Kate Spade Book Covers

Kate Spade is offering free covers for your covers featuring stylish arrangements old book covers. Their "Behind the Curtain" website is pretty nice too.

Web 2.0 and Spectra Visual Newsreader

Every web developer, designer, and marketer is promoting a different definition for what they call Web 2.0. At Tenfold, we define the next generation website as behaving more like an software application with a motion interface and minimal computer administrative debris. Here users will be able to access more information through high-resolution visual communication as well as word-driven content (user generated and host generated).

For an elegant example of a next generation website, check out the Spectra Visual Newsreader offered by MSNBC. Spectra merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum into an expansive news viewing experience. For another example, check out Thinkmap's slightly less stunning Visual Thesaurus.

More Artistic Wallpaper

A week ago we posted a site that had artistic wallpaper for iphones. Now here's some artsy desktop wallpaper for the rest of us who don't have iphones. (Believe it or not, nobody at Tenfold has an iPhone…yet.) Bobby Solomon has created the Desktop Wallpaper Project. The idea came to him after he created custom wallpapers to promote the band Radiohead during the 2007 release of Rainbows. The Project features some of Solomon's favorite artists and designers—many of which also happen to be favorites of Tenfold.

New Vitra Site

Vitra, the company that has manufactured furniture designs by Charles & Ray Eames and George Nelson since 1957, just released a new website. The new site face lift comes after 8 years of suffering the limitations of 90's site design.

Vitra has developed a wide range of furnishings for the office, for the home and for public spaces in collaboration with progressive designers. Yet it is more than just a design-oriented manufacturing company. The name also stands for the Vitra Design Museum, for a collection of modern furniture and its accompanying archive, for workshops and publications on topics of design, and for an architectural concept that unites buildings by Frank Gehry, Nicholas Grimshaw, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Alvaro Siza, Herzog & de Meuron and SANAA at the Vitra Headquarters in Birsfelden (Switzerland) and on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein (Germany).

To make appropriate reference to this wide spectrum of activities, the company refers to itself as project.

The McCain Brand

The McCain logotype uses Optima. Optima was designed in the 1950s by Hermann Zapf, who, like McCain, served as a prisoner of war. It reflects the classical Roman letterform, while maintaining the sans-serif modern appeal. Optima was used to set the names on the Vietnam Memorial Wall. The star icon with the gold wings evokes a sense of class and experience the campaign hopes will match up to McCain’s military service record.

Ich Bin Ein Obama

Today in the Daily Heller (newsletter from Design writer Steven Heller), there was an article that showed how good the Obama design team is. Above is a poster created for an Obama speech in Berlin that is a tip-of-the-hat to the German people. It pays tribute to the famous German era of design called Bauhaus (see poster above left).

Designers may want to thumb their nose at the John McCain poster below, but back home in Indiana (where I grew up), this would have great appeal among a certain audience who would hang it next to their Thomas Kincade paintings (this audience also shows up to vote). Oddly enough, both of these posters are great designs in terms of creating appeal among a targeted audience.

iPhone & iPod Touch Wallpapers

For all of you who love your new 3G iphones and love customizing them, Poolga offers free iPhone and iPod Touch wallpapers from a selection of designers and illustrators from around the world.

3D Chalk Art

Julian Beever is an English chalk artist who has been creating chalk drawings on pavement surfaces since the mid 90's. His works are created using a projection called anamorphosis, and create the illusion of three dimensions when viewed from the correct angle. Advertising and marketing agencies have used chalk artists like Julian to create sidewalk illustrations promoting various products like Coca-Cola.

Alberto Seveso

Alberto Seveso is an illustrator/designer in Italy. TOP: portrait of surfer Kelly Slater. BOTTOM: illustration from Gnocca series.

Tenfold Helps Smith + Smith Win Founders Awards

Tenfold recently created a rebranding campaign and website design for Smith + Smith Landscape Architects in San Francisco. The marketing director at Smith + Smith was so proud of our collaboration that she entered the work in the Society for Marketing Professional Services 2008 Founders Awards. The Founders’ Awards Program salutes members of the San Francisco SMPS who exemplify excellence in the area of professional services marketing. With San Francisco's rich design community, Tenfold was flattered that our work received the Committee's Choice in Corporate Identity and an Honor Award in Website Design.

Interesting Tip from Behance Magazine.

Dressed For Dinner

Even if the guy’s dressed in his favorite old white tee shirt, with this napkin at his neck he’ll actually look like he made the effort to get "dressed for dinner". A great conversation piece at any party.

Gotta Love the Swiss

The country known for cheese, chocolate, and typefaces also has designer garbage bags! In order to throw out the trash, the Swiss must buy region specific bags which include a disposal tax. Each region (or canton as the Swiss like to call them) has a unique bag design. The bags above are from the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden and feature the letter "A" printed in—you guessed it—Helvetica.

The Obama Brand

Politics aside, Barack Obama is the probably the first presidential candidate to marketed like a high-end consumer brand—think Target, Volkswagen, Nike. His message of change and hope is reinforced through an integrated brand identity composed of carefully selected typefaces, a beautifully-executed website, and the easily-recognizable "O" icon. At every campaign rally, whether it's in Denver or Detroit, the campaign uses consistent treatments on signs and banners. If you visit his website, you'll see all the same elements showing up in this clean, smooth, elegant way.

The "Change" typeface used by the campaign is called Gotham. Gotham was originally developed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones for GQ Magazine. It's tasteful, sleek, not fancy, and very American, as opposed to a Swiss font like Helvetica. Gotham's perfectly round "O" ties in nicely with the "O" logo.

The "O" logo uses the major elements that past campaigns have incorporated by combining the American Flag and the candidate's name. But the Obama logo goes one step further by creating other metaphors to reinforce his message. The "O" suggests a sun rising over fields created by the stripes of the flag, implying a new dawn—very instep with the concepts of "hope" and "change."

Flash Becoming SEO

Adobe announced today that they have been working with Google and Yahoo to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of Flash-based websites. Moving forward, Flash site owners won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

This is great news for clients who have built flash-based sites, as well as clients who have wanted to create dynamic flash experiences but had to settle for HTML due to Search Engine Optimization.

Read Adobe's Press Release