IPW

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It might be true that I’ve been spending energy publicizing some lesser known designer’s work. I thought it might be fair to share the spotlight with some higher profile logos, starting with this recent one of a certain soft drink company you may know well. The Pepsi logo was redesigned in the last twenty minutes before the Great Recession of 08′, back when corporations were rolling up $100′s, smoking them as big fat cigars, and extinguishing them on the foreheads of interns. Pepsi vomited cash onto this ‘system’. I wonder how dearly it wants that cash back?
This link to a designer named Laurence Yang’s blog pretty much nails all you need to know about the new logo.
http://blowatlife.blogspot.com/2009/02/pepsi-logo-response.html
Fifteen of the last twenty minutes of the Golden Era was spent compiling an epic pile of horse crap that somehow justified carting large sums of money away from PepsiCo HQ. I say, hats off to these guys. Anyone who doubts that pure, unadulterated bullshit was fueling the furnace that inflated the economic bubble of the Bush Era should read this manifesto/justification/cry for help from the designers of the “Breathtaking Design Strategy”:
http://bunnitude.com/misc/files/pepsi_gravitational_field.pdf

I just built this robot in my backyard. It’s fusion powered (which I had to invent first), it’s got the most powerful magnet in the world on its right hand and a drill on the left. Let’s do this thing.

This next entry (posted shortly after the first one) highlights one of the finest logos ever to grace New York City. That it succeeds on so many levels and yet it has never been acknowledged by the design community is some kind of a tragedy.
Unlike Pic Up Stix, a small restaurant on the UES, this is a very big car service that is fortunate enough to get citywide exposure for its branding, which looks like this:

I think the only question that should be asked about this logo is, “am I going to actually be picked up in a car that will fall backwards the moment I climb in?”
I actually get a rush of joy when I see this logo painted on the side of a slick looking black town-car, which is what the best logos do. I hope it never goes away.

I’m starting a project called, “The World’s Best Logos” which is going to be a trophy case for some of the best trademarks ever designed.
This first morsel can be found on 91st and Lexington in Manhattan and has been nominated for both its choice of typography and the curiously bulbous people in the logo-mark.

“Pic Up Stix”
(additional points for an amazing restaurant name)

Yes we have no bacon!
But we do have two new shots of the sewer pipe, spewing curiously delicious looking green goo. I can’t take too much credit for the materials that I’ve applied to my model, they are pre-constructed. One day soon I’ll figure out how to make my own, though I doubt I can improve on these, they look nice!.
Frog’s Eye View:

Another frog:

A Bird? An EPA officer?:

Meanwhile, I’m working on a nice piece of bacon, its actually harder than I thought it would be.

3-D is so hot right now. Stuff that pops out atchu face. So hot that I had to board the bandwagon. I’ve recently started learning a new modeling program called “modo” (small “m”, small caps are so hot right now) and I think that it might be interesting for you to see my progress. Eventually I’ll have something worth actually looking at, but for the time being you can watch as I flounder in this new, very complicated digital medium.
For my first entry, I’ll post this little sketch I just completed of a sewage pipe. My goal is to eventually render liquids expertly, so I’m practicing this sort of thing. There is no real texture or material added to this model, perhaps one day there will be.
Sewage Pipe:

My daily blog gradually turned into a weekly blog. Then, before we went on the trip, a monthly blog. Now, having been a very busy person for the past several months, it seems to have become a yearly blog. Just in case it has, I better sum up 2009 since it may be a long time since you hear from me next.
Barack Obama became president. That was cool. George Bush finally left D.C. to the cheers of thousands of well wishers giving him the one fingered salut. Strangely, the world did not instantly revert to normalcy, I’m still trying to figure out why. People are still losing their jobs, the American car companies haven’t sold a single car yet this year (oh maybe one or two), and the big Banks which have received billions of your children’s yet to be hard earned dollars (yours were spent on Iraq a long time ago) used that cash to go on hunting excursion in jolly old England.
Oh right and the Pope, a kindly old German fellow, essentially gave a high five to holocaust deniers when he lifted the excommunication of the insane Bishop Richard Williamson. Please note that he hadn’t been excommunicated because of this mild character flaw, it was probably for something more serious like daring to suggest that the Pope was wrong about something, which is frowned upon in the tiniest country in the world. No, now they’ve kissed and made up, despite the Bishop’s refusal to retract his statement, apologize, or crack a book on the Holocaust written by someone other than a Nazi apologist. The German chancellor Angela Merkel (who has access to pretty decent evidence) is currently demanding an explanation and so am I.
If it sounds like I am tweaked by this, you may ask, why. Why? I’m tweaked because I grew up in the presence of a Holocaust survivor: my step-father. I grew up listening to stories no kid should have to listen to, much less try to live through, like he did. The rest of his family were killed in the gas chambers that Bishop Richardson deny existed. I can’t imagine George’s parents simply vanished into thin air after they were torn away from their children, since no trace of them was ever found, so I’m assuming the conventional wisdom is right. Which means the Bishop’s in-door is probably shoved up his out-door.
On the second day of 2009, which was a very cold snowy day in southern Poland, we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and the site of my step-father’s imprisonment. And the ruins of the gas chambers which didn’t exist.
Me, Angela Merkel, and few million others are both currently waiting for an explanation from the Vatican.

Late at night, while the world is snug in its bed I use Google to follow the route of our trip. I know, it’s sick, I should probably seek help. It helps sooth a nagging melancholy that follows me about and hides behind a chair when I turn around. I am pining for the fjords of New Zealand, Australia’s red center, Vietnam’s Halong Bay, Nepal’s Annapurna range and the grasslands of Kenya. At night, I watch them all from the sky. I am still amazed by Google’s technology, but, like watching the house I grew up in with its satellite imaging, looking at Uluru from space has a special meaning for me. It reminds me: we were there.
This week, the America that I have been trying to convince the people of the world exists, finally showed up at the polls and reignited the flame (The Beacon) of liberty. Most people we talked with were unconvinced that the America of the last eight years was capable of voting for a liberal African American. I told them they were mistaken. I was going out on a limb a bit, but I believed in my heart I was right.
As the tears and excitement subsides, I’m left with the ghosts of memory that are already beginning to fade from another special time. Mongol children on the Steppe. The Great Wall. Vanilla Lassis in Jodpur. Sunrise over the Ganges watched by golden haired monkeys. Maybe we brought back a little open mindedness with us from our trip, but our return probably had little to do with Obama’s campaign. Unless more people were reading our blog than I thought.
After we took off, America, left to its own devices, crashed the planet’s economy and the Bush administration continued its downward spiral of mean-spiritedness and alienation. It made it difficult to argue that America was still the country the world wished it to be. I continued to make the argument anyway.
Hopefully they’ll remember the Amero-Polski couple that wandered through town and insisted it was possible. Even after my own memories start to fade.
Our Route:

The snarkey rumors that Gov. Palin had to be informed (they probably spoke very slowly through clenched teeth) that Africa was not a county is one final political confection placed gingerly on top of the pile that MCain’s campaign turned out to be. It shouldn’t make me so giddy because the Governor has been shipped off back to Alaska without fanfare and we’ll hopefully never hear her name again. Unless I say it to myself, dreamily thinking back to the day when I simultaneously heard it for the first time and knew that the McCain campaign had gone bonkers.
If Africa was a country, like Palin allegedly believed, were its various countries states? Like American states? Did they all vote for an African president? Who would that have been, Nelson Mandela? Momar Quadafi? Maybe she should have quietly asked the one international politician who seemed to care about her when he called, Nikolas Sarkozy. Oh right except it wasn’t him, it was two idiots from Quebec- Oh Well.
If you ever thought you could never feel sorry of the esteemed Alaskan Governor, here is your chance to prove it to yourself:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/01/masked-avengers-prank-cal_n_140023.html
Ouch.
I prefer regarding the likelihood of a United States of Africa. It may actually be a good idea, but it would have to exist first.