: nikon lens finder

Great new work from the team here at Isobar. Special thanks to Marc Lassoff, Sr Visual Designer who made this all come together on the page.

Nikon Lens Finder lets photo pros and enthusiasts narrow in on the lens that is right for them. A simple and elegant interface lets you filter out the lens you may already have, or don't have a need for, leaving you only with the best choices.

: pepsiyosumo.com

Via story in Advertising Age

With a great tagline that uses the Pepsi legacy and addresses this market "There has never been a generation like ours", Pepsi launches new site for Latino community focusing on people and calling on Latino consumers to submit and share their own stories. Shameless targeting of an important ethnic consumer group? Or maybe just a really smart strategy to engage this ever growing segment? Discuss.

Visit the site here - www.pepsiyosumo.com



Also, take a quick look at the campaign videos on YouTube. With language like "show the world we are changing the landscape of this country" and "we need you to play the role you know best, the role of you" - Pepsi is taking a very strong alliance position of sorts with this community. I like it. Its bold!

: warmth

TBWA Brussels had a simple idea on how to express warmth for their client who sells/represents natural gas.

Result - beautiful work! Warms the house, and the heart. I bet it sells natural gas too.

: nycpp

Personal Polaroid (analog) project evolved to a beautiful site (digital, obviously). Even the structure reminds me of the simplicity and immediacy of the Polaroid medium. Visit NYCPP

: plastic bag

via my friend L.A. Baker Brown



Poetic, beautiful, sad, moving, philosophical, ironic, beautiful, thought provoking. Oh, and it's about a plastic bag.

One of a series from FUTURESTATES. This one is by Ramin Bahrani, and narrated by Werner Herzog

: editing and the creative process

Want to show everyone how great you are? Don't show them everything. Only show them the very best of what you can do. Editing yourself down to this level of focus and clarity is incredibly hard. It is probably one of the hardest things to learn as a creative professional. It is also one of the most important.

Sure you might have raw talent, but that is not enough. If you don't know that yet, figure it out now. If you never learn it, you might end up whining about it for the rest of your life and wonder why no one recognizes your genius.

What does it take? Practice, practice, practice! You want to do something well, do it a lot, and do it all the time. Then do it some more! I believe you have to live this sort of thing. It's not enough to do it at work.

I find I practice this when working on my photography. Sometimes I am judging between the most minute of differences between photos like a 1/3 difference in exposure of a particular highlight or shadow (see below for a hint of this). Sometimes the decision is between two completely different photos with different subjects and approaches. My job is to decide which one is better.



Doing this as part of something I love really helps the work I do professionally. It sharpens my ability to see differences in designs and approaches. It makes me search and question rationales for design choices. By being critical of my own work, it helps me remove subjective judgments when looking at the work others. Also, it allows me to make quick decisions and to have faith in them.

I hope in the end it also allows others to have faith in those decisions too.

: la cage au Folles poster design

Designing posters must be a lot of fun. Well, at least I have always imagined it would be anyway. Have not done it since school. Here is a great interactive piece from the NYTimes on the poster design process for the La Cage Broadway revival starring Kelsey Grammar, and Douglas Hodge. It's narrated by Drew Hodges of the ad agency SpotCo. They focus mainly on the entertainment industry. This is getting more fun by the minute!

Anyway, the narration walks through the creative and iterative process involved in the designs. Great practice for designers to hear a pro backing up his work with rationale. Not sure the final product is my favorite, but hearing the how/why description really sold me on it as an execution. One interesting insight comes from hearing Hodges explain how even when they are starting from a poster, they are envisioning the graphical usage in video, animation and neon billboards.  Visit feature here or by clicking on image below.

: edward tufte - minister of information

I would imagine that most people coming to this post/site would not need any introduction on Edward Tufte. Visit that link if you do need one, or listen below for a great interview aired on the radio program On The Media this weekend from NPR.



Tufte continues his crusade for efficient, clean, and rich display of information. Those familiar with him, his books, and seminars know the spiel. I especially love this - he claims that the human eye-to-brain system is so powerful that in a one second glance, 120 megabits of information is processed by our brain. There is no reason to clog that process up or hinder it in any way with meaningless junk. That's an important principal to remember when designing interfaces. Not always possible or even advisable when designing marketing or brand experiences, but that is a debate to be had at some other point.

This time, Tufte has been brought on by the Obama administration to help design Recovery.gov. The White House appointed him to make sure the government can clearly communicate where all our money is going. The site is still a work in progress, but it does fill me with confidence knowing that someone cares this much about it.

The site has a nice clean look, but it is a bit cluttered at this point. Maybe a redesign is in the works? In the meantime search by zip code for information on how stimulus money is being spent in your community. Pretty cool to be able to track this kind of thing. Typically, you just imagine our tax dollars going to 500 dollar toilet seat covers for the pentagon. Seems to be real accountability at work here. Imagine if we had this type of thing to track where our money went in invasion of Iraq? I believe there are still $12 billion in cash unaccounted for.





visit - http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/home.aspx

: uncanny valley

I find this a fascinating subject. It's a concept that says that if you create a robot or human likeness that is 50% human like, it's acceptable. If you create one that is 95% human like, it is still acceptable. However, there is a "valley" which if you crossover to closely to humanness, it becomes repulsive to the general population. It's as if your instinctual reptilian brain recognizes some sort of danger and sends off warning signals.

Imagine if James Cameron for Avatar, instead of making his Pandora natives blue skinned, had given them human like skin and faces. The movie probably would have failed miserably. I don't think I would have been able to sit through it.

See below for another example. I guess you can get a robot doppelganger of yourself at some high end Tokyo department store. Tell me that dude/robot on the left aint disturbing? There is just something off about it. The facial features, textures, and nuance muscle structures are missing. It screams genetic abnormality and mutation. Just plain creepy.

Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro with his robot double

: nau

Not a revolutionary site by any means, but this seems like a great company with a business model focus I can believe in. They put a huge focus on high quality design, sustainability, community and the people that make it all come together in ways that you often see more from a service company like an agency. They even talk about the "true cost" of the decisions they make as a business. For instance, if a fabric is all natural and organically produced, does it make sense from a true cost perspective to ship it from the other side of the world?

They even have a page called "Principles of Design" explaining their thinking. They are speaking my language :) Go check it out - Visit nau.com