I love these pencils, hand-stamped with catch phrases from The Big Lebowski. But I love even more that there are multiple sets of pop-culture pencils at this Etsy store — including classic rap, The Goonies, mostly dead wrestlers and mid-century designers.

And I love ever MORE that you can order custom sets as well!

It’s a stunningly simple idea — obvious when you’ve seen it. And, in a variety of colours, it’ll set you back €15, plus shipping. That’s a mite too high for something that it readily available in its standard, fingertip burning form at Dollaramas around the country.

I wonder if you could just heat up a soldering iron and make your own, or something?

I live about 200 km from the city of Winnipeg. But nobody says that. Everyone always says “two hours,” because that’s how long it takes to get there.

Time is how people think of travel. Distance is useful mainly as an approximation of time. So that’s why a map that throws out that slavish devotion to geography, and instead concentrates on travel times, would be so useful!

Which is exactly what TimeMaps does (sorry, it’s in Dutch). By mapping out the Netherlands and correlating it with train schedules, recent design grad Vincent Meertens has made a web-app that visualizes how the “distance” (travel time) grows and shrinks over the course of a day. That is, when the trains run less often, like at night, it takes a lot longer to get where you’re going. And the map gets bigger, to represent that.

Meertens tells Fast Company that he’s hoping to add cars, bikes and other forms of transportation. His next project will be New York City.

It’s up for an award — you can vote for it here.

Fantastic work, and I love it. Borrows a little from this previous video, 100 Years of Title Design, but the borrows are essential.

(From Art of the Title, via Gizmodo)

This is a “sunken” bridge, located in the Netherlands that gives the incredible perspective of walking through parted water. The bridge gives access to a 17th Century fort, which has long been protected by a shallow moat.

It was designed by RO & AD Architects and uses a type of modified wood called Accoya wood, which offers increased durability against something like water.

Apparently from afar, it appears as if there’s nothing in the water, and you only see it once up close. I love that you can reach over and touch the water. There must not be too many issues with the water level increasing, otherwise they might not have gone with this idea. Very cool!

(via)

Here is a great collection of bird-themed logos from the 1960s and ’70s, like this one, for a shooting club, designed by Atelier E.U.M. Lenz (Switzerland).

The website Aqua Velvet also has collections of other animal-themed logos (1, 2, 3). Love it!

It’s a whole bunch of “in stereo” banners, from vintage LPs, all scanned to the same size, and stacked up into a big long pile.

Ha! I love it.

And, over at a website called, of course, Stereo Stack, a single click will randomly reshuffle the order of the stack, so uniqueness will rule the day.

The banners are via Jive Time Records and Project Thirty-Three.

(via BB and Retronaut)

What if you built a glass house, as designed by M.C. Escher, and forgot to include furniture?

Oh, they did that? In Japan?

Huh.

I do kind of like the multi-level playfullness of it — almost like a treehouse. But I’m guessing they don’t have any friends who wear skirts over.

(Via Gizmodo: The Weirdest Home I’ve Ever Seen Is an Exhibitionist Wet Dream.)

Several of my Twitter followers (I work in journalism, type nerds are (relatively more) common here) picked up on it, but it was kind of a nine hours’ wonder.

Well, here’s another nine hours of wonder for you — a game of Bézier curves and letterforms.

Think you’re a type nerd? Or a type geek? Or a type pseudo-intellectual? See how you fare at a game that looks like this:

It’s called “Shape Type“. Go on, give it a go!

Novum 11/11 – Making Of Cover from Paperlux on Vimeo.

Wow, this is pretty cool! Using HTML5, the people at Scroll have built a web-app that works a lot like professional page layout programs like Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign.

Sure, it’s rough around the edges, and the power and capabilities are limited, but you can essentially drag-and-drop text or photos to create the online layout you want for a webpage — in the exact same way you would create a print layout.

Is it revolutionary? No….? But I kind of want to say “almost.”

Find out more, or request an invite: scroll mkr.

I’m not sure why these were designed to look so much like Pokémon balls, but these Christmas ornaments are in official Pantone colours.

That’s important to us design-y types, especially of the print variety.

But I suspect if you put these on your Christmas tree, you’d better be prepared for a whole lot of weird looks from your family.

Find out how to buy ‘em here: Benvenuti in Seletti.

One Jordan Lloyd has a seriously intense collection of vintage logos on Flickr, including the one above, which I can’t source (go ahead, you try Googling for “pants off” — with or without the percentage sign — and see what you get), but which I picked to top off this post just because it amused me after reading Amy’s flowchart post below.

There’s a ton more if you follow this little link here, though. Check out a sample, below:

Mmmmmm, I love that look!

(via Draplin)

I have a problem. The problem is that my mom’s birthday is precisely one week before Christmas. And, my sister’s birthday is a week before that.

So while all of you are fretting about getting your Christmas shopping done, I still have two birthdays to shop for! Sometimes, it can be frustrating trying to buy great birthday presents AND great Christmas presents for them, especially when I have to fight the mall crowds, but mostly I muddle through.

The real issue comes later, when I go to wrap the presents, and all I have is Christmas paper.

My mother drilled it into me from a very early age that Christmas paper was absolutely verboten for a birthday present (although, I’m not sure why — I often had Hallowe’en themed presents and for my Oct. 18 birthday) so I’m careful to make sure that birthday presents are wrapped in birthday or neutral paper.

Now, if the wrapping paper you see above ever gets made and sold as a real product (it’s currently just a design idea), my problem will be solved forever. You see, although the gift above says “Merry Christmas” the genius of this wrapping paper is that it is a word search — and it contains words for just about anything you can imagine:

(Designed by Fabio Milito, via the Dieline)

I can’t think of a more common poster to have hanging up in the rooms or dorms of my (misspent) youth. Can you believe it’s been 15 years since the movie Trainspotting came out? Yikes. I listened to that soundtrack about a gazillion times, and I can still probably recite the order those songs were in. (There were some good ones, too … “Perfect Day”? Wow.)

One thing I hadn’t thought of was just how iconic these posters were — and how influential. I guess when you’re the right age, you just assume that things that resonate with you will of course be influential.

Looking back on these posters from a decade and a half on, it’s pretty amazing how well they still stand up — how modern they still look, how fresh. So it’s interesting to read an interview in Creative Review with the design team behind them. There was a lot of hard word, obviously, a lot of inspiration, and a lot of luck:

We had been initially given a still by the film distributors, PolyGram, from the film Backbeat, as a kind of visual guide for creating the Trainspotting poster campaign. But we hated the image and wanted to come up with something better. The film company had approved the idea of the individual shots for a character-based teaser campaign but the main image for the final poster was to be a group shot of the actors in a tight huddle. It wasn’t until we tried to get the actors into the group shots that the friction started. It was at this point that we realised that whilst the characters from the story were in a gang, they were by no means friends who could implicitly trust each other or want to be seen in a tight huddle-style group photo all hugging and being chummy in the manner that was initially planned.

Read the whole thing.

Then go watch Star Wars and think about how Obi-Wan used to be a heroin addict. It adds layers to that film. It is equally informative to see Trainspotting’s Renton as a proto-Jedi who turns to drugs because he can’t make sense of the Force.