“In my seminars, I enjoy teaching analytics because the fun is in finding effective and memorable methods to help people understand the concepts. One of my favorites is an analysis of the Red-Shirt Phenomenon in Star Trek.

What? You don’t know about the Red Shirt Phenomenon? Well, as any die-hard Trekkie knows, if you are wearing a red shirt and beam to the planet with Captain Kirk, you’re gonna die. That’s the common thinking, but I decided to put this to the test. After all, I hadn’t seen any definitive proof; it’s just what people said. (Remind you of your current web analytics strategy?) So, let’s set our phasers on ’stun’ and see what we find… “

A 1957 animated short by Charles And Ray Eames: “Applies graphic sensitivity to medium in cartoon form, and traces the history of storing and analyzing information from the days of the cavemen to today’s age of electronic brains.”

“At a conference recently, I heard Dan Cederholm from SimpleBits talk about inspiration. He showed a bunch of different techniques he uses, including how he uses Photoshop’s mosaic filter on an image to blow up giant pixels representing the basic colors in the picture. He uses those as pallets for the design work he does. Very cool.

Inspiration can come from process, but it can also come from the most unexpected places. For example, when we were designing the data-over-time visualizations for Google Analytics, we were totally stuck with bar graphs. We’d iterated dozens of times, scoured the web for examples to steal, and had tried just about everything. The result felt muddy and chartjunked…”

“I started to think that NC-17 movies perhaps shared a common visual string in their marketing materials — dark and provocative… I started with R and pulled up the top five movies’ posters. Less provocative but very dark. I moved on to PG-13’s five. Not provocative at all but dark nonetheless. PG’s five? Much friendlier but, yes, dark. It wasn’t until I got to the five Gs that I started seeing some bright colors in the movie posters.” (Thanks HOW Blog!)

“We’ve put together a list of the most significant film techniques that were used by Alfred Hitchcock. This information comes out of many books and interviews from the man himself and his been simplified for your consideration.”

“One of the products you offer on your website is a ‘TV-B-Gone’ television zapper which is basically a glorified portable universal remote that can be used to turn off television sets in public places. This product epitomizes the hypocrisy that your organization preaches by allowing one single critic of television to determine what the population at large may choose to watch. It is this very concept that you attack within the television industry; Marketing executives make the same decisions everyday for large groups of people.” (Thanks Torrez!)

“Hosted by the guys over at Out of Focus Studio, Take Zer0 is a weekly videocast on the subject of filmmaking that gives you everything you need to know before take one.”

“OpenSourceCinema is a collaborative documentary project to create a feature film about copyright in the digital age. We want you to create parts of the film.”

“Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. Helvetica will begin screening at film festivals worldwide starting in March, followed by cinema screenings across the US and Europe, and the DVD release.”

Remember those matchbooks that said ‘Draw Me!’ on the front? They advertised a correspondence course called ‘Famous Artists’. Everyone made fun of ‘draw Binky the Skunk any size but the same size’; but the truth of the matter was that the Famous Artists Course was no laughing matter — it was one of the best art instructional courses ever created. Founded by Norman Rockwell in the early 1950s, Famous Artists had three courses… Painting, Illustration/Design and Cartooning… (Thanks Boing Boing!)

“You’ve just shot some footage and are playing it back on your TV or PC and you notice something just doesn’t look right with the picture. But you can’t put your finger on what it is. It doesn’t look like a film that you would watch on DVD or the cinema. There’s something ‘funny’ about it. Basically you think it looks like crap. But why?”

“On the heels of their first short feature film debut, Coudal Partners talks with Designorati about the piece, its intentions, and the firms overall feelings towards self-promotion. Earlier this week, Coudal Partners released Copy Goes Here, a short film about the life of a Copywriter as he joins a small Graphic Design studio and then soon realizes he is the only one who can read the copy he creates. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Steve Delahoyde, Copywriter for Coudal Partners.”

“Please note that this script format aid originally appeared on The Daily Script under the webmaster Dana Franklin. Dana wrote this based upon the Warner Brothers formatting style. Dana no longer maintains the site. This appears here on this site without his permission.”

“‘Without taking away the artistic qualities of James Nachtwey’s powerful images, I find the film tremendously flawed,’ stated Pedro Meyer, celebrated Mexican photographer. ‘Instead of allowing his pictures to speak for themselves, James has lent himself to a documentary that is portraying him as a self-suffering photographer ready to save the world.’”

“This list is drawn from the second edition of ‘The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made’ (St. Martin’s Griffin, $24.95), edited by Peter M. Nichols and published in 2004. For additional information about the list, read Peter M. Nichols’s preface, or A. O. Scott’s introduction.”