Soulellis Studio

This is a flea market find from a year ago. It's a "souvenir" book of WWII photos from the Secretary of the Navy, published by U.S. Camera (it's not dated but I'm assuming 1945). The photographs — scenes of daily life, explosions, war routines — are compiled by Edward Steichen.

From the note on page 5: "To the Officers and Men of the Navy: You are leaving the Navy which you made victorious in the greatest war in history. These pictures will go with you as a reminder of a job well done — a job of which you can be proud as long as you live because it gave mankind another opportunity to live together in peace and decency..."

The typography, imagery, icons — all amazing But it's the striking cover that I find most gorgeous and inspiring.

Tonight I'm headed to the 2009 MASterwork Awards. Each year, the Municipal Art Society of New York honors distinctive architecture, urban planning and preservation in NYC. This years' winners include The Standard Hotel, the Lion House at the Bronx Zoo, the new TKTS Booth and The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at The New School. Soulellis Studio created the program brochure announcing the winners, and the awards themselves.

We've got a long way to go before the Kindle is a productive place for designers or anyone publishing an image-heavy blog. The graphics and typography are not great (terrible, even). Could be worse, but still — this is not yet a designer's tool. But I believe it's really important — critical, perhaps — to get on, and establish a presence. This isn't about making money (maybe, someday), but about a new ease in publishing. And understanding how technology is breaking down barriers, connecting us to our audiences and amplifying our stories.

For anyone interested in publishing your blog on Amazon's Kindle platform, go here. It's easy, it takes about 2 minutes and it's free.

If anyone is actually inspired enough to subscribe to Soulellis.com for $1.99 / month, here you go.

More shots of Soulellis, Kindle Edition (and some of Antonio's AisleOne).

A nice discussion about typography and design on e-books going on here at Wired Magazine.

An ecotone is a transition area between two adjacent ecological communities, and it's a concept that Ann Pendleton-Jullian (Director, Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University) uses to propose a new way to approach education in the 21st century. Design Education and Innovation Ecotones is circulating now and we're proud to have been involved.

Erik designed a beautiful document, and we worked closely with Ann to make sure the diagrams translated her concepts accurately and elegantly. The full paper is available here (PDF).

A few months ago I noticed that some Twitter users were establishing accounts in the names of famous historical writers, philosophers and other "dead celebrities." Some remained in-character as a kind of online performance art, while others were using Twitter as a place to deposit quotes or news. I decided to join them, and created two accounts myself.

I made a post about it back in March: 25 dead people on Twitter. And in three months that post grew into a website. As a joint venture with Krate, Soulellis Studio designed and built a robust Twitter engine that compiles the historical tweets of 78 more than 80 celebrities of the past into a real-time feed. But it doesn't just aggregate. Users can log-in to their Twitter accounts and reply, follow and retweet without leaving. It's called Tweeji, and it launched yesterday.

In our first day we heard from Sigmund Freud, George Washington, Jesus Christ, Sammy Davis Jr., Jacques Derrida, Janis Joplin, Eva "Brawn," Andy Warhol, NotoriousBIG, Ian Curtis, William Shakespeare, Bettie Page, William S. Burroughs, Charles Darwin, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Emily Dickinson, Buddha, President Chester Arthur, Pablo Neruda, Percival Lowell, Walt Whitman, Elvis Presley and Walt Disney, among others.

Within Tweeji's first 24 hours, Pete Cashmore of Mashable wrote that the technology and design are "really, really good" and that it's an awesome piece of software, "a kind of self-contained 'mini Twitter' of its own." (He also takes offense to the dark humor, but whatever.) We're really enjoying the response and feedback.

Visit Tweeji, have fun with it, and spread it around. And be on the lookout for more Tweeji projects launching soon.

Remember that post about 25 dead people on Twitter? Coming soon: a new way to talk to the dead. Stay tuned.

Disaster averted. I suspected that the green was not going to print well (especially for the monotones) and after consulting the printer's tint book saw that I was right. The green would have been terrible. We adjusted our palette and went back to Pantone 248. I call it purple but I've been told that this is definitely not purple (!). Whatever it is, the sheet looks great.

We design a new calendar and tour map for the Municipal Art Society of New York every two months, so we've had a really nice opportunity to evolve the design of this thing over time (this is the fifth one). It gets better and better. For the first time, we've placed all events on the map, keyed only the tours, and doubled the size of the piece. And it's a totally new, redrawn map of NYC, including all parks and bridges. As usual, a great collaboration between me, Erik and MAS.

Hey, we were featured on Speak Up yesterday. Speak Up is a fantastic graphic design blog/community founded by Armin Vit — what an honor to appear here as one of his bookmark picks for American design, alongside some truly great work.

Check out the other featured designers:

Helen Yentus
TNOP
Rumors
Arlo (@arlo_design)
End Communications
Jessica Hische

It's been a busy winter. Results are coming in the form of boxes filled with newly printed stuff landing at our door (from Rochester, in this case).

Look familiar? If you know the Cornell University campus, you'll recognize the Foundry building on our cover of the spring 2009 issue of the AAP newsletter. Workers are laying down the stone paving for University Avenue — in 1909. Turn the page, and we mirrored that view with an identical one, showing OMA's rendering of Milstein Hall one hundred years later. It's almost the same perspective — a fortuitous pairing that lends the controversial site a larger historical context.