The Fume Division

иконописПодарък иконаматрациMore design inspiration from a seller of vintage bottlecaps.

Thanks to Draplin Design Co.

Wondrous logos on vintage American farm equipment. You can feel optimism in the color palettes, strength in the typography. iPhone’d at the Minnesota State Fair 8/09.

The single worst thing that can appear on your website. Smart programming makes it easy to add sections as you need them; if you don’t have the content yet, why expose your lack of preparation to the world? And if your web designer or developer proposes anything like this, fire them and find one that has a more creative solution.

Consummate artist, creative force, and inspired persona Beck gets together with some friends, covers an album in a day, then releases it a song at a time, one each week. This time around, it’s The Velvet Underground & Nico; Thorunn Magnusdottir’s icelandic tones are hauntingly reminiscent of Nico, while Beck et al. dissect and discombobulate. Brilliant.

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico “All Tomorrow’s Parties” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Long before the album cover was reduced to the diminutive format of the CD and then, today, relegated to pixelated icons, Tom Wilkes created conceptual, iconic, and even controversial album art in the glorious 12″ format.

Large enough to draw its viewer in to engage with subtleties (like the bits of graffiti on Beggars Banquet or the Beatles-esque dwarves on All Things Must Pass), Wilkes was a photographer and graphic artist whose work existed in an era where the artwork and the music were partners in marketing the musicians’ brand–all things must pass, indeed.

Brilliant. The guts of 14-year old Jerry Levitan to sneak in, the guts of Lennon to answer the questions.

Kodachrome, with its complex processing (now only offered by a shop in Kansas), was discontinued last month by Kodak. The beauty of its color reproduction and the quality if afforded its subjects is lost in an era of instantly gratifying digital images, but its influence on the way we recall historic images is legacy. Fortune offers 20 photos by which to remember its importance to photography.

A rare color shot by Ansel Adams for Fortune, 1945

Exceptional article from a back issue of the Times on structuring and leading effective meetings. In today’s economy of attention, it rings as particularly timely. Executive summary from the article:

1. Whoever calls a meeting should be explicit about its objectives. This means specifying tangible goals and assigning responsibility for creating, summarizing and reporting on them. Ask yourself this question: Specifically, what do we want accomplished when we walk out of the room?
2. Everyone should think carefully about the opportunity costs of a meeting: How many participants are really needed? (Almost all business teams and committees are too big.) How long should the meeting last? Set a definite ending time. Anyone who doubts that the meeting is necessary, or thinks it’s too long, should speak up.
3. After productive or unproductive meetings, assign credit or blame to the person in charge. Then, if people have track records of leading ineffective meetings, don’t let them lead future sessions. When their expertise is essential, make them subordinate to an effective meeting leader.

Author Reid Haiste, University of Chicago professor, by Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

Look for this brilliant work in all the advertising award annuals: Google Street View advertising to announce its recent arrival in Holland. Created by students Eduard van Bennekom and Jasper Diks at the Junior Academy for Art Direction in Amsterdam. The power of a clear, simple idea. (Thanks to Alex.)

In this day in age, this seems simply inexcusable in building and operating an e-commerce site. Sale lost. (I suppose that, at the least, they’re aware of a problem between their shopping cart functions and non-IE browsers.)