We’ve been designing a logo for the Stumptown Coffee Roasters 2005 Holiday Blend, “La Reserva de Tostadores,” and I realized right away that the best font to match this graphic was the wonderful Vitrina by Cubanica, a.k.a. Pablo Medina. This font has been a favorite of mine since the Nineties, when it was used often and to great effect by David Carson.

Unfortunately, after purchasing the font, I found that it would not install on my computer. I wrote about my problems to Mr. Medina, and imagine my pleasant surprise when he wrote back almost immediately with some suggestions, and then a few minutes later sent me a newly-created version of the font, which worked without a hitch! Thanks, Pablo, for the great service.

So here’s what the design looks like. Stumptown is notorious for not actually selling their t-shirts, so you might not be able to get your hands on one of those, but you will definitely be able to order the blend itself from their website in the coming months.

We picked up two books yesterday, both great books, but both with very unique design. One is Trips & Trails Oregon by William L. Sullivan, the other is Re-imagine! by Tom Peters. In both cases, I was both attracted and unnerved by the design.

Trips & Trails Oregon is an amazing book, every page crammed with text, pictures, drawings, and even full-color (pink!) drop-shadows. It is obviously the passion of one person, who seemingly designed the book, took all the pictures, and wrote all the text. It really is an almost perfect book about traveling and hiking in Oregon, and once I stopped looking at the book as a graphic designer (and started looking at it as a “user”), I was hooked. But don’t even get me started on the author’s website!

Re-imagine is a different story. Mr. Peters obviously intends for the book to appear as shocking as the story he tells! For someone who has chosen a red exclamation point (“Pantone PMS 032!”) as his company’s logo, the book’s design is not surprising. Though the obnoxious over-use of color, photography, and red design elements is quite distracting, the content of the book is invaluable, and one can tell by his website that he does indeed “get it.” The book is pretty much a must-read for every modern business.

Steve Jobs had a chat with the media yesterday, and the discussion was well-covered by a Macworld article. When asked about adding a radio receiver to the iPod, Jobs responded:

We are very careful about what features we add because we can?t take them away.

This is a critical observation. Most of my favorite software has just enough features to get by, usually fewer obvious features than its competitors. You might call it “simplicity.” In the rush to justify a “Version 8.0 upgrade,” it’s easy to forget about simplicity.

When you find yourself designing anything – software, hardware, a website, whatever – never underestimate the value of “less features.”

Like many folks nowadays, I have a phone with a tiny camera built in. Naturally, it takes terrible pictures, but it’s the only camera that’s with me pretty much all of the time. When I first got the camera about two years ago, I used it a lot, because I had also subscribed to Sprint’s Internet service. Once I realized what an awful experience it was to try to do just about anything on that tiny display and over that slow connection, I cancelled my subscription to that service.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to get the pictures from your phone to your computer without paying Sprint’s monthly fee, so I haven’t used that camera much since. But a great article published today on 43folders contains a lot of neat ideas for ways to use your cell phone’s camera, many of which don’t really even require that the photos ever leave the camera. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Remember where you parked. Take a picture of the nearest sign or landmark.
• Remember a book in a store. Go home and buy it from Amazon for 40% off!
• Carry your to-do list. If it’s short enough, you can just take a snapshot of it with your camera. One less thing to carry.

I recently had the pleasure hearing a talk by Sarah Horton, author of Access by Design. Sarah talked extensively about designing for access, which often means forgoing graphics and, gasp, Flash interactivity. Needless to say, Sarah’s talk ruffled quite a few Flash designer feathers and I must admit that I spent most of the time watching her and thinking, “Yeah, but she doesn’t mean me!”

In a recent interview in Digital Web Magazine, she explains:

Let?s just say for instance… you?re in the process of designing a Web site, you have to make a decision about what font to use, or whether to use images for your navigation—if you adopt an ?access by design? approach to making those decisions you?re going to make a choice that?s going to favor the universal usability of your site. In that case it would be ?Oh, OK, I won?t use images, I?ll use text for a link.?

Sarah reminds each of us that we make powerful decisions about access whenever we create a website. Even if we are not creating a fully accessible website, it is still in our power to make a site as accessible as possible and to have justifications for decisions that make a site less accessible. For example, if a site’s main navigation must be graphical, put plain-text links in the footer as well!

By nature of their accessibility, her suggestions also apply to creating a website that is easier to find in search engines. Whether you love or hate what she has to say, Sarah Horton is challenging the way we think about the web and our roles as designers.

Ji Lee pastes empty speech bubbles over advertisements in the Manhattan area. People often fill them in, and Lee subsequently returns to photograph the results.

(As seen on kottke.org)

I’m sure I wasn’t the only person disappointed by the recent unveiling of the iTunes phone. There was plenty of speculation and expectation about just such a phone, but to me, this product hasn’t the Apple magic.

If you have an Apple device, which you hold in your hand, and plays music, usually it’s an iPod. But an iTunes phone misses the point in so many ways! First of all, it’s a phone, not an iPod. You can’t use songs as ring tones. You don’t have the neat scroll wheel to navigate your songs. I think the fact that it has so little storage is the least of its problems.

But how about this, Apple. Get iTunes out of the phone and back into the iPod. I want a phone that looks like an iPod! By that I mean I want something white and silver and remarkably simple, with controls just like the iPod. You can’t get that elegance and simplicity from a cell phone, you’ve got to use the iPod.

But where would you put the numbers? How about arranging them in a circle, around the touch-sensitive wheel? When the phone rings, the numbers light up, just like my iPod’s controls do. You tap the numbers around the circle with your thumb. Then you hit the center button to place the call. It’s iPod simple! Once you’ve finished, the numbers dim and it’s back to a plain old iPod again. It might be hard to see the numbers in broad daylight, but you’d see where they’d been etched, and anyway people would remember them after a while.

How about that. An insanely great cell phone. Will the Apple employees in the audience please pass that along?

Last week’s power outage in the Los Angeles area left us frustrated. Two of the companies we use for web hosting were both down – even though both cost quite a bit, owing partly to their extensive battery backup systems. However, in both cases, their battery backup systems failed!

Which is not such a huge deal. Later in the afternoon, the sites came back on just fine, and after a few filesystem checks, we were up and running. But we got to thinking. Most of the websites we host are on MediaTemple, which offers backups of their systems for a reasonable fee. But what if something terrible happened to MediaTemple? Is it wise to trust them to handle both the hosting and the backups?

That’s where Strongspace comes in. Strongspace is a service offered by the good folks at TextDrive, specifically for the purpose of storing regular backups in a safe and secure environment. Turns out it’s much safer, more convenient, and more useful than the service that MediaTemple themselves offer! In fact, for the price we were paying to keep our hosted sites backed up, we are now able to keep all of the client work on the computers in our office backed up as well.

If you are a person who is reluctant to do backups, I urge you to think seriously about it. Particularly when such a secure and useful service as Strongspace is available for $8/month. Our firm insistence on regular backups may have saved our business once already!