There is no organizational utopia. All organizational structures have trade-offs, and every type of organization has inefficiencies…No form of reorganization can make risk and peril melt away.
— Jim Collins, How The Mighty Fall

The visual look for the titles of upcoming movie Shutter Island is dark, understated and wonderful watercolory goodness. They treat the Paramount logo quite brutally as well.

1. Handmade, custom-painted axes* from Best Made Co.
2. The gorgeous PF Bodoni Script Pro typeface family
3. Shrimp, a handy URL shortener for ExpressionEngine from Dan Benjamin
4. Brand New’s Why Do You Sketch Logos? article (and comments)
5. The Facebook username countdown

*I have a birthday coming up this month. The Flashman or Jim Dandy will do.

Spider-Man on Broadway with music & lyrics by Bono and The Edge. Very, very weird. I have no further commentary.

I’m completely enamored with these bird paintings by Frank Gonzales. It’s like JPG artifacts or satellite TV glitches. I’d love to see that style applied to editorial illustration portraits.

When it comes to design for big corporate, sometimes seeing the pitch work that was passed on is more interesting than the creative that was eventually chosen. Case in point: Plazm’s reimagined layouts for Newsweek. Three-week timeline!

Between two products equal in price, function and quality, the better looking will outsell the other.
— Raymond Loewy

Faithful readers, this summer I’m relaunching this site with some cosmetic makeover and a complete reworking of everything under the hood (including porting it all from WordPress to ExpressionEngine). It has existed, in similar form, for the better part of two or three years, it’s badly coded and very piecemeal from a content management standpoint. It needs to grow up to catch up with what I’ve learned over the past few years.

I’d love to get some feedback from you about how you use/view/read/share the content here, and what could be better. So, a very general question: what would you like to see change from a design/UI/presentation standpoint to make this site more usable/enjoyable/awesomable? We’re not talking about actual content or delivery, but more so the framework it lives in.

1, 2, 3, go.

Big failure (the kind that levels companies, complex systems, longstanding relationships) has its origins in a contradiction: it happens gradually, then suddenly.

Big failure happens over time, all at once. Unless you catch it now.

If people are emotionally attached to the method, they will resist change. If they are emotionally connected to the core value…they will not only embrace change but might insist on it.
— Will Mancini, Church Unique

Tweemap maps your Twitter followers. Tasty grid-based usage of GoogleMaps. Sadly, no Antarctic followers. Yet.

Soon-to-launch foodie site Culinary Culture has an absolutely gorgeous illustrated splashpage thanks to the extremely talented Jessica Hische.

Here’s the problem with copying: Copying skips understanding. Understanding is how you grow. You have to understand why something works or why something is how it is. When you copy it, you miss that. You just repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath.
— Jason Fried, Why you shouldn’t copy us or anyone else

What if your homebuilder constructed houses based merely on the outward appearance, with no attempts to understand the foundation, infrastructure or load bearing walls? They would have no idea why that one window was off-center, or that specific material was used in the kitchen, or why the porch trim is blue. The exterior may look fine, but the bones are rotten.

Ultimately, copying doesn’t affect the person being ripped nearly as much as the one doing the copying. After all, rarely is the faux as compelling as the original. But when you copy, you do yourself a disservice. You cease to do work. You cease to be inspired. You stop trying.

When you copy, you never learn how to learn.

Nathan Rice has 5 Useful WordPress Functions You Didn’t Know Existed. He also has a new blog layout that I was delighted to design for him.

Do not covet your ideas. Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you.
— Paul Arden, It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be

This Crimespotting map is incredible, especially the slider functionality for changing the time of day and date range. Also, it’s just dang pretty. Stamen Design is responsible, and they have plenty of other data visualization gorgeousness on their site. (via Wilson Miner)

My name is Joshua Blankenship, and I am a brand loyalist. A connoisseur of highly functional, beautiful things. Bags, jeans, toothbrushes, water bottles, pens, whiskey, guitar strings, and so on and so forth. If a thing is worth having, it’s worth having the best of it (that you can wisely afford.) And if there is a category of thing, I likely have an opinion on where to find the best of it.

So when my left coast friend Noah Stokes asked if I would be interested in collaborating on a site for like-minded brand loyalists, I jumped at the chance to handle design and branding. And when he started throwing out ideas about sharing our process for the project with our respective readers while we were still in the process, I got even more excited.

And so we begin humbly with the easy part: a name, a URL, a logo and a loose tagline to help serve as a mission while we start putting our money where our (collective) mouth is.

Noah has a great write-up on the beginnings of this idea here. If you don’t already, subscribe to Noah’s RSS Feed and my RSS feed to stay up to date on bbbbrands, and be sure to follow @bbbbrands on Twitter for other updates.

I have no real interest in playing video games, but the trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic is pretty amazing (storytelling, pacing, animation.)

I love all my wife’s poetry, but FFFFound Me? perfectly sums up the internet longing for access to invitation-only web services.

Happy to see Jeremy Cowart back on Flickr. Here’s the why.

I shouldn’t be surprised that a product/service I’m brand loyal to is born and maintained out of a company culture that runs counter to typical corporate structure, but I am. It’s fascinating any time I see stuff like this articulated so well:

Instead of adding rules as we grow, our solution is to increase talent density faster than we increase business complexity. Great people make great judgment calls and few errors, despite ambiguity…We have found that by avoiding rules we can better attract the creative mavericks that drive innovation…We are mitigating the big risk technology companies face (obsolescence), by taking on small risks (running without rules).
— Netflix, excerpted from 7 Great Reasons to Work at Netflix (emphasis mine)

The whole thing reads like a manifesto for Doing Amazing Things, but the specific ability for a company to grow in size and complexity without an avalanche of bureaucratic muck is rare.