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The whole slide show is worth a look, but here are some favorites:

Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division (Factory, 1979), Image: Factory Records

This was the first and only time that the band gave me something that they’d like for a cover. I went to see Rob Gretton, who managed them, and he gave me a folder of material, which contained the wave image from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. They gave me the title too but I didn’t hear the album. The wave pattern was so appropriate.

True Faith, New Order (Factory, 1987), Image: Factory Records

This was a first work from real life. In 1986, I happened to have a trauma in my personal life and it made me very attuned to the world around me. Suddenly, I had no filters. I was parking the car one night and a leaf drifted by the window and I thought, ‘That’s so beautiful.’ It was framed by the windscreen, which is probably why I saw it as an image. So we did a leaf. I went to Windsor Great Park with photographer Trevor Key, came back with about 50 leaves and shot two or three until we found the right one. It had to be the right shape and look like it was falling. There was no digital manipulation at this point. I still have the leaf although I keep thinking that one day it will fall apart.

Total, Joy Division & New Order (Rhino, 2011), Image: Rhino Records

…I realised this was a record that would be sold in supermarkets and advertised on television. So the cover has a ‘pile it high, sell it cheap’ aesthetic….

In this video, Ira Glass talks about being young, having taste & ambition, and being dissatisfied with the work you do.

It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while, it’s normal to take a while and you just have to fight your way through that…you will make things that aren’t as good as you know in your heart you want them to be, and you’ll just make one after another…

Via

1. Nevolution: This is a mental public health issue

Image credit: Daniel Neville

Daniel Neville has penned a thoughtful piece about the ethical implications of video games that manipulate us and how these mechanics are holding back the artistic potential of the medium.

…[G]ame designers are using evolutionary needs for rewards and goals to cheapen the game playing experience. If there were no golden coins to collect, or princesses to solve, would the game still be playable? [Braid designer Jonathan Blow] made a big point about comparing the simple and addictive (yet ultimately empty) rewards based system of World of Warcraft to gorging on fast food…Blow questions if game designers have been designing games to exploit the need for fitness indicators and affordances. Rewards can be like food (naturally beneficial) or like drugs (artificial stimuli and the illusion of fitness indicators), games over use the drugs because they don’t understand how to make a food.

2. White Hat SEO: It F@$#ing Works

Image credit: Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz

This is a fantastic, extensive article that neatly summarizes what White Hat SEO is, strategies for implementing it, and why hacking or gaming Google (Black Hat SEO) is a waste of your (or your client’s) time.

Unless your manager/company/client is wholly comfortable with the high, variable risk that comes with black hat SEO, you’d better stay clear. I’m also of the mind that there’s almost nothing black hat can accomplish that white hat can’t do better over the long run, while building far more value. Unless it’s “I want to rank in the top 5 for ‘buy viagra’ in the next 7 days,” you’d better explain that you’re recommending black hat primarily because you’re not smart, talented and creative enough to find a white hat strategy to do it.

3. Fast Company: Would You Like This Article More If You Had To “Like” It On Facebook Before Reading?

Spoiler-alert: according to this article, psychology says you might.

So was it ethical for The New Yorker to require readers to “Like” a recent article before reading it?

Like our blog to find out.

4. Crash Course: Design for Startups

Image by: Paul Stamatiou

If you’re a novice web designer or a DIY startup in a hurry, check this out. Self-proclaimed developer/startup guy Paul Stamatiou shares his process, tools, and inspiration for site design.

For World Water Day this year, Solidarités International (with agency BDDP Unlimited) called on journalists to spread awareness and appealed to readers to sign a petition. They also made this beautiful spot:

You can still read the petition (in French) here. Thanks to Sean for the heads up.

Commenters on the article remind us that the fine print at the bottom of the Disney chart says “Note: This Chart Designates Operations and Not Authorities.” However, the article uses the different charts to suggest differences in the way designers and clients approach projects, not a difference between Disney’s and most corporation’s organizational structure.

Still, the fact that a company can even conceptualize its own company-wide organizational processes like this (let alone take the time to chart them visually) is credit to the company, no matter how traditionally hierarchical its actual authority structure is.

(Thanks, Andrew Hearst.)

You should check out Are Girl Scout Cookies Deliciously Evil?, a strange and interesting homebrew analysis of the famous Girl Scout Cookies fundraiser.

The author notes the following. In 1992, a box of cookies cost $2. In 2011, they cost $4. I quote: “Total inflation from 1992–2011 was 57%, but the price increased 100%. From 2006–2011, annual US inflation was close to 1% over that period and the net inflation was 9.25%; ); there was a 14% price increase. Perhaps the Girl Scout leadership is to blame.”

The analysis is interesting, and well worth a read, for at least two reasons:

1. The working hypothesis is that the Girl Scouts are evil.
2. It’s an interesting case study in evaluating charities on your own.

Spoiler alert: It looks like the local Girl Scout councils, rather than the national leadership, are probably to blame.

A mention over at Rhizome reminded me of this nice manifesto by Bre Pettis and Kio Stark, which now also has a great accompanying poster by James Provost.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

Ever since the recent Japanese Tsunami, I’ve been trying to think about whether graphic design efforts to generate donations to foreign disasters are good. (Spoiler: I haven’t decided.)

In the process of thinking about it, though, I ran across a nice infographic from Good that has to do with U.S. Foreign Aid.

Here’s the interesting thing. If I’m reading this infographic right, the average American thinks that the fed is spending a quarter out of every dollar in the federal budget on foreign aid, and he thinks it should spend a dime. In fact, the US spends roughly a penny out of every two dollars.

What does this mean? Isn’t this the age of information?