This is great...by Aakash Nihalani. (via It's Nice That)

Very clever! Fuseproject created this packaging solution for Puma shoes. It uses less cardboard and provides you with a bag that you can then use to store your shoes. Not a bad alternative. See more images and read more here.

My father has this old deck of cards (pictured above) designed by Antonio Martorell. They depict the various political parties in Puerto Rico and its politicians. I was reminded of those cards when I saw this flickr group which collects images of vintage playing cards.

I couldn't resist posting about this... Project Thirty Three is a blog about vintage album covers, primarily those using shapes or type as the design. You must check it out. I can never get enough of this aesthetic.
(via swissmiss)

While looking through those album covers I came across another great site. It's dedicated to Alex Steinweiss, who designed the first album covers and made them into art:


Beautiful! Check out this site here.

There's a neat article by Steven Heller in the NY Times today about motivational posters from the 20th century. Those of you who may be near Gainesville, Florida should check out the exhibit he mentions (at U of FL). Read the article here.

Which reminds me — can we put this one to rest?:



Yes!! (image via alan spach)

I read this article years ago in the New York Times, about a woman who fell in love with a particular hue of blue and a basset hound at the same time. She spent years trying to obtain that blue paint for her walls, while her dog shed, drooled, and slowly wrecked her beautiful apartment. Read the complete article here.

I've been reading a book titled "The Studio Reader", which is a collection of interviews and essays about various artists and their studios. Although they all have their own unique approach to their work space, the majority use their studios as a place to collect. It's like Michael Smith says in one chapter:

"I feel like a full-time clerk, a manager of my own lost-and-found, where old ideas get mixed in with new projects and creative flashes get mistaken for frantic searches for something I misplaced on my desk in the many piles of paper within arm's reach. I like to think I am deliberately playing bad clerk to my good clerk, providing amusement for some fly on the wall, as I transform into a real life Mr. Magoo, aimlessly groping at phantoms, climbing up and down ladders, and creating havoc with the many stacks of boxes filling my studio. Invention and delusion intertwine in my current creative process, with collating replacing automatism and filing likened to the application of a delicate glaze."

See more about this book here.