Winnipeg, Canada

Here’s a cool ‘tool’ that Adrian discovered recently…

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. (from the Wordle website)

You can either enter text yourself or submit a blog/RSS feed for the Java applet to draw from. Visit http://wordle.net/ to learn more or to make your own “word cloud.”

Image shown: the “word cloud” image above was created using the Wordle applet and text from Circle’s website. You can view the image larger here.

Winnipeg, Canada

We had fun this past week, designing and publishing a ‘test-run’ of nostalgic and quirky all-purpose greeting cards—launched for ‘What? Clay Art & Curios’ (the Winnipeg Beach ceramics studio of Rob’s girlfriend Evelin Richter) on the occasion of this summer’s final round of the 7th Wave Artists’ Studio Tour. The tour invites the public “to tour the studios and participating artists of the Interlake… essentially a self-guided tour enabling visitors to speak with the artists and view their work in very picturesque locations.” Best-sellers were souvenir cards depicting retro-beach scenes, along with those featuring pithy sayings. A selection of the 25 different cards are now available for sale at the Fishfly Gallery in Winnipeg Beach.

Auckland, New Zealand

The September/October 2008 (#363 Interactive Annual) issue of Communication Arts magazine contains a feature article entitled “Living on the Edge: Visual Communication Design in New Zealand” written by Circle’s principal, Robert L. Peters. The in-depth piece investigates New Zealand’s unique attributes, history, culture, and current realities in relation to visual communication—the feature is accompanied by a selection of contemporary works by Kiwi designers drawn in large part from recent winners of DINZ awards shows (Designers Institute of New Zealand).

Peters visited New Zealand in late 2007, touring design offices in Auckland and Wellington (in conjunction with DINZ lectures in both cities) and acting as an external moderator for students graduating from the Wanganui School of Design. He has been contributing foreign feature articles to Communication Arts magazine since 1994, including pieces on design and design events in Russia, Portugal, Uruguay, Australia, Korea, Japan, Brazil, China, Denmark, and Cuba. Copies of CA issue #363 are available at book stores and major news outlets around the world and may be purchased online from the Communication Arts website.

“To foreigners, New Zealand is an exotically bucolic, clean green land of extraordinary natural beauty—a pristine playground-destination for thrill-seekers, and a place apart from the rest of the world—a view effectively reinforced by the tourism slogan “100% Pure New Zealand.”

To the country’s quietly self-reliant inhabitants, New Zealand offers a peaceful, friendly, egalitarian and multi-cultural haven for individualists who find themselves surrounded by a moat known as the Pacific Ocean. Blessed with a temperate climate, the island nation enjoys a relaxed lifestyle imbued with a love of the outdoors and the waters surrounding it, and an enviable quality of life.

Less known abroad (under the radar, some might quip) is the wellspring of talent, innovation and design prowess emerging from the NZ creative community—it’s at the forefront of this wave that the candidly fresh and vibrant vernacular of New Zealand’s visual communication design finds itself…”

Read more of the article (with full creative credits for works shown) or download the entire CA New Zealand design feature here (1.2 MB).

Note: this feature article from the Communication Arts magazine September/October 2008 Interactive Annual appears with permission by Communication Arts ©2008 Coyne & Blanchard, Inc. All rights reserved.