I was expecting the plectrum but wasn't expecting package number two (or number three for that matter, which I'll show you later in the week). Alistair, from ephemera-loving We Made This (who, incidentally, have one of the most extremely interesting design-related blogs) very kindly sent me this BOAC Route Map.

The cover was designed by Erwin Fabian who worked periodically for Penguin probably around the same time that he did this.

Born in Berlin, Fabian was one of many creative types that fled Germany to avoid the Nazis: first to England, deported to Australia then back to London after the War where he worked as a graphic designer between 1949 and 1962. At that point he moved back to Australia and concentrated his efforts on Abtract Expressionist sculpture.

Of course, it's an extremely interesting map too; I count four line-screened colours plus that red, curiously overprinted quite crudely rather than intergrated into the design (to accommodate changes in routes or so the map artwork could be relayed for different journeys I'd guess).

My very first tutorial for the PSDTUTS.com has been published. It is, again, about how to create a digital smoke in Photoshop.

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Dan noticed that on the Nov 1 episode of The Daily Show, Jerry Seinfeld brought the term “blog” to task.

“Is that the worst new word of the culture, blog? It’s so unattractive. It’s like something that you spit up and its, it has like, it congeals, and is, you know, and you kick dirt on it.”
- Jerry Seinfeld

Peter, who coined the term back in 1998 agrees with Jerry:

“I like that it’s roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking.”
- Peter Merholz, August 30, 1999, email to Keith Dawson

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Hey everyone, I have an important announcement to make. I recently quit my job in order to devote my time to BittBox! In 2 1/2 weeks time I will be BittBoxing full time and taking on select few freelance jobs. You can expect a much more active BittBox.com in the near future. (and a little more insight into who I actually am) It will take some time to get moved and settled, and the next 2-3 weeks will be bumpy for me, but starting in December expect a dramatic rise in activity here. I also want to apologize for a lack in activity recently, but this is a weird time in my career (quitting my job to blog full-time and all). I think you all deserve the right to know what is going on and what to expect. The design below is devoted to this change and is titled “Fresh Start.” Don’t hold back, gimme your critique, it’s how we get better :)

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I’m off to Berlin tomorrow where I’ll spend the week immersed in the first European Web 2.0 Expo. I’m hoping that it won’t be the same mixed bag as the US counterpart: despite some good stuff, the lows were very low indeed.

I’ve been nominally serving on the board of advisors, helping to put together the design track. If nothing else, I passed along the names of Brian Suda, Mark Boulton and Jan Eric Hellbusch so the topics of microformats, typography and accessibility should be well covered. I’ll also be giving a couple of talks that I’ve already road-tested; Microformats: the Nanotechnology of the Semantic Web and The Beauty in Standards.

A full schedule is listed on the conference website but it’s marked up as a dead end. It always strikes me as a shame when someone goes to the bother of publishing event information without sprinkling the few extra class names needed to create an hCalender. Here’s a hint to any conference organisers out there: Dmitry Baranovskiy’s conference schedule creator is rather excellent. Brian and myself used it to output a nice hCalendar version of the expo schedule.

I’ve added some CSS and put the markup online. If you’re in Berlin and you want a quick glance at what’s on, here’s a suitably short URL:

icanhaz.com/berlin

From there you can download the schedule or better yet, subscribe to the schedule. That way, if there are any changes to the line-up, I’ll edit the HTML and you’ll get those changes reflected in your calendar.

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Tagged with microformats hcalendar web2expo berlin

So I had myself a bit of a Facebook purge today. As Facebook is becoming more and more part of the cultural landscape it’s become a bit more important to be a wee bit more careful regarding which people can actually see your details. Maybe I’m being a bit too cautious but the thing is I have been slapped once before regarding the ‘Kode at work. I know sounds strange since I’m extremely careful to make sure I don’t really say anything about what’s going on at work except regarding which projects I might be working on and having a picture taken off the architect’s website. The point is, you never know when certain information is going to come back and really bite you on the ass, and as such I’d really rather not get into too many of those situations in the future (hey I am a blogger and therefore I will no doubt get into trouble at some point down the line).

So I’m off any groups, won’t find me as part of any networks. The only people that can see me are the few that I allow in. Any photos I don’t like I take the tags off and hope they never get seen (exceptionally bad ones are asked to be removed).

The thing is I find Facebook as a concept to be awesome, and I love the implementation of it as well. I like it’s clean lines and distinct design. I like how functional it can be (although finding a decent Flickr plugin is like pulling teeth) I just want all my Flickr photos to be part of my photo albums and that’s it. However as with everything moderation is the best option.

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Copyright © 2004-2007 Khaled Abou Alfa | Permalink | Add to: del.icio.us, Newsvine

I've had a few nice things in the post lately. The first was my limited edition Rockwell plectrum, as seen on the Redesigners font promo project, courtesy of the very excellent Simon Whybray.

Thanks Simon!

Golden Compass trailer in glorious quicktime. This movie cannot come soon enough…seriously. I’ve been waiting for this movie version for years now, since I read the first book (er hem, Northern Lights), 6 years ago now. Everything looks like it’s going to kick some major ass. If you’ve not read the book yet, shame on you.

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Copyright © 2004-2007 Khaled Abou Alfa | Permalink | Add to: del.icio.us, Newsvine