Check out these spectacular new spreads from a recent campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand for Sanyo.

They're advertising in these for a digital camcorder that can take video underwater. What I like so much about these in particular (aside from the fact that they're well laid out and the typography is impressive) is that they've got this great message, which I take to be as follows.

Isn't everything just weird? Why don't you take a minute and appreciate that?

I love it. It's not some vague promise or total non-sequitir. It's a totally open question that's not deeply laden with some sort or other of bullsh*t.

Thanks to Fubiz for the heads-up.

I found this absolutely mind-blowing.

Eric Nitsche, April issue of Gebrauchsgraphik, 1956

Oh and they are Mary Blair fans. Score.

Kitchen Appliances, Montgomery Ward 1953 Catalog

((It's a pity, its authors, AdamsMorioka, have a (arguably unnecessary) Flash-only site...))

These remind me of this brilliant poster for Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

Once weekly, GOOD Magazine posts an infographic, or a "transparency", visualizing everything from the amount of our national acreage controlled by major retail chains (below) to the length of time people spend on popular email clients. They have now created a flickr archive of them all.

Student Debt: GOOD and Futurefarmers look at the ballooning student debt in the United States.

Retail Store Space: The biggest retailer in the world covers an area larger than Manhattan. GOOD and Futurefarmers look at "the amazing amount of space occupied by a few ubiquitous chains."

Oblique Strategies is a set of special cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt whose purpose is to provide creative inspiration.

In an interview, Eno describes them thusly:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude."

Interested? If forty-five bucks for a deck sounds steep, you can get the next best thing with the new Oblique Strategies feed on Twitter. You can even pick up a few strategies from the man himself by following Brian Eno.

It’s like having your own Magic 8-Ball of cryptic design wisdom!