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MIT is one of the best, if not THE best engineering school in the country.  With that being said, there has always been a great deal of "competition" between MIT and Harvard, a mere 2.5 miles separating the two campuses.

As most of us know, Halo 3 was released this past Tuesday, September 25th.  A group of MIT students took it upon themselves to mark this landmark occasion:

You are looking at the statue of John Harvard, founder of Harvard University.  This is not a photoshop.

MIT 1 - Harvard 0.

Are you ready? It's almost here the ScrapMatters Grand Opening 10:00 am PST, Saturday, Sept 29th. Brittney, Shari & I plus the rest of our great team have been working hard to make this a fun, exciting place to hangout. Join us for lots of freebies, prizes and thank you gifts!

For a bigger picture click on this thumbnail -->

This bathtub is designed by James Hayon.  Key words to describe is contemporary, sophisticated , sleek . Made of black stainless steel with mirror finish which requires laser cut .  The leg makes it look like loose item or old-fashioned bathtub but the finishes and its shape gives a strong contemporary feeling .

It is somehow reminds me of a buffalo legs...with slender feet and big body.

It's not too often that you see a designer really take major changes to a design, or better, direction, and really answer the challenge.

Thanks to Dennis for pointing the way to Brand New. This post discusses how VSA Partners designed a great logo for Chicago's big for the 2016 . . . then had the rules completely changed on them and had to almost start from scratch. The result? Something even better.

Designers love to complain when direction changes. I don't blame them. It's frustrating, time-consuming and can suck the wind right out of you. But it's the process. I think most designers would admit that it happens more times than it doesn't. And while there are tons of reasons for it happening, the fact remains it is the rule, not the exception.

But sometimes, running free creatively within very rigid, even unreasonable, boundaries can be amazingly fruitful.

So the small link-only posts did not look very nice, and untitled posts don't work very well either. I have some ideas for when I move to my own server space, but I can't figure out a workaround using the Wordpress.com templates. (Which are fantastic and better than I could design myself; I'm not knocking WP.com or the designers at all.) So I decided to take the links out of the main blog, and to give every post a proper title. Over there on the right I've got a list ("Noted") pulled from my del.icio.us links and that will have to do for now.

It's interesting, this blog design stuff. I'm doing some research and trying to figure out some of the things I'd like to do. What makes a blog easy to read, nice to look at, and fun to visit, besides the actual content? Obviously that is the most important component, but there is certainly more at work. The overall design of your blog says something about you before a reader even focuses on your words. Template or showcase designs with paragraphs of lorem ipsum still communicate an idea or an energy about the person behind them. (Which is also the most difficult part of choosing from the pre-designed templates here at WP.com or on Blogger or anywhere, because the designer's ideas don't always fit perfectly with your own. It's like finding the perfect jeans.)

I'm also looking at the technical stuff: navigation menus, comment displays, metadata, etc. There are so many different ways of handling the most common of blogging conventions and the variety fascinates me. I have tons of questions...do you put links to feeds or rely on browser auto-detection? Category or monthly archives? (Or both?) Is it silly to have a list of recent posts right next to the archive listing? Should I put a space for recent comments before I get any? Do you like del.icio.us/Twitter/Flickr integration or do you find it intrusive? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

It's finally here. The long awaited, much anticipated, many times mentioned, but never fully revealed, Howiezine - Robots. My edition finally came, lovingly bound, packaged and shipped from the Howie editor, Pad Thai, and now I can finally show you. Finally. I have been waiting for AGES, I tell you.

This was my first experience participating in this project, and I hope to do it again. Not only is it so amazing to be a part of a group of talented, passionate designers, coming together to communicate their perspective on an idea, independently, but at the end each participant receives a hand crafted book containing each page, bound in a different, fun way each time. I will treasure this little book. There is some truly amazing work inside. It is like a slice of designer heaven for me. Just awesome.

Here is my 2 page spread that I did for the zine. See it bigger here.

Amazon has recently redesigned their site, well the U.S. version of it anyhow. (Hopefully we won't have to wait for the Irish version as long as we've had to wait for the iPhone.) On their page highlighting the changes, there's one section in particular that caught my eye: Their ans[...]

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A Montreal man is claiming ownership of a Gustav Klimt painting that he says was stolen from his Austrian grandmother during the Holocaust.

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Vancouver artist Arabella Campbell has won the $25,000 RBC Canadian painting competition for her work called Physical Facts Series #6.