Chad Hagen has offered up a series of prints entitled Nonsensical Infographic. I'm particularly prone to No. 1 and No. 2 but No. 3 and No. 4 take the nonsensical angle to new levels.

via Drew.

Big thanks to Paige and Julien for the heads up on the ARCHI/MAPS Tumblog. While I am sure there is no shortage of architectural image blogs floating around the interwebs I find the offerings from this particular one right up my alley. I mean, try telling me you don't love this or this. You can't! Because, like me, you do love it.

Heads up - VHX now works on mobile devices; iPhone and iPad included. The Dashboard of videos posted by friends continues to be great but the Channels option for Devour, Boing Boing, Laughing Squid and Movie Trailers should more than suffice for wasting an entire day.

Chris Herron Design has posted an exhaustive case study on Rebranding Hell. The writeups are amazingly true-to-form representations of a legitimate corporate overhaul; as is the major baffling turn of direction during Phase 2. The end result is silly and ridiculous but the plethora of logos leading to that point are quite impressive.

via Mr. Chad Pugh.

I stumbled upon this jQuery HTML5 Uploader last night and was quite impressed from the demo. The ability to drag and drop files right into the browser for upload to the server seems like a dream come true, especially given how easy the Uploader looks to configure. After fiddling with it for a little bit last night it's not quite as easy as the two lines of code they'd have you believe - as you need to write callbacks for all the events to give insight to the actual user. It's also (apparently) not compatible with anything except Chrome and Firefox but, regardless, nice proof of concept and potentially quite useful down the line.

After much deliberation (and a few false starts) I finally got my act together for my Summer Mix Series submission. Jamie had challenged me not to go the easy route and create another entry in the Summer Nights series... so I had to come up with something new. The result is, Altered Voices, a compilation featuring tracks utilizing voice modification in some form or another. There's some heavy vocoder, some brilliant editing or maybe just an entirely synthesized vocal track. The tracklisting may be a lot of familiar names (even from previous mixes) but it's great to have them all put together for one listening experience.

[ Single MP3 | Single M4A | Individual MP3 ZIP ]

1. Electric Light Orchestra - Yours Truly, 2095
2. Yellow Magic Orchestra - Technopolis
3. Telecommunicators - Pandora
4. Kavinsky - Nightcall (Dustin N'Guyen Remix)
5. Birdy Nam Nam - The Parachute Ending
6. Honor Student - Dueling Keytars
7. Rafter - No F*cking Around
8. Black Moth Super Rainbow - Lost, Picking Flowers in the Woods
9. Carl Sagan - Glorious Dawn
10. Jogger - Biss
11. Plone - Plock
12. Sexy Prison - Slow Walk In a Glad Rain
13. Pete Drake - Forever
14. Grandaddy - Jeddy 3's Poem
15. AIR - How Does It Make You Feel?
16. Neil Young - Sample And Hold
17. Giorgio Moroder - E=MC2

Been spending some time this week exploring the work of filmmaker Jamie Travis. He has a handful of works - all seemingly existing in the world of highly-stylized sets, vaguely macabre humor and focusing on strange trails and tribulations of kids. His YouTube channel has a number of short trailers that give you an idea of his visual style. I also managed to stumble upon this copy of The Saddest Boy in the World being shown in its entirety... as long as you don't mind Russian subtitles.

I have mentioned the works of NSAG alumni Brad Vetter previously but he just relaunched his official portfolio and I implore you to take a few moments to browse through it. He's posted work dating back as far as 2004 and, unsurprisingly, it's all great. He really has a phenomenal grasp on the use of woodtype and letterpress.

• Usability in Icons - decent write-up on the use of the "Link" icon and how ineffective it is. It's unfortunate that there really isn't a conclusion as to what would be better than the chain or globe icon but at least there's an agreement that it's a terrible representation.
• The Quick Website Launch Checklist - nice rundown of items to keep in mind when launching a site. Honestly, I don't stick to all of these at all but it's nice to have a list to run through just to calm yourself a bit.

I'm torn on this series of works from Ofra Lapid entitled Broken Houses. Each image features a small scale model of a decaying building set on a simple gray background. I love the juxtaposition of the chaos of the dilapidated building and the cleanliness of the setting but the models are comprised of images "found on the web while pursuing an amateur photographer from North Dakota who obsessively documents the decaying process of these houses." For some reason having the source imagery come from an unnamed source seems to cheapen the experience for me. Despite that, the resulting gallery is incredibly nice.

via PS.

My apologies on the shortened Friday videos last week.. I could barely keep my eyes open all day. Hopefully this perfect morsel of a video treat - That's a Ten - will make up for it. Personally, I think a little lip smacking combined with such a memorable catchphrase is going to catch on big time.

Heads up Chicago residents - Public School is having a gallery show at The Family Room. The opening is September 9th and will feature contributions from Cody Haltom, Will Bryant, Justin David Cox, Matthew Genitempo and Jay B Sauceda. If you were one to mark worthwhile events in a calendar, this would be one of them.

Fast Company has a great article on Adam Lisagor - of Sandwich Video and You Look Nice Today - regarding his pitch videos for various apps; Flipboard, Square and Everyday among them. Aside from the interesting aspect of reading about his process, his history and his success it's fascinating to me that I generally assumed he was involved in these products in some form; not just pitching them. I suppose that's a testament to his believability in the pitch, as well as my general ignorance in the world of advertising.

Regardless, he seems like someone generally involved in Good Things. I'ma keep an eye on what he's up to.

via Sox.

There is much that I love about the Contrast Rebellion - the site design, the simple message campaigning for higher contrast in websites and, unsurprisingly, the readability. What I don't love is that their examples of sites in the wild using high contrast are all black on white (or white on black). This seems to work against the idea that "contrasty dark text can look equally good" because it implies that you really don't have any palette to work with. Aside from that, I'm a fan.

I somehow caught one rather hellacious bug.. so I'm putting in a lot of time sleeping / not browsing the Internet. That being said, I'd hate to deprive you of video ridiculousness.. even if it is a shortened version. Enjoy the playlist.

• Livin De Life - I am sure this guy is way too rich to be embarrassed but, lordy, he should be. How do old white men get talked into making rap videos?
• How To Pronounce Hamburger - you may have seen the Pronunciation Book series of videos but, despite the inaccuracies, the Pronunciation Manual is light years more amusing.
• Help Megan Amram get on Glee - the video is old but it's still quite entertaining. If you aren't following her on Twitter, you're missing out.
• Future Son - not hysterical but just funny enough!

Have a great weekend.

Ah yes, another installment of Everything. Episode 18 is more of the same goodness that they always seem to deliver. I'd say that the Daniels piece is my favorite but there's always something worthwhile in there.

FontFeed points out that PBS Arts launched their second episode of Off Book, focusing on Type. The episode features the likes of Hoefler Frere-Jones, Paula Scher and Eddie Opara - all doing great things with typography. Don't let that 7 minute time length intimidate you into watching it later.. you'll be sucked in right off the bat.

The work of Bruce Pennington falls so heavily into the sci-fi / fantasy realm that you may have to take a moment to consider it without humorous irony. We've become accustomed to seeing images of this nature and assuming they're being presented for ridiculous reasons, rather than legitimate artistic measures. However, I legitimately enjoy this or this. Granted, this is pretty absurd but that's part of the fun.

Recently, Chad steered me towards Mapnificent - an engaging tool that dynamically shows you "areas you can reach with public transport in a given time." If you live in an area without much public transport, like Nashville, it may not be all that handy but somewhere like San Francisco, New York or Portland reveals a lot of very useful information. At the very least, if you're considering moving it could be a phenomenal tool to determine where your best neighborhood to check out should be.

Under Consideration recently launched a new division; Art of the Menu. The site shares inspiring, insightful and, occasionally, ridiculous restaurant menus. I wonder if this only applies to printed material or if a wall menu could make its way in there as well? There is obviously a wide variety of design within the realm of menu design so it seems like a site worth keeping an eye on.