iancul

Wonderful works made by Yurko Gutsulyak, an ukrainean designer. His matches-calendar won a lot of awards, and one can easily see why. I also love the beautiful Cognac CD case, the nice stationery for the Golovan and Partners law firm and many more.

(via Dieline — thanks Alin for drawing my attention :) )

Beautiful photography from Ranjit Grewal.

(via forgot, sorry)

Typical Murphy, after working on at least four design projects concerning banking (finance, to be more precise) in one form or another, after spending days scavanging for related pictures on the internet, after asking friends to risk getting arrested photographing banks while on vacation abroad, it took one random search through Flickr to find the banking in photos group.

So, if you need examples of fascias, interiors, ATM’s, window treatments etc, that’s the place. Feel free to add your photos, obviously :)

and last but not least, a “supermarket” bank (they’ll probably have to downgrade to street kiosks due to the financial crisis, though :P)

(pictures from flickr, obviously)

Great idea, excellent implementation. Take your time, don’t resize your browser :) Just fly a baloon.

(via Gorun)

Marjolaine Roller has some great illustrations and especially very cool monkeys. Take a look for yourself :)

Poland’s poster design never ceases to blow me away:

Poster made by Tomasz Boguslawski, a Chicago International Poster Biennial finalist. Read the article on Design Observer.

If you really need to “sweet write” somebody, here’s the best way:

Typolade makes chocolate fonts. If you can read german, please fill in the details :)

(found by Roxana)

Great article about the glittering, Vegas-rivaling, Tokyo pachinko halls on Ping Mag, made by Tokyo Odyssey (check their website for more projects).

Seeing these amazing lighting solutions proved me yet again that light is one of the most impressive means of building architectural volumes, but also one of the most underestimated. Strange how we, humans, as civilization depend so much on our visual perception and still are toying around like dumb kids with one of physics strongest energies. It also pains me every time I’m involved in interior design projects, on one degree or another, to see how of little importance the lighting is to the architects or the client (can’t blame the latter, though, especially in Romania).

One of the rare things that impressed me during college was the lighting lecture kept by a great designer (even if he was a former doctor and also a plastic arts graduate), Mr. Savel Cheptea, one of the founders of the Design College in Cluj. He taught us the importance of good lighting, the effects it has on our eyes and especially on our working/reading stamina—by extending, the huge importance lighting has on our mood (ever wonder why you’re grumpier on rainy days?—it’s the lack of strong, warm sun light and the omnipresence of cold, shadowless light, not the rain itself). I bought that week a 200 watt light bulb for our student room, it boosted our drawing efficiency by at least two times, being able to draw till 4 or 5 in the morning without our eyes feeling the fatigue. After two weeks we got used to it so well that we could sleep with the light on, as others were working.

Most of my 3D renderings were light studies, I could fine tune radiosity and light scattering for days, but got bored in modelling in just three hours tops. The biggest pain while working as an interior designer was that the company made just 3DSMax scanline rendering for the clients, with no real light simulation whatsoever. Sure real light took hours of rendering compared to the 20-30 minute basic renders, and of course clients were visually uneducated (and sadly, still are in Romania). But lighting is one of the most important parts in interior design. Build anything you like, using the most amazing materials, put a 50 watt bulb inside and you’ve got nothing. Use just plasterboards and LED lighting and you can suggest any mood you’d like, from burning hot to freezing cold. And even if the client is uneducated, presenting a light study rather than a washed out top view image will help you sell the project a lot easier. Engineers can easily make top views, an architect should sell concepts, moods, impressions (Monet anyone?).

Sadly, romanian architecture is in the dark. The majority of public-interest buildings are either washed out with cheap lighting (not cheap actually, cost-inefficient to be more precise) or totally “stealth”, like haunted houses on a creepy road.

Concluding, here are some examples of superb lighting. You can easily guess the succes they have as a retail marketing and branding tool.

—or yet another possible title: how would Hari Seldon review The Good, The Bad And The Ugly finale.

Intriguing? Well, if you’ve never thought of applying game theory—wiki—to movies, here’s a treat:

I think that the final scene in this Clint Eastwood movie is the most outstanding example of game theory. Three men in a triangle — each with a gun, a rock at the center of the three. It is up to each man to evaluate his situation. All are excellent shots. Who do they shoot?

Clint has supposedly put a message on a rock that holds the key to everything, but do the other two trust Clint to have actually written the correct answer? As the other two evaluate the situation, they realize they can’t trust Clint to have written the answer on the rock — therefore they can’t shoot Clint who likely still has the answer. That means the other two can only shoot each other, but only one will likely hit before the other.

What they don’t know is that Clint has given one an unloaded gun… Clint can ignore this one. The one Clint has to worry about with the loaded gun will try to kill the one with the unloaded gun. Neither will fire at Clint. Clint will fire at the one with the loaded gun. As the camera passes from one face to the other the audience is meant to figure out what each would do.

The guy with the loaded gun shoots at the guy with the unloaded gun — Clint shoots the guy with the loaded gun. Game over. As with the hangings in the movie, he has dangled Duco out as bait while Clint takes the money.

The game is decided before it starts.

Clint sets up a situation where each evaluates their possible moves, but in reality, Clint has already won the game. Its a brilliant example of people making the best decisions based on the information available to them…and somebody manipulating the information available to them.

Phil Mellinger, 2002

Sounds like Asimov’s Hari Seldon has just used his psychohistory to find out if somebody’s gonna be a lucky punk :) Too bad scripts this good are so rare.

(via typographer)

Nice tongue-in-cheek typeface from the skilled František Štorm. You can get it for free on his site. Definitely check out the other superb typfaces his foundry sells.

A short hint: This typeface is dedicated to all Romanian graphic designers. It takes inspiration from stencils in Bucharest during my visit in early March 2007. Go ahead with more stencils, they are better than most of commercial graphic design in your country now!

(found by Alin)