Great minds think alike, even if they're at opposite ends of the earth. Here are, fittingly, a couple collections -- Joelapompe and Badland -- of advertisements that happen to share the same idea. Coincidence, or something shadier?

 
Take a strange, meandering and kinda confusing journey around a US map, courtesy of web artist Jackie Goss. Fun with cartography: There There.

 
Ideas really don't get more ambitious than this. Scientists in Los Alamos are enthusiastically researching the possibility of replacing spacebound rockets with an elevator that travels from the equatorial ocean through the atmosphere and into space. The elevator's shaft would be nothing more than a thin piece of ribbon made out of carbon nanotubes, a nascent material that is ten times stronger than steel. The Space Elevator: Going Up?

One of the more fantastic alternatives to conventional rockets proposed to date has been the space elevator. The concept is deceptively simple: rig a cable, tower, or some other structure from the surface of the earth at the Equator out to the altitude of geosynchronous orbit—36,000 kilometers—or beyond. A spacecraft could be ferried up the elevator to GEO and released and, voilà, it’s in orbit. No need for rockets, ramjets, or other propulsive technologies, and the ascent to orbit can be made in a far more benign, safe environment than within a rocket. The space elevator had generally been treated as an interesting concept, but one ahead of its time. An elevator appeared to require materials and engineering techniques decades, if not centuries, into the future. Recent innovations in materials science, coupled with a fresh look at the elevator concept, have changed some peoples’ opinions on the topic.

 
What ails the book publishing industry? The Trouble With Take-overs: A consideration of the impact of Corporate culture upon the culture of publishing.

The relationships that lie at the heart of the creative process, are both personal and delicate. They form the 'human' side of the business, where people deal with people. To thrive they require good communication, empathy and perhaps most important of all trust; and here lies the root of 'the trouble with take-overs'. The relationships that form the cornerstone of a publishing house do not appear on the balance sheet. They are elusive and their importance is often missed by the new corporate management. These relationships will only tolerate a finite degree of interference, and once broken, the engine that drives the business splutters to a halt; the results, which on paper seemed so achievable, are never realised.

 
A couple things you're sure to find a lot of at the magazine rack: celebrity photos and screamingly awful typography. It takes a detective to find covers that are simple, compelling and actually showcase an idea - like the elegant George Lois covers for Esquire or the iconic beauty of early Playboy faces. This is the topic of discussion here at Design Observer.

But that was then. Today, you’d search in vain for a magazine that commissions covers like those. The best-designed mass circulation American magazines today – Details, GQ, Vanity Fair and, yes, Esquire – usually feature a really good photograph by a really good photographer of someone who has a new movie out, surrounded by handsome, often inventive typography. The worst magazines have a crummy picture of someone who has just been through some kind of scandal, surrounded by really awful typography.

What art directors used to call the “Esquire cover” – a simple, sometimes surreal, image that somehow conceptually summarizes the most provocative point of one of the stories within – never found many imitators outside of Esquire even at its peak. Certainly few editors, then or now, were willing to imitate Esquire’s Harold Hayes, who gave Lois the freedom to devise covers from nothing more than a table of contents.

And it’s important to remember that Esquire was famous then not only for its covers but as the place for great writing, a place where Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese and John Sack helped invent the New Journalism. Indeed, it was Sack’s profile of Lt. William Calley, accused of leading a massacre of women and children in a Vietnamese village, that inspired one of the magazine’s most powerful covers. I doubt that Lois at his peak could do one tenth as much with a vapid puff piece on Cameron Diaz.

(via BookNinja)

 
A while back I posted about a New Zealand artist that made his living creating portraits out of toast. Well, in a similar vein, you may want to swing by Gum Blondes to see what is being made of simple chewing gum. The brainchild of Ancaster Ontario-based Jason Kronenwald, Gum Blondes is a collection of supermodel photos recreated using only gum mounted on plywood.

No paint or dye is used. The colour is inherent to the gum - the mixing takes place inside the mouth during chewing an endless variety of flavours made by an endless variety of companies. Kronenwald has a dedicated team of chewers and prefers the texture of Trident.

 
Flash at its finest: Tokyo Plastic (be sure to catch the drum machine demo - it's the second link).

 
Urban space, technology, the settlement of people, and the future. All for of these things -- and their interaction -- are the topic for discussion in a Metropolis forum, The Best and Worst Case Scenarios for the Future. Folks like Kurt Andersen, Andres Duany, Martha Schwartz and Morley Safer weigh in.

I am certainly not worried about the cities of the future if they are the kind that the New Urbanists are working on. The traditional city is a better platform to absorb change than any of the urban proposals of modernism. Bear in mind that Manhattan is a 19th century city, and look how resilient it is. The oldest sections of Boston, Paris, London, and Barcelona have been able to absorb all manner of technological innovation, and today they routinely out-perform all the other sectors any way you care to measure. Those modernist sections are turning to crap, of course. The modernist urban proposals have proven to be as passing as fashion, as in needy of constant bolster as any monocultureIt is so evident that modernist urbanism is undermined by nothing more exotic than the passage of time.

 
A collision between art, commercial culture, and madness. "In the spring of 1999, the Family Learning Channel commissioned animator Don Hertzfeldt to produce promotional segments for their network. The cartoons were completed in five weeks. The Family Learning Channel rejected all of them upon review, and they were never aired...". The result was "Rejected", an Academy Award nominated short animated film featuring the discarded commercials and chronicling the downfall of the animator and his simple stick-figured characters. The ending is hilarious pencil sketch armageddon, which you can see on the DVD or online here.

Production began on March 3, 1999 and was completed and sent to the lab in June 2000. Although not quite our longest running production, "Rejected" (2000) remains one of our most over-budget and monstrously behind-schedule projects.

This was due to several factors, the first of which arising from the film's constant creative evolution throughout production - the finished film bears little resemblance to the original concept, and was continuously changing on its own terms, making the process much more experimental and difficult than usual. The film's big finale sequence wasn't conceived until midway through production, while individual scenes were redesigned and significantly altered up to the very last day of sound mixing.

 
It's horse race betting Vegas odds for management guru types. The Thinkers 50 list offers a global ranking of business thinkers - people like Drucker, Porter, Peters, Hamel and Handy (the top five, incidentally). The 50 thinkers are ranked based on a shortlist from names suggested to the organizing jury, screened against notoriety in the media, and judged by a panel of experts for such characteristics as originality of ideas, presentation style, loyalty of followers, rigor of research and, of course, the coveted guru factor.

 
This long-format Nutrigrain (spec?) ad makes me feel GREAT!!! [video link]

(via Adland)

 
"If you want this kind of room and comfort now, be egregiously rich and have your own private jet." So says one of the captions to an intriguing photo slideshow - Castles in the Sky - over at New York Times Magazine. The pictures -- of Harrison Ford's De Havilland Beaver DH-2, Busta Rhyme's Gulfstream IV-SP, Donald Trump's Boeing 737, and others -- were taken by American photographer Neal Slavin to document the behind-the-scenes world of elite travel.

''On the one hand,'' he explains, ''these are almost architectural pictures. On the other hand, these are pictures about people. I had to bring these two elements together.'' Technically speaking, the biggest challenge was achieving the proper lighting. As those who travel coach class may be consoled to learn, even spacious private planes can feel cramped: ''Every picture,'' Slavin says, ''was like trying to light the inside of a cigar tube.''

 
This is just someone's personal blurb about his tendencies for "generalistics". It's an interesting self-awareness, however, that this Mr. Ellison describes; labelling himself a "lazy generalist" - a dilettante with a penchant for beginnings. As a business consultant and fiction writer, he declares this mindset of dabbling to be a great advantage.

In my decades of existence I have had the good fortune to have dabbled in a variety of fields and industries. It's one of the several good things about being a consultant who helps companies grow their businesses. All of my dabblings have (if nothing else) taught me vast respect for those who have the talent, inclination and singlemindedness to become competent specialists. If I live long enough, I hope to become a competent generalist. A couple hundred more years oughta do it.

 
Studies like this one, Beware the Ties that Bind, by Martin Ruef of the Stanford Graduate Business School make Creative Generalist very happy.

Ruef has found that disparate information and its transmission are keys to innovation. "Weak ties -- of acquaintanceship, of colleagues who are not friends -- provide non-redundant information and contribute to innovation because they tend to serve as bridges between disconnected social groups," he says. "Weak ties allow for more experimentation in combining ideas from disparate sources and impose fewer demands for social conformity than do strong ties."

Entrepreneurs who spend more time with a diverse network of strong and weak ties -- of family, friends, business colleagues, advisors, acquaintances, and complete strangers -- are three times more likely to innovate than entrepreneurs stuck within a uniform network. "Diverse networks and sources of information encourage the diffusion of non-redundant information and thus stimulate creativity," says Ruef. In terms of the entrepreneurial team itself, "the more entrepreneurs you have, the more likely you are to have innovation because people come in with different backgrounds and perspectives." Ruef cautions, though, that even if complete strangers spend a lot of time together, the ties among them soon will be the equivalent of strong ties and drown out the benefits of non-redundant information.

(via IdeaFlow)

 
Cozy. That would be a nice way to describe the funkalicious (!) interior spaces designed by Verner Panton of Denmark. Perhaps no other designer captured the '60s zeitgeist better with everything from the simple and elegant Panton chair to the Phantasy Landscape psychedlic lounge.

Trained as an architect, he preferred to create integrated environments. Few things held such horror, Panton once said, as striding into a room to find a sofa, two chairs and a coffee table. Fighting that traditional grouping, he designed furniture such as the Living Tower, a massive foam rectangle within which five people sat in a horizontal stack, each facing the knees of the next person higher.

Panton also used foam extensively in creating interior landscapes swirling with curved shapes, most offering little indication of which body part was meant to rest against them. Often these pieces were designed as modules, meant to be rearranged as the situation demanded. In short, Panton aimed to short-circuit the scripts of social interaction by flooding people with new sensations.