This is a cool series by South Carolinian designer Marco Suarez. Great colors and composition, and the circle canvas gives them that little something extra. It might ruin it, but I’d love to see a little bit of type sprinkled in the outskirts. Nothing crazy, maybe just some cool looking numbers.

Some excellent examples from Graphis Packaging 3. I can say without any doubt in my mind, that packaging design has declined significantly over the past 20 years. Take a look at the more recent Graphis Packaging 9. Nothing in there even remotely piques my interest. I would love to hear a reasonable explanation of this phenomenon. Is it that marketing departments have slowly wrested control from true designers? Or is it just that I personally appreciate the style of a specific era to the current one? Or maybe I’m just so used to the style of things today that I am intrigued by the rarefied forms of the past. I’d like to think I’m being objective about the whole thing and that the above examples really are superior, but perhaps I’m not.

Anyone in the know care to shed some light on this? Have studies been done? I need answers!! I’ll tell you one thing, you could fill those boxes with whatever you wanted; if I saw them on the shelf I would buy them. Check out some more examples here.

Images via Crabstick

Roger O’Donnell is an English keyboardist best known for his work with The Cure, Psychedelic Furs, The Thompson Twins and Berlin. I’ve had the pleasure to see Roger play live in recent years, he’s definitely one of the main reasons why we fall in love with certain songs he wrote. Here are a few selections Roger was kind enough to share with us:

Efterklang – Mirador with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra. A go to band for me when nothing else is worth listening to.

Herbie Hancock – Vein Melter, Herbie “the keeper of the keys” pure Fender Rhodes magic from my mentor.

Tortoise – High Class Slim Came Floatin’ In, musical over achievers yes but they are prepared to push it to the edge, inspirational.

Tonto’s Expanding Headband – Cybernaut, all Moog.. What more do you need?

The image is called “The Perfect Garden” by Philistine DSGN

Its a shame that Seattle doesn’t have transportation passes as beautiful as these Muni Fast Passes from San Francisco. The muted colors and typography of these have really caught my eye.

Found via Flickr

LiveView is a nifty app for your iPhone or iPad that allows you to instantly screencast from your computer to your mobile device. It works over your network connection in conjunction with a desktop app. it was created by Nicolas Zambetti, a San Francisco based interaction designer.

I’ve found LiveView extremely useful over these past couple weeks during iPhone app development. To be able to quickly see how your graphics look in the intended environment is priceless, especially when compared to the alternative option, which usually involves dev simulators, wires, syncing, and TIME. This app essentially allows me to view Photoshop on my phone, live, while I make adjustments. Amazing.

Frank Chimero recently wrote a great piece on his hardware/software set-up. If I were to write my own, LiveView would be the most recent addition to the “essential” category.

Rafael Anton Irisarri puts together a playlist for us of Broadcast’s Trish Keenan, very devastating news for all music lovers.

“Last week I was extremely saddened by Trish Keenan’s tragic, untimely death. She was a brilliant, talented artist and her music became a huge inspiration to me. I love the sound of her voice, it was absolutely fantastic. The first time I heard Broadcast, I thought everytime her parts would come in, it was the work of an angel.

When Jakub asked me do a guest spot on ISO50 this week, I couldn’t think of anything else but Broadcast. So, with that in mind, I went over my collection and selected my favorite songs from their catalog. It was supposed to be only 4 tracks, but what can I say, I really liked their music so I ended up using 14 tracks instead. I never got to meet Trish, but I feel very lucky to have discovered her music and at least gotten to know that aspect of her life.”

R.I.P. Trish

Perched on a sea cliff in Phuket, Villa Amanzi is making me wish I was anywhere but home right now. The “luxury villa” hotel built in 2008 by architects Original Vision, is a spacious 2,644sm. I was going to throw this into the category of “stuff I can’t have” but then I looked at the rates/reservations page. If you go at the right time you can get the place for $2000/night, and it sleeps 12 people. That’s $166 / night each; not so crazy really. Now I just have to get back down to Thailand. Speaking of which, I was lucky enough to visit there once, I took some pictures.

Photos via Top Box Design

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about this Vivian Maier person, a street photographer operating during the 60’s and 70’s in New York and Chicago. The work is great, but the story behind the discovery of her work is equally fascinating. Maier passed away a couple years ago and a guy named John Maloof ended up purchasing around 100,000 negatives of her work — 20,000 of which were still in undeveloped rolls — from a furniture store (the store had acquired the work through a storage space non-payment auction). Maloof has been developing the work and posting at VIVIAN MAIER – HER DISCOVERED WORK.

While it’s sad way that Maier never lived to see her work appreciated on a large scale (well, who knows if she even wanted that) but I do find it pretty lucky that her work finally fell into the hands of someone with the interest and skills to bring her body of work to light.

Photos via VIVIAN MAIER – HER DISCOVERED WORK

The time has come to pick the winners for the ISO50 Holiday Giveaway. It was high stakes this year with a choice of snow boards or skis and a bunch of stuff from The ISO50 Shop up for grabs. So without further ado, drum roll please:

The grand prize winner is Michael S. Gallegly. Congrats Michael, you’ve won your choice of an ISO50 designed snowboard or pair of skis along with some ISO50 prints, shirts, and music.

Second Prize goes to Ryan Stotts who gets some ISO50 prints, shirts, and music.

Third Prize was awarded last month.

Congrats to the winners and thanks to everyone who entered!

This song is worthy of its own post, James Blake just demolished my mind, I don’t know how i’m going to be able to DJ tonight I just feel like staying in and watching this over and over, my recommendation to listen to this is thru the roof.