Since the honey was limited I wanted to do something special with the presentation. I was also itching to go to Metrix Create:Space and play with their tools. Their laser cutter allowed me to replicate an intricate label at small quantities. The cut labels are beautiful because they highlight the color of the honey and allow light to pass through the different shapes. The labels are big so you have to turn the jar in your hand to read the label. The word HONEY is filled in by the amber liquid and the comb shapes mimic a partially capped frame.

I can’t say enough good things about Metrix. The people are awesome, their philosophy is great, and for Seattle their hours are unbelievable. They are open until midnight seven days a week! Without them these labels would be stuck in my imagination. So go there and make something. You’ll have fun.

• Yogurt dominates BCAM, multiple brands and varieties. You could barely buy yogurt without fighting Breast Cancer.
• Lunch meat was an unlikely contender. I suppose people can’t resist a good breast pun.
• Cheese seems to be a common theme in BCAM products. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Velveeta, and Freschetta.
• Kroger/QFC did two products, bottled water and luch meat. This seems like an odd combination. Maybe these products’ packages are cheap to redesign.
• We didn’t see any female products supporting BCAM. No hairspray, shampoo, tampons, or makeup. Shame on them.
• A lack ‘health’ food sporting the ribbon, just the yogurts and Special K. Nothing from energy bars, teas, juices, oatmeals, etc.

For the record my two favorite pink packages are Ziplock and Emergen-C.

Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

You should probably read the whole thing.

I really hope that the sole reason behind Apple’s operating system names is this eventual Spinal Tap joke. It’s too perfect. OSX + iOS = OSXI.

Google uses the textual content of links to determine the subject of the linked page. There are some simple practices that can make the links you create more valuable.

Bad:
The Bob Loblaw Law Blog is here.
The link doesn’t contain any words that are relevant to the content.

Good:
Visit the Bob Loblaw Law Blog.
The link contains a name, subject matter, and medium.

The Google results for the word here are here. Happy Hunting.

Photo shows a view south toward downtown Seattle from the Space Needle. The tracks for the Monorail run toward downtown. The edge of the observation platform is visible at the bottom of the photo. 1962. Image courtesy Washington State Digital Archives.

The current PostNatural Organism of the Month is the Sterile Male Screwworm (hopefully that doesn’t remind you of anyone).

During the late 1950′s a large-scale public works program was initiated to eradicate the live-flesh-eating screwworm plaguing cattle ranches across the American south. The screwworm is the larval stage of the fly, Cochliomyia hominivorax. Full-scale fly factories were produced in Florida and Texas capable of producing 500 billion sterile male flies per week.

The factories were optimized to expedite each stage of the fly’s life and to sort them by gender prior to their emergence from the pupae. Male screwworms, at the age of 5 ½ days, were loaded into metal tubes and carried by a lone worker to the irradiation facility where they were exposed to a radioactive sample of Cobalt 60, permanently ending their reproductive capacity. Following maturation into adult flies, they were released from airplanes 1,000 ft above America’s cattle growing regions where the now impotent males would attempt unsuccessfully to mate with the typically monogamous females.

via Future of Science Blog

I started looking at the out-of-box experience of buying a Windows PC with a new contempt. The crapware. The stickers. The anti-virus software problem where the cure is worse than the disease. The flimsy hardware. It’s not so much that I despised Windows PCs, but that it felt like Microsoft and the PC makers despised them, like they all have no respect for their own platform.

Example number two is the wretched state of digital news design by Andy Rutledge. Via DF.

Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days.

In both of these scenarios, companies have lost sight of their actual audience. They started treating their product like a NASCAR team, any open space is a space to be sold. I guess it is hard to see the downside of the first sticker or popup ad when someone is ready to hand you the cash. But soon these things add up and overpower your product. Instead of being in the business of making and selling computers you are now in the business of selling prime desktop placement to junk software companies. Instead of being in the business of journalism you are now in the business of clicks. Now your product is something that your customers never wanted in the first place.