to start posting some photos of them here.

We’re down one art director at the agency and our biggest client has been giving us more work than we can handle. The account executive on the account has been trying to dig us out of the situation, but with me being the only creative on the account it’s been a nightmare. Deadlines have been tight and I’ve been spending way too much time at the office.

We tried bringing in a few freelancers, but the majority of them have been limited to production work. Helpful, but not helpful enough. Further complicating problems, everyone at the agency is still working on refurbished/junk iMac G5s and mac minis that are constantly crashing, eating files and not fast enough to keep pace with the amount of work we have to turn around in a day’s time.

Hopefully things will take a turn for the better. However, in the meantime I’m going to start looking elsewhere for other opportunities in the area. We’ll see how things go.