the February 18th 2008 Are

Evolution of Car Logos For all the design heads out there, or gear heads, Neatorama has a really great write up on the evolution of car company logos, always interesting to see where different designs came from.

Oceanic Dead Zones We try to stay away from things not related to the art/design world here, just cause deviating just opens up a pandora's box of incidentals, but considering I've seen two stories on this in the past week, I figure it's worth passing on. This is the type of stuff to inspire artists to create works that actually matter and speak to something we all (should) care about. But oceanic "dead zones" (where sea life cannot survive) and the rise of "Super-slime" (primitive organisms that are thriving and wrecking havoc on anything, including humans, that comes in contact with it) are very real, and worth reading up on.

Steve Gerber Dies I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the passing of Steve Gerber died last week(ish). As a great comic writer and creator of one of my favorite characters (I don't care what anyone says, even if it really didn't hold true to comic, Howard the Duck was a great movie), so we bow our heads in memory.

Shepard Fairey's Obama poster I have a friend who tabled for Obama and people here in LA were continually asking for this poster, apparently the limited edition prints went lickety-split, unsurprisingly. But these are everywhere here in LA, and true to Obey form, free download at the site to create your own iron-on, if you so please. I know a lot of people hate on Shepard, but he's "kinged" many spots, held his own, doesn't sit on his laurels (in this case tried and true images aka, he always updates into a new design). He also has some serious design skills, there's a lot of graf/stencil artists that can be hated on, and I suppose he fits, but I don't think it's warranted. and speaking of Obama, he is the only candidate to even approach talking about an arts policy. "His campaign position focuses on nine points: Reinvesting in arts education, expanding public grants for arts education, publicly championing arts education, creating an artist corps, increasing funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, promoting cultural diplomacy, providing health care for artists and ensuring tax fairness for artists." The artist corps may be the most interesting, something that's been missing since the New Deal era aka when most of the country's murals and public arts were made, I'm all for it.

that's it. a quick update: no more bandwidth stealing of images, imgred may be down/gone, but I'm switching to google's image hosting, which is a bit more reliable and easier to work with than flickr, at least in terms of posting. So if you have an image being hotlinked, I'm sorry, I will be converting old posts as time permits, I'm sorry in the meantime.