Things will slow down here for a week or two as we do some backend and hosting maintenance on xBlog — not to mention taking a break for the holidays. See y’all in 2007! (The link goes to del.icio.us.) Happy holidays!

As advertised. (Thanks things magazine!)

“Acquired: at the Museum Bellerive in Zurich recently, the catalogue for Typotecture: Typography as Architectural Imagery, an exhibition at the Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich, 2000. Great collection of posters, wide-ranging in provenance and subject matter but all concerning typography ‘being able to subject itself to gravity and acquire a physical presence, to expand into a space and come closer to architectural form’. Includes an essay by curator Andres Janser. Features work by Max Huber, Michael Bierut, Ivan Chermayeff, Mihaly Biro, Claude Luyet, Tomoko Miho, Mirko Ilic, and many others.”

“This past summer I took a Letterpress class at the University of the Arts here in Philadelphia. I ended up enjoying it so much I decided to take it again (though this time as a 10 week course instead of 5). I felt so good to jump back into doing this again. And now that I had one class under my belt, it was much easier to experiment and play around with some of the projects.”

“I asked Alan Cooper (over a rather echoing connection) why he is outraged by bad software, and how he developed the concept of ‘personas’. I was interested to hear the ‘father of Visual Basic’ say ‘What I need is a computer that doesn’t make me feel bad and a cellphone that doesn’t make me feel stupid’.” (Thanks infoDesign!)

“We built Swivel because we wanted a Web site for data. Like many business folks, we had spent a bunch of time editing spreadsheets, reading other people’s spreadsheets and emailing spreadsheets back and forth. We had learned a bunch of macros, shortcuts and tricks for editing data. However, when it came time to share data with other people — so they could explore the data themselves — it was … less good. We, unfortunately, had to freeze the data in the form of a document or presentation because only other power users could really go nuts exploring the data.”

“Adobe Systems Incorporated will introduce a beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 software, the next release of the world standard in digital imaging, on Friday, December 15th. Adobe is delivering a widely available Photoshop CS3 beta to enable customers to more easily transition to the latest hardware platforms, particularly Apple’s new Intel-based systems. The beta is available as a Universal Binary for the Macintosh platform, as well as for Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista computers. The final shipping release of Adobe Photoshop CS3 is planned for Spring 2007.”

“As commercial book publishing crashes, personal book publishing is booming. Personal book making entails printing high-quality books in very small quantities, including quantities of one. New technologies permit anyone to print one copy of a softcover or hardcover book, including all-color photo books. These printed-on-demand books are indistinguishable from commercially printed books. In fact, some of the books you buy on Amazon are manufactured with this same technology. You just can’t tell the difference. However, being able to print as few as one copy — instead of a minimum of a thousand — shifts the economics of bookmaking toward individuals with more passion than money.”

Dan Zettwoch: “Here’s a pile of stuff I generated while working on a recent illustration. It might give you a window into my working process. You could either look at this or come over to my actual window. The drawing was for an annual event put on by Downtown St. Louis shopping association called Festivus.”

Greg Storey: “I’m often asked what books I’m reading, what books I’ve read. Here is a core sample of my larger library. These are the books and subscriptions that I have around me at all times — with a gadget fetish twist at the end…”

“At The Art of the Book event last week, the panel was asked why there were so few female superstar designers. Milton Glaser took a shot at answering the question (many women choose family over work during the crucial superstar career development years) but judging by the reaction afterwards online, his comments were not appreciated by some. To be fair, Glaser’s comments were taken out of context, I think, and what he said is a part of the overall answer to the question.”

“Old tags never die. They just go to Hell and regroup. At ObscureTags.com. This page contains absolutely no CSS because CSS is dumb.”

“The Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics has a logo that changes every time it gets used on letterhead or displayed on a web site. The logo system was designed by Michael Schmitz and is based on cellular automata like John Conway’s Game of Life.”

“People who are suffering from burnout tend to describe the sensation in metaphors of emptiness–they’re a dry teapot over a high flame, a drained battery that can no longer hold its charge. Thirteen years, three books, and dozens of papers into his profession, Barry Farber, a professor at Columbia Teachers College and trained psychotherapist, realized he was feeling this way. Unfortunately, he was well acquainted with the symptoms. He was a burnout researcher himself.”

“Can an interactive web site produce false memories? Possibly so, according to a fascinating paper to be published this month in the Journal of Consumer Research by Ann Schlosser, a business professor at the University of Washington. Schlosser performed an intriguing experiment: She took two groups of people and had them check out two different web sites devoted to the same digital camera. One site included static pictures; the other was interactive, allowing users to play around with a virtual version of the product. Later, she tested them on their ability to recall details about the camera. She intentionally included details that were false, but sufficiently plausible that they might have been true. The result? The people who viewed the interactive demo of the camera were much more likely than the folks who’d only viewed static images to ‘remember’ the false details as being present. Or another way of putting it: The interactive demo was more likely to produce false memories of the product — potential buyers who thought the camera could do things it can’t.”