On April 1st, 1977 The Guardian published a seven page “special report” about San Serriffe, a small republic in the Indian Ocean. The report included detailed facts about the geography, culture and economy of this hitherto unknown land. The newspaper received hundreds of requests from readers seeking further information. However, the island never existed and the report was one of the first April Fool’s Day hoaxes by a national newspaper in Britain.

San Serriffe probably didn’t fool any designers at the time as everything about the place referenced typographic terms. The two main islands, Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse looked like a semi-colon, the capital was Bodoni and the dictator’s name was General Pica!

The most impressive part was that major advertisers played along with the joke – Guinness, Texaco, Kodak and Vladivar Vodka all ran special advertisements, construction company Costain’s ad read “Costain is changing the face of San Serriffe” - geddit?. Read more about San Serriffe at Hoaxipedia

I just stumbled across a really innovative design idea for wine labels via Noisy Decent Graphics.

If you’re at a friends place for dinner and you have a really, really nice bottle of wine, how often do you remember its name when you’re shopping for wine again? Most of us have better things to remember, anyway. Or maybe you’re a bit tipsy and won’t even remember whether it was a bottle of red or a bottle of white. Anyway, this is one of the ideas that makes you smack your head and ask yourself why you didn’t think of this

I just stumbled across a really innovative design idea for wine labels via Noisy Decent Graphics.

If you’re at a friends place for dinner and you have a really, really nice bottle of wine, how often do you remember its name when you’re shopping for wine again? Most of us have better things to remember, anyway. Or maybe you’re a bit tipsy and won’t even remember whether it was a bottle of red or a bottle of white. Anyway, this is one of the ideas that makes you smack your head and ask yourself why you didn’t think of this

I just stumbled across a really innovative design idea for wine labels via Noisy Decent Graphics.

If you’re at a friends place for dinner and you have a really, really nice bottle of wine, how often do you remember its name when you’re shopping for wine again? Most of us have better things to remember, anyway. Or maybe you’re a bit tipsy and won’t even remember whether it was a bottle of red or a bottle of white. Anyway, this is one of the ideas that makes you smack your head and ask yourself why you didn’t think of this

In the US, marshmallow Peeps are as famous as the Easter Bunny. Introduced in 1952, the sickly confections were originally only in yellow chick form, hence the name. Now they come in a variety of shapes, colours and flavours, which makes them ideal material for building sickly sweet dioramas. The Washington Post has just judged it’s second annual Peeps Diorama Contest and with over 800 entries, it’s clearly catching on.

TV shows, films or the year’s events inspire many of the entries such as this year’s winner “The Tomb of King Peepankhamun” by Laura Sillers. My favourite however is Sue Hauser’s campfire scene “Suddenly There Was a Peep!” in which four Peep rabbits toast their marshmallows over a fire – surely that’s cannibalism?!

You load a new web service, eager to dive in and start engaging, and what’s the first thing that greets you? A sign-up form. We can do better, says Luke Wroblewski, author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. Via a technique of "gradual engagment," we can get people using and caring about our web services instead of frustrating them (or sending them to a competitor's site) by forcing them to fill out a sign-up form first.

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Findability is to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as "web standards" is to "table layouts." In a web whose vastness exceeds comprehension, sites with findable content win. The good news is that everyone on your team can help make your site findable. Get a taste for this essential discipline from Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond.

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Dieter and Lung of Perish Factory have directed this awesome, and, dare I say it, cute music video for Bomb The Bass, called Butterfingers. For the unfamiliar, it’s an analogue synth/sequencer/groovebox, of no particular type, made in felt. Each button and control has a unique character and role in the video that sustains viewing all the way to the witty end. In Dieter’s own words there was “no real trickery to the making of it, just lots of hands, a lot of puppets, a lot of takes and a crap load of duct tape in the back holding things together”. Check it out here.

graphic design by andrew townsend.

hannah stouffer is grand array.