Onawa, Iowa A Field Trip

Daniel and Steve visited the Monona (IA) County Fair for Field Notes, video camera in tow. It's not likely to make anyone's list of top viral videos, but it does sort of catch the pace of the place. Available now from Field Notes Brand, our County Fair Edition, featuring 50 versions, one for each US State. Available in 3-packs, full sets, and as part of a yearly subscription.

Fridays Are For Layer Tennis

Victory Jacket

Voting has closed on last Friday's match between Brendan Dawes and Joshua Davis. The results are in and Week Two's winner is Davis. Read our post-game interview with him here.

Layer Tennis will be off this week, enjoying the Labor Day holiday. We'll return on September 10th with a match between Mark Weaver vs Scott Thomas.

Stuff About Stanley Kubrick

I Am Putting Myself
to the Fullest Possible Use, Which Is All I Think That Any Conscious Entity Can Ever Hope To Do

For the last ten years we've been collecting links and tossing them into various categories. As you probably have noticed, we're a bit of obsessed with a certain film director. Check our big, messy "Stuff About Stanley Kubrick" archive.

A Film and New Exhibitions

A MoOMumentary

New exhibitions and our three-part MoOMumentary entitled The Curators, are now showing at The Museum of Online Museums. Kevin Guilfoile is the Collections Director of the MoOM, and he chatted chatted with Time Out Chicago recently. The MoOM has also been featured on All Things Considered, in the NY Times, Chicago Tribune and Time Magazine and was discussed at length on an episode of NPR's Hello Beautiful!.

A Project For a Friend

You Lost Me There

Longtime friend Rosecrans Baldwin dropped us a line asking if we'd be interested in making a trailer for his debut novel You Lost Me There. He'd sent us some uncorrected proofs a few weeks prior and we'd loved it, so of course we said yes. He wanted to use the prologue to the book and tracked down a studio where he recorded himself reading it. Sending those files over, along with a collection of amazing photos by Aya Padrón, and we got to work. Since the prologue, and the book itself, is all about memory, we built a collection of blur and flicker effects and thought gradual fades would work nicely throughout. To really make the piece work, we spent most of our time on the sound design, assembling dozens of miscellaneous audio clips in our archives and finding bits and pieces at our regular go-to: the wonderful, collaborative site The Freesound Project. We hope you'll enjoy the end result as much as we enjoyed making it, and really hope it encourages you to pick up a copy of You Lost Me There.

This Plus This Equals That

The Lionel, the Richie and the Wardrobe

This is the sort of thing that Twitter is especially good for, but a washroom full of chalkboard walls works too. A while ago we hosted a quick contest called Booking Bands in which we asked people to combine the name of a book with the name of a band. We received thousands of entries, posted a ton of them and then randomly selected three and sent those people the book and a CD from the band that they mashed together. The process of coming up with funny or unexpected associations in this contest became a central part of JC's presentation at SXSW, A General Theory of Creative Relativity.

Inaction Heroes

Copy Goes Here

For the proper effect, check the trailer first and then please take a few minutes (eleven actually) to watch our short feature film about words, pictures and bravery, Copy Goes Here. In case you missed it, here's what our home page looked like when we debuted the movie.

The Field Tested Books Book

I Read That Somewhere

We had this notion that somehow through experimentation we could identify how our perception of a book is affected by the place where we read it. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe it's possible to determine how a book colors the way we feel about the place where we experience it. The result is Field Tested Books. Check hundreds of reports online or better yet, for portability and typographic excellence (Linotype Electra!) you can't beat the paperback Field Tested Books Book which is available now for just nine bucks.

Vehicle ID System Update

I Brake For Quasi-Religious Symbols

We have word that recently two readers in New York, who followed our guidelines for updating their vehicle identification systems, pulled up alongside each other at a traffic light and celebrated their common bond by honking and pointing. Excellent. Our plot is beginning to take hold. Write for yours free today, but hurry, we only have tens of thousands left.

From an occasional series Face Time

Classic Display Faces That Deserve Props

Chauncey H. Griffith's Bodoni Poster Black was developed for Mergenthaler in 1929 and features strong verticals and shallow descenders. It's regularly employed for era-specific "Appearing Nightly at the Copacabana" lobby-card-ish announcements and by and large it's serviceable, if not particularly interesting. But, just in case you find yourself in need of a two skinny chicks whispering near the coke mirror, late 70's, Los Angeles sort of vibe, set it tight in all-caps with almost no line spacing. Suggested pairing: Univers Light Extra Condensed.

September Guest Editor Mig Reyes

Reyes All That

Mig Reyes (mgr) is a designer's designer. Having worked for clients like Segura Inc., Rand McNally, and Harley-Davidson, he now spends his days designing at everyone's favorite t-shirt company, Threadless. His nights are occupied working on projects like Humbled Pie, a site dedicated to hearing words of wisdom and advice by people in all types of creative industry. Mig also serves as a mentor for AIGA's Chicago chapter and teaches at The Chicago Portfolio School, so you know he must be a stand up guy. Catch up with him on a minute-by-minute basis on his Twitter feed and here on Fresh Signals as he steps in as our Guest Editor for September.

A list of all the brilliant people who have helped us by guest editing Fresh Signals can be found here.

Other recent features are listed on Page Two.

Fresh Signals

"My boss got a call from her kid's teacher; she was calling every parent to apologize profusely for the movie she'd shown in class that day. She'd pulled a version of The Giving Tree off YouTube and played it for the class. Unfortunately, she'd pulled the wrong version. It was this one." sd-today

"All-in-all, an awesome quality product!" Thanks for that. ms-today

"It was not the young Danish designer's intention to create a comfy and soft sofa, but rather a simple resting place, which still requires some physical activity." dw-today

FotA Steven Heller takes a look at Thurston Moore's book publishing company, Ecstatic Peace Library, which is now almost ten years old. sd-today

Jim DeRogatis is celebrating his birthday with a look at the best albums of 1990, including The Flaming Lips' best work, In a Priest Driven Ambulance. In case you forgot, the Lips used to be a rock and roll band. bb-today

18 places to feel dwarfed by nature. ms-today

And you think you had a bad day? ms-today

Say hello to GeekMom. ms-today

My Morning Run. ms-today

For BB, get that damn song out of your head! Unhear it. ms-today

The design crews behind Facebook and Threadless reveal their behind the scenes processes. mgr-yesterday

Music vid of the moment: Wentworth Kersey's Oxbow. Find the hidden phone number in it, text them with your address and receive a copy of their new album. Via Denver Egotist. sd-yesterday

Trailer for Beijing Punk, a documentary that follows underground punks in China's capital city as it prepares for the Olympics. sd-yesterday

In German, but some cool photos of The Museum of Letters in Berlin. More info on the Buchstabenmuseum here. sd-yesterday

Snow. dw-yesterday

Artist Anastassia Elias' "Rouleaux," cut out art made inside paper tissue tubes. Via J-Walk. sd-yesterday

The same. But not really. jc-yesterday

A boy and girl in a city with a wigglegram. mgr-yesterday

Big thanks to Herman Yung of Doobybrain for serving as our Guest Editor in August. Up next for September is Mig Reyes of Threadless and Humble Pied. A list of all the brilliant people who have helped us throughout the years can be found here. sd-yesterday

"The best of the bottom of the barrel." Youtube videos no one watches, Zero views. ms-yesterday

"Gonna ride my bike until I get home." The Bike Song. ms-yesterday

300,000 of the largest websites visualized with favicons. Oh, that one looks familiar. ms-yesterday

There are gig posters, then there are vintage B-movie posters. mgr-yesterday

A look at some of the amazing rainforest wildlife photographs of Guido Sterkendries. ms-yesterday

Musician Maxence Cyrin adapts pop songs to piano pieces and then sets them to scenes from classic films. You can see a fabulous example of his work with this take on The Pixies Where is My Mind. Via It's Nice That. ms-yesterday

Trailer for the film Another Year. ms-yesterday

Constantly changing the design of these cards hasn't helped the Cubs win, but who's keeping score? mgr-yesterday

If all modern art was like this, I'd be broke buying too many lifetime museum memberships. Video of Chris Burden's "The Flying Steamroller." sd-08.31

For BB: everyone's favorite video band Pomplamoose teamed up for a promo for a song off Lonely Avenue, the album Ben Folds and Nick Hornby have coming out in late September. sd-08.31

Thanks to this bizarre music vid, now I know where the stuff I drink every morning comes from: Funginears' Tea. sd-08.31

For the rock star/chef on your life, the Flipper Guitar spatula. ms-08.31

Everything is better when there's tacos involved, even your favorite music: Album Tacos. Thanks Claire. sd-08.31

Wanting to beat the studios to the punch, 54 different filmmakers have made The Footloose Remake. Here's the original for Scene 53 and here's the remake (give it a minute before it starts to veer ever so slightly). sd-08.31

As Glenn Beck's rally kicked off this weekend in DC, Jeff Jetton did the only thing that made any sense: dress up like pregnant demon and carry a sign reading, "I Want a Sandwich." Via Wonkette. sd-08.31

Chris Milk's interactive music vid for Arcade Fire's The Wilderness Downtown. sd-08.31

Page Two contains the previous 35 Fresh Signals, recent features, a key to the icons and the categorical archives.

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The MoOM Board

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A Thing We Made:
Field Notes

Field Notes Brand memo Books and more. "I'm not writing it down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now." A CP/DDC joint.

Some Other Things We Made:

We hated the options available for custom packaging DVDs and CDs so we created a brand that gives creative professionals and hobbyists the tools to make great stuff. Here's a bit from the latest Jewelboxing weblog entry:

"Jewelboxing to appear as part of Sonoma/Napa photography group meeting." Read the entire post.

Pinsetter: Spell with buttons.

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