Announcement BY Armin

Self-Promo: The Adventures of You and I

Please excuse this brief identity-reviewing interruption so that we self-promote on our own blog. This has nothing to do with logos, brands, or identities but we figure that with so many readers on Brand New there is a good chance that many of you are moms or dads, aunts or uncles, or even grandpas and grandmas, so… Our latest project at UnderConsideration headquarters is The Adventures of You and I, a one-of-a-kind children book, customized on demand to each kid, printed individually, and hand-bound. Illustrated by my wife and partner Bryony and written with all the silliness of a 5-year-old by me.

Announcement BY Armin

2011 Brand New Tips

While cleaning my e-mail a little bit today I noticed that my Brand New folder was extra scrollable. I am aware that I get a lot of tips, but hadn’t realized exactly how many. For 2011, give or take, I received 2,086 tips. Many of them are repeats, many of them are for very small brands, and many of them don’t fit our coverage, but the ones that do are always exciting to receive. This is the fuel that keeps feeding Brand New and I am most appreciative of everyone that takes time to tip us. If you have tipped us in the past and have not received an answer, you can now see why: it’s pretty much impossible to reply to 2,086 e-mails on top of the other thousands of e-mails. But please know how important your tips are. Keep ‘em coming.

Announcement BY Armin

2010 FPO Awards, Storefront

The 2010 FPO Awards publication is now available as a 248-page book, a PDF download of said book, and a fancy iPad app: here.

End of Year List BY Armin

The Best and Worst Identities of 2011, Part II: The Best

To end the year on a positive note here are The Best Identities of 2011. As much as I enjoy posting the train wrecks, the Bests are more fun, mostly because my selections tend to generate plenty of disagreement. You can catch the worst here. Enjoy and see you in 2012.

Continue reading this entry

End of Year List BY Armin

The Best and Worst Identities of 2011, Part I: The Worst

Without much further introduction — since now you know what to expect from our end of year round-ups — here are The Worst Identities of 2011. Enjoy! Part II: The Best will come next Monday.

For clarification: The choices are solely at my discretion. Original comments and voting results do not really influence my selections.

Continue reading this entry

Announcement BY Armin

FPO Awards, Pre-Order

The 2010 FPO Awards book is now available for pre-order at 20% off the eventual retail price. Preview of the iPad app is also available for perusing. See details on FPO.

Announcement BY Armin

Another Server Move

Over the next day or two we will be moving to another server yet again, with more memory and horsepower to see if that alleviates the traffic spikes. Expect downtime.

Announcement BY Armin

Changes to Commenting

Due to the massive amount of comment spam we get and that we have to fight against, the commenting on Brand New hasn’t been the best experience: lots of spam gets through and many of you (real people with real comments) are getting flagged as spam. We will be moving forward with the Disqus comment system. It changes things a bit and some may not like it — that’s okay, you’ll get used to it. For now, I will try this with minimal registration needs, but if spam is still getting through I will have to do an e-mail verification system. We’ll see. So, for now, test the new system in this thread so that I can see if everything’s working properly and so that you get registered in the system for future posts.

Comments from all the previous posts are currently being imported into the system and should show up in a day or two — as we have almost 150,000 comments.

Announcement BY Armin

Graphic Design: Now in Production

This Saturday, October 22, the Walker Art Center will open Graphic Design: Now in Production (GD:NIP), a joint exhibition with the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. This is the first major exhibition on the field of graphic design since the Walker’s seminal 1989 exhibition Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History curated by Mildred Friedman and the Cooper-Hewitt’s 1996 survey Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture, curated by Ellen Lupton. For GD:NIP the Walker’s Andrew Blauvelt and the Cooper-Hewitt’s Ellen Lupton have teamed up to showcase the current state of graphic design: “Expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed tool. With the rise of user-generated content and new creative software, along with innovations in publishing and distribution systems, people outside the field are mobilizing the techniques and processes of design to create and publish visual media.” Brand New is honored to be part of this exhibition in a number of ways.

Continue reading this entry

Announcement BY Armin

Brand New Awards, International Distribution

I’m hoping to get a little bit of help from our international readers: We would like to find distributors — design-centric bookstores, organizations, and/or stores — that would be interested in distributing the 2010 Brand New Awards book. At this point our international distribution is limited by the fact that it’s so expensive to send overseas and I think many people hate the thought of paying almost half of the price of the book (plus the book) for shipping. If we could get bulks of them to you locally, then we all win. So we are looking for two things: if you are a consumer, suggestions of which stores you think would be appropriate for the book, or any other ideas of how you usually get design books; or if you happen have an outlet for selling them, contact us for terms and pricing.

Since we are in it for the long-term we want to make sure that everyone has the best possible access to the annual books. Thanks for any help or insight you might have.