Curiosity Killed the Cat

Designers! I have 5 invites for Typekit. Typekit is a service that provides web-embeddable fonts to your site. No more Verdana and Georgia for you! You can learn more about them on their site or their blog.
Drop a note if you want an invite. I'll need to know which email you want the invite sent to.

Spent most of the past few weeks working on Chrome Artist Themes Gallery. It's nice to finally see it live. Obviously I didn't make any of the themes this time 'round, but a gallery with 100+ pages in 40+ languages == massive changelists and submits. But the upside is I got to see a lot of these themes as they were being built. I've also, at some point, probably installed all of these themes on my various machines (let me say now that the Mac themes implementation is not quite up to par with the Windows one, but that's what you get for being on pre-alpha release...) Some of my favorites:

• Cath Kidston - it's flowerly and pink and oh-so-girly. It's the one I've settled on using long term.


• Yulia Brodskaya - her paper designs are simply amazing! Lovely vibrant colors.


• Boa Mistura - soft textures, calm pinkish-purple colors. Light and airy.


• Hatsune Miku - NEEDS MORE LEEKSPIN (consequently, when the Japanese marketing guy asked me what I knew about Hatsune Miku, I answered, "Gong Show". He was amused.)


• PukPuk - a golden theme with some nice artistic swirly designs


• Akira Isogawa - I love Japanese patterns.


• Jon Klassen - another with nice paper textures; a calm watercolor painting with cool color tones


• Baron Ueda - pink and brown, an awesome color combination. And grunge!


• Stefanie Posavec - words, words words. Good for a bibliophile, and a nice soft reddish pink palette.

1. This poster. Too bad shipping to Japan costs more than the poster.

...and still putting snowflakes everywhere I can.

The reason why I'm in NY.
Can you guess which ones I made? I think there are like 12 of them. They're pretty obvious...

Seriously, the problem with Pepsi can be clearly demonstrated by its commercial during the Super Bowl, as compared to Coca Cola's.
Coca Cola: Heist
Coke has done what it normally does - a light-hearted, colorful, fun and cute ad, with nice animated effects and high production values. It plays off the current "nature/environment == good" trend, but the cooperation between all the insects to open (and share) the soda harkens back to some of Coke's strongest brand recognition: harmony and unity amongst different peoples (I'd like to buy the world a Coke).
Pepsi: PepSuber
Pepsi pulled off a parody of Macguyver called MacGruber, and this had the potential to be really great (the MasterCard MacGuyver a few years ago was well constructed and well played). Unfortunately, the camp went downhill fast as all MacGruber did was espouse on how wonderful Pepsi was, and did he mention he might be sponsored by Pepsi? and oh, by the way, he changed his name to PepSuber too, so let him take a swig of Pepsi while the bomb goes off. I was hoping MacGruber was going to macguyver a way out of the problem using either a) the soda in the can or b) parts of the can or the can itself. I mean, you could use the soda to drench the bomb and prevent the fuse from lighting, or use the metal of the can itself to short out the electrical timing switch, or somehow fashion a cutting edge from the can to snip the wires. Instead, it was terribly lame in a very "what the hell were the advertising execs thinking" sort of way, which is also what I think of Pepsi's new logo. (Seriously, the first time I saw their logo, I thought it was a logo for a Korean airline. Not the right direction, Pepsi...)

I'm #5 on iGoogle's hottest themes listing today! I don't think the first two count, either, as they're the first two for all listings.
I wonder how long this will last...

OMG NERD

This is what happens after I spend most of the day preparing pages for a launch tomorrow, and need to do SOMETHING THAT'S NOT HTML ZOMGWOW

...until I bury Google in snowflakes.

EDIT: Also, if you missed, it, shinkansen doodle!

Since people have been pinging me all day about this, no, I had nothing to do with the Gmail themes announced yesterday. I did make a few themes to use internally, but not any of the ones on the public build.
If they make a Gmail themes API similar to the iGoogle one, you can be sure I will make these available. I have a
green floral (papercuts) theme, a glossy theme similar to the DA! v10 layout, and a port of the iGoogle Tetris theme.
Already, Hank has planted the idea of a LOLcat theme in my mind...
Also, I need to post my snowflake iGoogle theme...

The part of me that enjoys Helvetica meets the part of me that enjoys politics: NY Times blogs on font usage in presidential campaigns.
Link found at the Things younger than McCain blog, which is quick to point out that Helvetica is younger than McCain, although Helvetica is not a particularly "old" font to begin with. By the by, if anyone knows where I can buy the Helvetica mug in that blog entry, I would be greatly appreciative.

Looks like the iGoogle theme directory got a big update today.

Preview and add my Papercuts theme to your iGoogle page from here.

Just submitted my Papercuts iGoogle Theme to the directory. Here is a live preview.
Next in line: Either a Painted Ladies theme or a tropical fishtank theme.

Was tooling around with text in Illustrator. Some random logo concepts for Anime Expo 2008 Karaoke Contest and/or the Karaoke Kaizoku-dan:

It's rather retro. The shift-color logos make me think of those "ABC Specials" graphics they used to have in the 80s, where the text would color-shift and zoom in with that catchy drum beat rolling in the background.

Make a logo for Polysics' MySpace Records page!

SWEET! WHO'S WITH ME ON THIS?! WE MUST MAKE AWESOME LOGO OF AWESOMENESS!




Actually, I should probably read all the rules first.

This could be insanely dangerous. I just have to figure out what sort of stickers I want to make.

My brother needs a website for his film company, so here are some initial mockups I came up with in about two hours worth of time:
Mockup 1 (film camera version)
Mockup 2 (film crew version)
The main requirements were to use the company's pre-existing logos (I'm quite fond of the film crew pic myself) and to keep it black and white, and simple/indie feeling.
C&C?

( More under the cut )

You know what would be awesome?
If any of you WC-gumi are still walling, check out which?waller, which is a walling game I'm running at Minitokyo where folks enter walls anonymously and people get to guess who made which one. I think it would be stellar to get some older wallers back in the fun.
This round's theme is any series that starts with a vowel (official English or Japanese title) or any artist whose name starts with a vowel (first or last name acceptable.) You have a little over a month to enter in walls. Link above has info.
There's no real winner or loser for the wallers, so there's not a lot of pressure except for the time constraint. Let me know if you're interested :)

I just manually cleared out about 100 comments worth of spam from DA! by downloading the MySQL table, scrubbing it clean in Excel, and reuploading it.
Anyone know of a good script (PHP preferably) that I could implement to try to stop this?
So far, most of the spam contents has been trying to insert spam links, so I've added some error checking to discard any comments that include http:// in them, as only 1 legit comment out of nearly 300 actually has http:// in it. Also, many of the other spam links had the same "Add" or "Add Entry" so those were also blocked.
Any other suggestions?
Although the comment script collects IP addresses, I don't think an IPblock will do any good because they change for each spam entry.

I made the spam image for something else entirely, but it's quite fitting here as well.