Double Triple, Art Fag City’s favorite design group teams up with artist Ryan Junell to bring you this great Obama advertisement asking registered Californians to vote this Tuesday. I’m a fan. Full disclosure: Jason Corace, a member Double Triple, is also my roommate.

They just don’t make toys like they used to. Via Superdickery

Screengrab AFC

Looks like designers aren’t tired of black in web design any more, because I’m even spotting it on fine art websites, typically the last people to catch on to anything trendy. ArtInfo’s new all black all the time site immediately comes to mind, a site that now looks decent even if it’s unnavigable. Sadly color alone can’t solve this outfit’s problems. Anyone else try to use their sale index? Look forward to an exercise in torture - users have to click five million different check boxes just to see a result that might be useful. It’s also still woefully incomplete, a disappointment given that they’ve been working on it for nearly three years now.

Rhizome also has a fancy new black masthead. Their new site improves so much upon their old design, that I am still, one month later, dazzled by its effects. In this case, the aesthetic of the black masthead recalls fancy gadgetry or the design of downloadable platforms such as Miro. It literally looks like what it is supposed to do. This same concept might also be applied to the mom blog/personal diary site dooce, her masthead now resembling a giant TV console. In Heather Armstrong’s case though, it would seem the new design simply clears more room for advertising and traffic generating headings such as daily photo, daily dog (chuck) and daily style. It’s largely empty content, but not worth complaining about since nobody goes to her site looking for important information about anything.

Why do creative competitions inevitably find the worst designers to create their calls for entry.  In the case of Metropolis, which offers 10,000 to the best design about water, the promo itself looks so unattractive, you have to wonder if  the competition is worth entering at all.  The entry details are hard to read,  the flash website opens in a pop up window, and the skip intro button appears only after the intro has loaded.   Thankfully, with the Metropolis designers appear to have nothing to do with the judging, (Eric Chan, Fiona Cousins, Lance Hosey and Pam Light are this years panel members.)

With all this said, even if Lance Hosey director of William McDonough + Partners, does look at your work, I can’t imagine the $75.00 entrance fee will be worth it.  Which is to say, always proceed with caution when faced with a charge to have your work reviewed.  With only a few exceptions, it rarely pays off in any way shape or form.

Image via Fiona Gardner

Sorry for the late start today, but as you can see we’ve been very busy over here. As promised, we’ve been working on a few design changes around here that we think will make our life and yours a little easier. First of all, observe our new Fresh Links column. We like to post a lot of links, but it’s annoying when doing so pushes more substantial posts down the page. In an effort to “screw that,” we’ve moved them over to the left and created a separate RSS feed. Yay!

Also note the way our blogroll is now set up. Rather than having five million links lining the sides of our posts, you can now click on the category of your choice and our list of websites will load in the main column. I didn’t feel comfortable pruning the list, since we consider the links a resource, but we needed to find a way to make it more manageable. I personally think this solution deals with the issue rather nicely.

One of the more exciting new features on AFC lands in our masthead, which will now feature a new emerging artist every two weeks. Click on the image and a page with the profiled artist and a full sized reproduction of their work. Kicking us off is the work of Nathaniel Stern, who headed up the residency I attended at icommons last week in Dubrovnik. We’ve got a few net celebs slated for future slots, so look forward to upcoming profiles.

There are a number of other changes, such as a slimmer column width, a new masthead and, great looking fonts, but rather than go into the self evident, I’ll let you observe all this and decide for yourself what you think. If you like what you see, why not send a shout out to Patricking and Su at House of Pretty, because they worked very closely with me over the last couple of months on the new design.

One final note on our new public face: I’ve updated my myspace profile pic to more accurately reflect the AFC core essence. I’m particularly pleased with my new rack.

A good friend pointed me to an article at Earz Magazine today titled “Why Ban Comic Sans”, which naturally led me to Google the term “Comic Sans”. The result of the search revealed a mass of negativity on the web surrounding the use of the font. For example, “The beloved font of teachers and school administration officials and people who think it looks like friendly and approachable handwriting” says Lone Prairie Blog who concludes “except it DOESN’T LOOK LIKE HANDWRITING AT ALL. IT LOOKS STUPID.”

Those trained in typography can ignore this next observation as I’m sure there are plenty of holes to be found, but I bring up the subject of Comic Sans because it vaguely reminds me of the proprietary typeface developed for General Electric by Michael Abbink, Inspira. Whether or not the relationship is a strong as I am making it out to be, I can’t help but find it endlessly amusing that the corporate branding of a multinational company could evoke, you know, Archie and Veronica books. Not surprisingly, according to Wikipedia GE’s perspective on branding reads some what differently, characterizing the font as “clear, precise and modern.” I guess they work with a relatively loose definition of modern.

In other news, if you’re finding AFC a lighter read than usual, please be advised that more substantial posting about fine art is forthcoming in the new week.

Scholastic’s illustration by Mary GrandPre, British and Canadian cover by Jason Cockcroft

The Toronto Star feeds my endless interest in the Harry Potter phenomonen, and Canadian-American comparisons today snidely observing that Canada “and the rest of the English speaking world” will be using a different cover for JK Rowling’s latest in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” The comment reflects the common belief amongst Canadians that the US does as it pleases, often at the expense of others, (deep seated resentment towards Americans for not converting to the metric system persists today) though the article does not address some of the more interesting aspects of branding involved in the choice. For example, the illustration provided by Cockcroft represents a departure in his usual more realistic renderings for children’s books, and draws a closer connection to the early Scholastic covers by Mary GrandPre. Of course, if the point is to create a cover that sells better because it looks more like the American version, I’m not sure Cockcroft has succeeded given that GrandPre’s recent change in stylistic approach has been so drastic that it’s hard to tell the same illustrator did the last two books.

As for which cover is better, my vote goes to the Scholastic version as it targets a broader age range of readers. I can’t look at the Cockcroft cover and not think of the popular children’s book author Robert Munsch.

For those who are still at work, we close off the day, with this video via Drawn! Count this as a must see for all the typography-Pulp Fiction nerds in the audience.