I’m collecting examples of good broadside design for some future projects. These are some of my favorites so far.

Further recommendations are welcome in the comments.

In The X-Ray of the Sarcophagus of Ta-Pero
Oneiros Press
Designed by Shawn Sheehy.

The Madness of Kong
Ithaca Typothetae

Painful Alphabet
Colored Horse Studios

I Didn’t Sleep
Printed by Shari DeGraw
City Lights Books

Search Party
Cannibal Books
Designed by Katy Henrichsen
Printed by Effing Press

Having taken a sudden interest in poetry broadsides, I went Googling last night for examples of good broadside design, but found instead these beautiful letterpress greeting cards from Sycamore Street Press. They’re enough to make me want to start my own print shop.

A new ad campaign launched by Hyundai Card in subway stations in Seoul features mostly blank spaces. The company says the ads are a response to the loud, hectic nature of most subway advertising. Each ad is composed of a huge white panel that includes only a small icon and logo. More photos are available in this scan from Monocle.

Design nerds unite!  These shoes, by United Nude, patterned on the Eames chair, sent me round the bend:

There are different levels of design nerd.  To me, the name “Stefan Sagmeister” rings a few bells, and an Eames shoe is an appropriate dinner-table topic.  Others (and I suspect Johnathon is in this camp) have visceral, inexplicable reactions (of disgust) to (bad) design.  Something that’s off isn’t just ugly, it’s wrong.

If you fall into this category, proceed to this article on the New York Times on typography at your own risk.

Not exactly new at this point, and not directly related to poetry, but things magazine’s linked guide to a book of design-related blogs contains enough new reading, screencapturing, and photo logging to keep you blinking into an LCD for the next year. If you only click one, make it I Love Typography.

YouTube – Piano stairs – Rolighetsteorin.se – The fun theory.

More things in the world should be designed to delight.

Books begat computers, which begat instant messaging, which begat talk bubbles, which begat … bookshelves.

Bookshelf-annotation : clusterflock.

I have no idea what the city of the future will look like, but I hope Mitchell Joachim is going to be part of the planning team.  If the name sounds familiar, he appeared on the Colbert Report last week, carrying pictures of future tree houses and people movers shaped like sea life:

What does it have to do with poetry?  Everything or nothing, I suppose.  I’m fascinated by poets who produce work under the (specific) influence of their environment.  It’s impossible to picture someone like Auden without the influence of the industrial structures of English coalworks.  Who knows which strange machines and structures will become commonplace, working their way into the world of letters without much notice?

Mandy Brown, writer of the excellent A Working Library weblog, lays out the principles for designing good reading experiences online in a new piece for A List Apart:

Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking. We measure how frequently they click but not how long they stay on the page. We concern ourselves with their travel and participation—how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Readers flourish when they have space—some distance from the hubbub of the crowds—and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.

I’ve read and admired A List Apart for years, and this is easily one of the best pieces they’ve published to date. Required reading.

Advergirl offers a new collection of greeting cards with “sentiments for a broken economy.” I’m the breadwinner in my household, so the card pictured above got me where I live. It’s funny because it’s awkward. I think.

via Heather Ackmann and several others

The “One Thing” pad from Pretty Bitter looks like an elegant way to combat continuous partial attention and concentrate on the important rather than than urgent.

There were 12 items on my to-do list today. Only seven got done, and the one I really cared about — finishing a draft of a poem — wasn’t among them.

(via Caterina)