Ladies and Gentlemen, this edition of Quipsologies!

A new blog devoted to the appreciation of book cover design. [Via]

The latest attempt in creating an interactive NYC subway map. (London Tube and DC Metro are also available)

A very lovely (in Spanish though) blog on type design by Chile-based designer Juan Pablo de Gregorio: Letritas. [Spotted at]

Anyone can throw 250,000 multi-coloured ‘superballs’ in the streets of San Francisco, but 9,000 pieces of fruit in the streets of Swansea is a feat all the more impressive.

Yet another online magazine about visual art/stuff/media/art, Anti magazine.

A cool graphic showing the baffling amount of screen resolutions and sizes that we need to deal with in these modern ages.

“In the 1960’s, Edward Hall decided to study the proximity of people as they talk and how the physical distance communicates its own underlying meaning. He called this field of study Proxemics […] In 2006, Ksenya Samarskaya decided to chart and map these distances. The first iteration of the project lives as a 6.5 foot map, charting dialogue out of three Harlequin Novels as to the proximity with which it would have been stated. The diagram plots these against Hall’s original specified distances for Intimate, Personal, and Social distances, their significance, and the waning and waxing of our different receptors as categorized by vision, touch, sound, scent and heat.”

Build custom screen effects for iTunes using iVisualize.

For those doing interactive work, stylegala offers fresh links, forums, and top sites in their gallery.

Finland has a new logo for its Finland’s EU Presidency in Helsinki.

There’s cause for a little celebration! BMW has sold its 150,000 mini!

Could this be the sign of things to come: Wal-Mart undertakes design initiative for its stores. They could push the envelope (at least in terms of what we’re used to seeing them do).

Adobe is now poised to bring a new programming language to its customers. Looks like the next best thing for web developers. Say hello to Ajax.

The Poster Museum at Wilanow, Poland, has just opened its 20th International Poster Biennale, featuring usual suspects Uwe Loesch and Niklaus Troxler, as well as student work from L’Ecole d’art Maryse Eloy in Paris and L’Ecole de recherche Graphique in Brussels.

Also at The Poster Museum: an online collection of work by the great Jan Lenica.

With the recent backend work on Speak Up, we’re all forced to be more W3C compliant. I guess that means I’ll soon be able to laugh at these unicode cartoons.

Good rock ‘n’ roll… [long pause] I don’t know. I guess it’s just something that makes you feel alive. It’s just like, it’s something that’s human, and I think that most music today isn’t. And it’s like anything that I would want to listen to is made by human beings instead of computers and machines. To me, good rock ‘n’ roll also encompasses other things, like Hank Williams and Charlie Mingus and a lot of things that aren’t strictly defined as rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll is like an attitude, it’s not a musical form of a strict sort. It’s a way of doing things, of approaching things. Like anything can be rock ‘n’ roll. — The final interview with great rock (and cultural) critic Lester Bangs.

In the words of George Carlin: “What do Americans think of this once-pristine country being turned into a coast-to-coast billboarded, mini-marted shopping mall? They think it’s just fucking dandy! …which indirectly brings me to the reason why suburbs will never have tall trees.

— If you censor video games, then you have to go after comics, you have to go after movies, you have to go after TV shows downloaded on iPods and bit torrents. So I think the courts just say, “Aw fuck it. I don’t want to get involved.”

— Ultimately, it all leads back to the money. If namby-pamby stuff stops selling, the big, mainstream producers, the big moneymakers, the Sony Corporations, General Electric, you name it, they all have to get into some part of the game. And once they get into the game, they’re the guys that pay Congress, so Congress isn’t about to go after these guys for that. Nobody likes to stop the money stream.

A conversation between Vice magazine and Al Jaffee

LogoWorks: now with a fifty dollar discount

(Uncle) Jean-Luc Godard’s commercials for Marithé + François Girbaud jeans were recently uploaded to YouTube.

Artist Lee Walton and his contemporary version of situational aesthetics. [via]

Over 20 years ago, I had the singular experience of meeting, interviewing and attending a couple classes with Allen Ginsberg. I was stupid and inexperienced, he was generous and insightful. This past weekend saw the 80th anniversary of his birth, so why not take the time to visit the Naropa University Archive Project. There, under the auspices of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, you can listen to recordings of Ginsberg’s readings and classes on such topics as vividness, close observation, prosody, negative capacity and clear seeing.