Secret Still

1) Jason Forrest - War Photographer. That is just awesome.

2) Disappearing Car Door. Real or fake? Either way, pretty badass.

3) Baby Gives the Evil Eye. I would call it more the motherfucker-you-must-be-crazy eye. Cute.

While I was eating vegetarian brunch yesterday with the Girl’s family, across the bay a tiger from the SF zoo was having a brunch of its own. Apparently it jumped a moat and a serious wall to escape and then, like any tiger, starting tearing people apart. One man was killed and two other were severely maimed. The tiger was shot dead by police. I honestly just feel sorry for everyone involved in this, including the tiger.

Escaped Tiger Kills Visitor

After a brief hiatus, and before the next one, here come the lukewarm jets. Strap in for mediocrity.

1) Sweet Georgia Brown - Oscar Peterson. Piano legend Oscar Peterson died recently. See what the world has lost.

2) Typographics. A sweet animated short describing typography with typography.

That’s all you get unless I find something else that interests me.

1) While My Ukelele Gently Weeps. There are so many great things about this video that I can’t even begin to describe them.

2) Hi, I’m a Wii. Mac ad spoof for Nintendo Wii.

3) Battles vs Baraka. I forgot all the weird things that Baraka did to me. I’ll have to watch it again.

I’d say that one of the things that I’m most proud of in my life is my brain. It never ceases to amaze me with all the things it can do, the lessons it’s learned, and the ways it allows me to experience the world. It’s nice to know that I have most if not all of the 10 Habits of Highly Effective Brains. Now I need the 10 habits of highly effective lovers and the 10 habits of highly effective skateboarders and I’m set.

1) Billy Dee Williams for Colt 45. The smoothest motherfucker for the smoothest motherfucking beverage.

2) A Christmas Kiss. Awwww, thas nasty.

3) Jib Jab: In 2007. Jib Jab’s year in review.

Leave it to Stanford to blow my mind so early in the morning. Those darling, little geniuses have created an online tool called Vector Magic that will create a vector from JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, or TIFF files. It can output to EPS, SVG, or PNG. If all those things mean nothing to you then go the hell away. The best part of the whole thing is that it’s free! No longer will haggard designers have to spend the better part of their day tracing some stupid product image to turn it into a usable vector. Illustrator CS3 has a pretty advanced trace tool, but for those of us who don’t spend all day in Illustrator it can be pretty daunting, sometimes impossible, to get the image to vectorize properly. Stanford’s tool is fairly customizable and seems to hold up well against images of varying color and complexity. To give you a nice example the image for this post is a vectorized version of the image from the previous post, created with Stanford’s tool in about 32 seconds.

Vector Magic

Stop what you’re doing immediately and go listen/read to David Byrne’s conversation with Thom Yorke about music release methodologies and the changing face of music availability. Supoib.

Either it’s never been there before or I was oblivious to it in the past, but a lot of companies have gone digital with their Christmas Cards this year. On one hand I’m really glad that they’ve gone paperless (for the most part), but on the other I kinda feel like the December holiday season is about being personal again, regardless of which holiday, if any, you celebrate. Trees are saved, but you don’t get a signature or even the idea that anyone thought about you individually. Maybe that’s the trade-off we have to make, but I think there’s a happy medium somewhere. I’ll see what I can come up with. In the meantime enjoy some digital greetings and messages of cheer.

1) DDB London’s card designed by Peepshow.

2) Need a Goat from ITO partners. Interesting because it’s a video of their paper card in action.

3) Tattoo Santa from R/GA (pictured, with my my hilarious misspelling). Create your own holiday message and ink it onto Santa’s flesh.

It’s a little derivative of Jeff Soto’s work (and I know Jeff hates imitators), but I have to admit that I like the illustrations of Stephen Knowles. Via It’s Nice That.

Stephen Knowles