Jakub why do you post music like Avon Sparkle that sounds like the matchless soundtrack to a late night exploration of Africa’s west coast shoreline you may ask? or expect us to melt and mold with the warm of Kirana’s Lament that might make us feel like were on vacation in a humid jungle that has us surrounded by sugar cane and panthers? how do you expect us to be able to listen to NoworldbutU when the molasses pace might only be perfect when i’ve fallen asleep in a dark room in the afternoon on a sunny day where I lay there listening and stare at the dust floating by in the sunlight that is leaking in? well I just thought you might like something different for this late night post.

I know I’m always taunting you Mac users about your lack of 64-bit (I develop primarily on Windows 7 but have a few Macs for various purposes, mostly live shows). But now that CS5 is here you are free to bask in the unadulterated glory of full memory allocation that us Windows users have been enjoying since CS4. John Nack has put together some benchmark numbers that should give you a rough idea of the performance gains you can expect. As Nack points out though, these gains will only be seen by people working with larger files, tasks like web design won’t benefit much. You can check out the numbers here: Photoshop CS5 64-bit Benchmarked

On a side note, my overall experience with 64-bit has been favorable in the graphics realm, but for music I use a 32-bit installation. For music production there isn’t much of a benefit from 64-bit unless you’re doing a lot of sampling, it’s mostly about CPU and disk speed for recording and effects. The DAW software I use to record — Cakewalk Sonar 8.5.3 — still isn’t as stable as I’d like it to be when bridging 32-bit VSTs (many of my favorite VSTs have not been ported to 64-bit native yet) so I’m sticking with 32 for the production of this latest album I’m working on.

First off let me just say that it’s awesome to have come across this beautiful archive of work by German graphic designer, Anton Stankowski. The images in the archive are fairly large so the detail of the design becomes evident. In the first image of this post it looks to me like the background of the poster was painted with a brush then overlaid by the type. The process of how this was done would be refreshing to see.

The first thing about Stankowski’s work that pulled me in was the amount movement. Nearly every one of these pieces utilizes a visual system that controls your eyes across the graphic elements and to the typography. The system is very effective considering that I keep looking at these pieces every couple of minutes to see how my eyes move around.

The Sulzer poster and the Hill Briskuit Mehl packaging are undoubtedly my favorites. Even though both are very simple they still have a lot of motion in them. Also in the Sulzer piece, the transition of the mountain peak to the type sings composition to me and in the Briskuit packaging I really admire the grid and typography.

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Starting later today, Shelby White will join the ISO50 team as a contributor to the blog. Many of you will recognize Shelby as a frequent commenter here on ISO50. He also runs his own design blog, Wanken, which he has curated for the last couple years. As is evident from his posts, Shelby is extremely passionate about design. He has a remarkably discerning eye for captivating work — especially of the mid-century modern variety — and his aesthetic should fit right in here at the blog. He is currently living in Seattle, Washington, where he is studying at the Art Institute and working for BKWLD (A Sacramento/Seattle-based design agency where Scott spent some time as well).

We are excited to add a new perspective to ISO50 — please give Shelby a warm welcome, his first post should go up later this afternoon.

A few photos from Australian photographer Trent Mitchell. That first image is really amazing — looks more like a painting than a photo to me. I am obsessed (and terrified) of the ocean, and I love shots like this that capture the colossal power and beauty of the ocean.

The other day I was convinced I needed to take underwater shots with my new camera. Thinking an underwater housing might cost somewhere around $100, I set out to purchase one and rent a wetsuit. This, I’ve learned, was a naive assumption. An underwater housing for my camera costs approx $3500. The dream died as quickly as it appeared.

The original inspiration for this underwater mission was the work of Asako Narahashi. The idea of floating just off the coast of various beaches, taking the occasional photo, sounded pretty good. Looks like I’ll have to make due with a complicated array of ziplock bags.

Shigeto’s EP came out today, you may have heard of him since he recently remixed Tycho’s Adrift. Shigeto is a master at delicate detailed melody and stop and start rhythms over tracks that grow and accelerate seamlessly, the Semi Circle EP is a nice sampler for things to come.

Odd Nosdam’s Up In Flames is like a DJ Shadow record stuck in a good groove but with a ton of attention put in the delivery of that loop, I just wish this song was longer.

One artist that really impresses me is The Gaslamp Killer, this EP is good but not great yet he’s a proper example of the perfect showmen, an entertainer to the hardcore and passionate fan base that goes out to shows.

Now for some Aziz Ansari, fyi NSFW.

I met Christopher and Edward from The Silent Giants at a show a while back where they gave me this beautiful The National poster along with a couple even beautiful-er hand-screened business cards. Being firmly planted in the digital world, I’m always fascinated by artists going the traditional route. The Giants are all about screen printing and their work is oozing with hands-on goodness. I especially like their packaging work.

Check out their portfolio and blog for more (the blog is highly recommended for some nice process shots)

Found a few nice examples of gas company brochures/maps on Kaizen Verdant’s Flickr. Reminds me of one of my favorite’s, the Shell Nature Lovers’ Atlas (second one down).

See Related: Oil Company Ephemera

After being “almost done” for the last couple weeks (months?), the newly redesigned Dropular has been released into the wild. Dropular, like FFFFOUND and vi.sualize.us, is a social bookmarking site for images. I used it a fair amount when it first came out; I liked how clean and streamlined the design was. It was also very easy to tell how images got to the front and what the “top” image criteria was (unlike FFFFOUND, which is a complete mystery to me). You could organize the content by “most dropped” of all time, the month, etc. You could also roll over images to see quickly how many people had added it to their collection. And if I remember correctly, there was an infinite scroll, which increased the likelihood that you would spend an inordinate amount of time browsing the backlog.

I haven’t really had a chance to play around with the new site too much yet, but it’s here and ready for testing. Everything looks OK to me thus far — it’s definitely still under development, so it’s kind of hard to judge whether or not things have improved. At the moment, most of the features I loved and mentioned above appear to be gone. Hopefully they are still to come (they have stated numerous times that features will continue to be rolled out as the release progresses).

It looks like registration will soon be open for new users, so keep an eye out if you didn’t have a chance to get an account last year.

Image via Olly M (was the first thing I Dropped when I signed up last year. Perhaps an apt motto for the Dropular development team…)

Sometimes its a challenge to post 4 songs you absolutely like every day, like today all I wanted to do was post this amazing Ducktails track which you can preorder the 7″ here. The track just seemed enough, its perfect for a Monday morning headphone getaway.

I also wanted to share this Delorean’s track which is what I put on when I want to pretend the new MGMT record is good because these guys did a better record that will probably hit the same crowd hopefully plus Delorean has a great House music meets tropical thing going.

I have to also include the highly leaked Crystal Castles LP single that is pretty much on every blog, I love the single Doe Deer but its abit rowdy for a Monday morning so this track will be a good preview I guess, its a bit pop for my taste though, like some kind of Little Boots throw away track.

I want to end this on a high note which is this Laid Back track, if you’re a wedding DJ and feel soulless then drop this.