AIGA San Francisco and the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design will present the third biennial Compostmodern conference on January 19th in San Francisco. Compostmodern is an interdisciplinary design conference dedicated to promoting sustainable solutions within the design community at large.

Posted by Megan

Portfolio magazine has an interesting little story about wine label design and how makers are taking more risks to make their products stand out on the crowded shelves.

Posted by Megan

If you recently had a project printed on Neenah paper, pull it out and send it in. You could win a free trip to the 2008 HOW Conference in Boston, which includes airfare, meals, lodging and registration for two. To learn more, visit www.neenahpaper/how.

Posted by Megan

HOW's upcoming Jan/Feb issues features the winners of our first annual In-HOWse Design Awards, but you can see the Honorable Mention winners right now on HOWdesign.com. Each category includes a slide show of winners along with credit information and insight into the projects.

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P22 and Lanston Type recently released LTC Goudy Extras, a set of over 50 ornaments, connecting borders, flourishes and decorative motifs originally designed by Frederic Goudy throughout his career. Many of these designs were used by Goudy at his Village Press and offered by his Village Foundry in the 1920s. The styles range from complex title page illustrations to simple linking borders, but all have the unique Goudy style.

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Behavior Design recently partnered with The Museum of Modern Art, New York, for their latest exhibition, Georges Seurat: The Drawings, creating an interactive touch-screen kiosk that enables MoMA’s visitors to virtually explore Seurat’s four surviving sketchbooks.
 
Directly alongside their conventional showcase (each object opened to a single spread), the sketchbooks can be viewed in their magnificent entirety on two kiosk monitors. Behavior mastered numerous challenges to collect, digitize, and choreograph elements into an intuitive and becoming interface that gracefully reveals Seurat’s work and invites users to marvel and explore at will.

Behavior Design also designed and developed a companion website to supplement the show and its themes, featuring a sampling of the sketchbooks, drawings, and other works alongside examples of Seurat’s working methodologies and processes.

Posted by Megan

Artists/designers Saelee Oh and Jill Bliss will be showing their collaborative illustrations at Giant Robot 2 in Los Angeles from December 8 through January 9. If you can't make it to the show, you can pick up a 2008 calendar of their work for just $15.

Posted by Megan

I don't don't know how most people in Sweden celebrate Christmas, but I think the designers of the Pipparkakan cookie cutters will be having a merry time, indeed. This would be just the thing to liven up a bake sale or cookie swap!


via NotCot

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by The Creative Group

You plan to spend your entire morning doing research for an advertising campaign, something you've already had to put off for more than a week. Just as you're digging into your work, your manager swings by to ask you to proofread a client e-mail. This request is followed by one from your co-worker who wonders if you want to have a "working lunch" to brainstorm ideas for her upcoming project. Do you, as is typical, agree to all these requests?

If you want to move ahead in your career, the answer should be no. It may seem counterintuitive, but spreading yourself too thin means that the quality of your work suffers. Setting limits at work will prevent you from being overloaded and help you do your best on the projects that are most important. Following are some tips.

Posted by Megan

Building on the success of last year's holiday campaign, Toy New York and EVB, are bringing back the online phenomenon, ElfYourself.com, for OfficeMax's holiday effort.  Last year, the site generated more than 11 million elves and kept users glued to the site for the equivalent of over 600 years. I visited the site to turn myself into an Elf, which was both fun and a bit disturbing. The dance moves are great, though.

Posted by Megan

Designer Josh Jakus's Wine Pocket is constructed of industrial wool felt collected from factory excess. It's both eco-friendly and stylish and now it's on sale at DWR for $29 with free shipping.

Posted by Megan

PaperSpecs is sponsoring a free webinar, Sustainability-Hands On, with guest speaker Brian Dougherty of Celery Design Collaborative. The event, which takes place on December 13, will provide practical information about spec'ing sustainable paper and other ideas to decrease the environmental impact of your designs.

Posted by Megan

by The Creative Group

Breaking new creative ground can be a challenging proposition for designers. In a recent survey by our company, eight out of 10 in-house designers said it's difficult to convince senior management to accept ideas that deviate from the prevailing corporate style. And more than a quarter of respondents cited their company's unwillingness to take risks as the most frequent obstacle to creativity.

On the bright side, many in-house designers feel they can exercise more creativity than they did five years ago. However, it remains difficult to break certain barriers. Following are seven strategies for overcoming challenges and enhancing creative freedom.

Posted by Megan

Ventura, a recent relase from TypeTrust, is a legible script with a nice set of alternate characters. The single-weight face sells for $26.

Posted by Megan