Fifteen entries in "Random"

Summer 2008 was busy. At this point it’s all a bit of a blur. Between work, travel and an obsession with political punditry, it’s slightly difficult to remember what all happened. So, before we forget, a roundup of projects completed this summer…

U.N. Icons Suite

We worked with OCHA, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, to develop a standard symbol set for all OCHA maps. We created roughly 120 icons communicating a wide variety of subjects: security, relief materials, infrastructure, sanitation, etc. The symbol set was made into a typeface that OCHA cartographers will use worldwide.

The project was a serious graphic challenge. Some concepts are extremely difficult to represent using simple graphics. Consider a subject like security. How does one design distinct graphics for things like arrest, detention, abduction, assault, attack, forced entry, harassment/intimidation and hijacking?

Fortunately we were given enough time to get the set right. We’re pretty happy with the results. And attending meetings at the U.N. was a bit of an adventure.

Design by Matt Owens with significant assistance from Dylan Mulvaney, one of our summer interns.

Good

We worked with Good on The Hidden Cost of War, a 2-minute video feature examining the hidden costs of the Iraq war for the Transparency section of the new Good website. The research behind the piece comes from Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilme’s book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.

Design and animation by Matt Owens and Jason Bishop. Opening intro sequence by Mark Owens.

The piece has been getting some attention, and we were psyched to see it discussed, among other new Good video pieces, on Brian Lehrer Live:

(Skip to the 3:50 mark)

If you’re not familiar with Brian Lehrer, you should check out his regular 10am program on 93.9FM WNYC here in New York. You can listen on the web. He has the best opening theme music.

After the video piece turned out well, Good asked us to design the Transparency section of the November/December Good Magazine, now on newsstands. The Transparency section covered 5 topics: the hidden cost of war; the amount of energy burned by the average car vs. the average human; a glance at refugees worldwide; smokers by state; and taxi queues in the United States.

Some spreads:

You can see more from this project here.

Sesame Street

David’s spent the summer regressing back to his childhood. He was asked to direct four short spots for newest season of Sesame Street, season 39.

Drum Machine:

Forward and Backward:

A Boy and his Robot: Lunchtime:

Cowboy Patterns:

King Tuff, The Weight

In addition to Wes’ summer as The Rambler, he created two LP packages, one of which features a staggering coupling of complimentary spot colors, the second is more photo-driven, but equally ridiculous.

King Tuff Was Dead:

The Weight Are Men:

Nevikov

Athletics’ Jason Gnewikow has been busy with his fashion line under his phonetically spelled name: Jason Nevikov. Spring/Summer 2009 is currently in production, with some pieces already available via Oak:

http://www.oaknyc.com/product/jason-nevikov-1984
http://www.oaknyc.com/product/jason-nevikov-outdoor-min
http://www.oaknyc.com/product/jason-nevkov-brooklyn-har

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And that’s only half the summer. More coming…

Matt’s DustUp typeface strikes again:

(on Pete, not LL)

New T now available from Clandestine.

Just FYI, before all this, I was running a printing press:
A Brief Career In Printing.

Thanks to Duane King for scouring his graphical deep freeze for the overprinted Italian postcards he picked up in the 80s. Perfect. Reminds of the trash stock we used to prep press runs with.

Our pals at Oak were on the front page of today’s NYTimes Fashion & Style section. Article here. Critical shopper indeed.

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And, it’s that time again:

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

If you’re in the business, I recommend you carve out 5 minutes and take The Survey For People Who Make Websites, 2008. I thoroughly enjoyed it last year.

This summer we have two new faces in the studio.

Jason Bishop – fellow Brooklynite and one of our long-time buddies via Richmond, VA punk rock (think Avail, Action Patrol era) – will be spending the summer with us. Jason is currently an MFA Designer as Author candidate at the School of Visual Arts. Prior to going back to school, Jason was working in NYC doing primarily web design/development for clients such as nytimes.com and Cornell University. Now he’s expanding his skill sets to include to motion and traditional print design.

Jason’s work:
http://jasonbishop.net

Dylan Mulvaney is entering his fourth and final year of study earning a BFA in graphic design in Iowa State University’s College of Design. Dylan is interested in the intersection of digital and traditional tools of production within graphic design; meaning, he likes to get his hands dirty. This summer he’ll be bouncing back and forth between here and our friends at Rad Mountain. In the fall he will be studying in Rome’s Piazza delle Cinque Scole, getting knee deep in contemporary European design culture. After graduating in May 2009, Dylan plans to locate to NYC proper.

Dylan’s work:
http://dmulvaney.com

The addition of Jason and Dylan required an Athletics expansion: birch-top desk #10.

We like building our own desks. And it’s always nice to visit “the nicest guys in the world” at Meserole Lumber.

Wood cut to size, Jason sanding:

Built, ready to poly:

Poly’d, drying:

The Wiggle Puppy, observing:

Final product in context. 3-desk superstation:

Last week we launched a new project. We’ll get around to writing more about it, but for now, the teen-machine that is the Nylon Summer Music Tour is still getting going. Designers should find the zine-maker entertaining, particularly the ExtraJamz ZIP.

• • •

Stopped by last night’s Riviera opening, Fellow Traveler. I particularly enjoyed Funderburgh’s work. Show will be running through May 31st.

• • •

Cut/Copy In Ghost Colours is the new summer record. Theirspace.

• • •

After consistently releasing records for years and years, career musicians sometimes go for legendary status. Tom Petty appears to have made the jump. You could certainly argue that he had already achieved this status; the Wilburys were, after all, a super-group. But with the recent release of Highway Companion, the Runnin’ Down a Dream documentary, the Heartbreakers’ Superbowl halftime show, and now the surprising resurrection of the Mudcrutch band and brand, it seems pretty well wrapped up. In case you missed that last one, check out the heartwarming NYTimes scoop. The record is good.

• • •

Speaking of NYT, be sure to catch this week’s piece on the McKibbin lofts. This photo in particular made me laugh. Takes me back to when I first arrived in Williamsburg at 19, and living just down the street from the McKibbin lofts. I don’t miss being mugged at 8pm.

• • •

Our pals at Empowering Media launched a new blog. Make no mistake, this is nerd biz. If you’re building websites, you need friends like Larry Ludwig.

• • •

Lately we’ve been working on an internal re-brand exercise dubbed “Adobe CS4: Spirit-Breaker”. Still working out the details, might work better as a Flash-specific campaign.

• • •

Not sure if this is real, but it doesn’t matter. Jealous of my famousness. Update: Defs not real, but again, doesn’t matter.

The web is pretty well open. You can view-source your way through most HTML, CSS and Javascript. That’s how most web workers learned their way around — by studying other websites. It’s one of the things we like about the web.

We certainly have no issue with anyone viewing our HTML, CSS, etc. But please don’t steal our design. And certainly don’t copy/paste our entire site HTML+CSS, change out the logo, post it behind your own domain and call it your own. Unfortunately, this happens on a somewhat regular basis.

Thanks to Mint’s newest unique referrers RSS feed, we can keep up with the latest URLs linking to the Athletics site. This feed lists the latest sites, blogs, link-lists, etc. directing traffic to our site.

And yesterday, upon clicking through to some of the latest referrers, we found this:

(Click for enlarged)

Web theft, in progress. Here we have someone in the process of customizing our site to make it their own. They have changed out the logo, changed some copy, but otherwise you can see they are still using our graphics and copy.

We couldn’t find an email address on the site, but after doing a whois on the domain we found that it’s registered to someone in Ankara, Turkey. We did find an email address registered with the domain, but it bounced back our kindly worded please-remove-our-property-from-your-site email.

Then, after taking a closer look, we noticed that they were still linking directly to our images. We realized we had the ability to send the folks at Yenioyun (and other web-offenders that we may not be aware of) a message.

Using a bit of mod_rewrite code, we were able to reroute all external requests for images on our server to an altogether different image.

Click through to http://yenioyun.org/ to see the result. And as I’m sure they will be changing their site shortly, here’s a screenshot for posterity. For the full effect, see the ani-gif we are using.

Of course this is nothing new. Web admins have long employed this sort of tactic for dealing with users leeching bandwidth (hotlinking images within their MySpace pages, message boards, porn sites, etc.) Most recently, I particularly enjoyed the John McCain MySpace incident.

Please, have the code:

With the help of this article and the mod_rewrite manual, we put the following mod_rewrite rule into an .htaccess file and placed it in our images directory.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_FILENAME}  .(gif|jpe?g|png)$  [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !^$
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !athleticsnyc.com   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !bloglines.com   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !google.   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !search?q=cache   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI} !^/images/stop_stealing.gif
  RewriteRule  (.*)   http://athleticsnyc.com/images/stop_stealing.gif?id=$1   [R,NC,L]
</IfModule>

The first line looks looks for all gif, jpeg and png files. The next few lines define the domains allowed to serve up our images (we want Google Reader and Bloglines users to be able to view our images). The next to last line disregards the rules if you’re requesting the replacement image (to keep from causing an infinite loop of redirects).

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Questions? Comments? Contact James via email - .

AisleOne has a great interview with designer Duane King.

Duane is one of our good buddies and creative director of BBDK, our partners out in Sante Fe.

Frustrated by a lack of vector illustrations of current political figures, and inspired by campaign fever, Matt whipped up ten speed-illo vector-heads.

Matt is offering this vector set, dubbed “Politics As Usual 08”, to the world free-of-charge.

Download ZIP

Depending on the reference, Matt Owens can render a vector illustration of any head in under 5 minutes. Want a vector rendering of your family/dog/child? He’s your man.

We’re big fans of Faul’s work.

After Paul’s death in 1966, Faul (aka Geoffrey “Billy” Shepherd, aka Neil Aspinall) really stepped into the character and helped produce what many consider to be the group’s finest work (Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album, Abbey Road).

Faul also went on to enjoy a very successful solo career. From AllMusic:

Out of all the former Beatles, Paul McCartney by far had the most successful solo career, maintaining a constant presence in the British and American charts during the ’70s and ’80s. In America alone, he had nine number one singles and seven number one albums during the first 12 years of his solo career.

It’s surprising that someone as talented as Paul McCartney could be replaced with another equally talented individual with strikingly similar features.

While Paul deserves a lot of credit for his ’63-66 years, there’s really no contest: Faul is the real talent. His sweeping body of work over the past forty years firmly establishes Faul as one of the great career musicians.

A few items of interest, in no particular order…

Casual Aesthetics

Our pal Wyeth Hansen recently launched the Casual Aesthetics blog. The first three posts are great.

I figure Wyeth’s writing will appeal to all sorts, as you have some of this:

Now anyways, to make the animation feel ‘vintage’, I developed a layering system which basically involved lowering the frame rate, desaturating certain colors and bumping others up, adding a looped ‘wash’ texture over the piece and adding fake film grain to give it a gritty texture.

and this:

Casual Aesthetics embraces a sort of sliding-scale approach to problem solving by identifying both the merits and shortcomings of various solutions. What emerges is a gradation of values linked to formal attributes, which ultimately becomes an expanded matrix as more and more elements and ideas are analyzed and added. This is achieved by organizing and analyzing existing objects and media that exemplify various characterstics and extruding their latent meaning.

Thinking for a Living

Duane King recently sent us copies of Thinking for a Living, the newsprint companion to Duane’s session at the Dallas Society of Visual Communications 3rd Annual National Student Show & Conference. Duane also launched http://www.thinkingforaliving.org.

Both the website and print peice serve as a collection of ideas & resources for young designers — lots of recommended reading.

Bob Borden and Duane King run BBDK, a multidisciplinary studio based in Sante Fe, New Mexico. We’ve collaborated with BBDK in the past, and expect more in the future. Total sweethearts.

Web design process, client-perspective

I’ve been reading Joel on Software for some time. Joel Spolsky is a software veteran, and founder of Fog Creek Software in NYC. One might describe Joel’s writing as popular fiction for software nerds.

Today he posted an article on the recent web redesigns for Fog Creek Software and their product, FogBugz. Designers, developers, freelancers, project managers, proposal-writers, & those that run studios should enjoy.

A mystery to most, but Atlanta knows what I’m talking about. At the very least, one should appreciate the flyer.

Some tunes: Think about it. Ben Burton Park.

Gavin might still have some records (Update: he does).

See you Thursday.

Update:
Was fun. Time-warp to age 16.

Opening tunes Nasty Moves & Ben Burton Park:

Our buddies Mike Evans and Jennifer Galatioto just released The Unhappy Animals, a line of depressed toonery that you can wear about on your person.

Given Mike’s ridiculous attention to detail, it’s no surprise that, day one, the site and line both arrive with graphic-designerly precision.

I like the turtle.

We regularly receive emails and packages from people looking for jobs. They find your site – perhaps on Newstoday, Digg, whatever – and get in touch. We hear from a lot of students, people overseas, etc.

Today we received two unusual packages. Eric Yevak of Richmond, VA sent both Matt and Jason the same package:

• Massive fold-out poster of a bearded guy wearing a Yankees hat
• Mix CD

The posters:

There was no letter. No explanation. Totally random.

So, we googled about and found Eric’s site: http://www.ercyvk.com/. Eric decided to drop the vowels in the domain name, with exception to the first ‘e’. Nice.

If you scroll down, you find this…

... which we enjoyed.

We don’t usually have paper this big around. It occurred to us that we could make the world’s largest paper hat:

Or a giant head:

Or cut holes for your head and arms and wear it around:

For those interested in sending us random things:

Athletics
190 N. 10th Street, Suite 305
Brooklyn, NY 11211

I was watching TV the other night and caught an iPhone commercial. Something about it caught my eye, so I did some investigating on the Apple site and discovered that this ad uses the Matt Costa – Songs We Sing cover in the cover-flow demo.

Thanks Apple.