This time around Be Aware 10 covers the ups and downs of those unique Taco Bell buildings, a Business Resource Guide from the AIGA that helps explain why good design is good business, a list of the top 20 movie poster fonts, alternative photography and Google's recently released Analytics service. Get it while it's hot.

Have you ever wanted to get your hands on over 4,950 logos from companies around the world? I thought so. Look no further, ye logo-obsessed readers, to Logotypes.ru, a Russian site that is collecting logos and making them available for preview and download in Illustrator format. You can even submit your own if you're so inclined.

My one request for this site: a bulk download option of all the logos in the library. I guess that could lead to bandwidth issues though, as the entire library currently clocks in at 71 MB. Bittorrent, anyone?

[via Digg]

The Design Weblog would like to wish y'all a Happy Thanksgiving. Hopefully, your nose isn't buried in too much work or news-reading and you can enjoy some relaxing time off with friends or family. Since it's a time to be thankful, we would certainly like to thank all of you for reading, and more recently we'd like to also specifically thank you for all the submissions to our Help Name Us post. Darren and I are going to whittle down the entries soon, and we'll probably post the top 5 and put them to a vote in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more details as they develop.

For now, we hope you enjoy the holiday, and we'll be back with more design goodness this weekend!

Be Aware 9 from Be a Design Group Blog has been unleashed. On the table this time around: design contest awareness, tips on InDesign's Book feature, a letterpress word scramble challenge, good practices for design revisions and musings on having variety in one's design life. It's yet another moderate but useful read from a blog that just refuses to deliver anything but great design sense.

I posted on Be Aware 8 earlier in the month when it landed, but for some odd reason I can't find the post, so go check it out if you haven't already.

A Google engineer from Zurich has posted a neat little experiment online: visitors to this blog post can help create an evolving image of a world map, one vote at a time. (Note: fellow Safari users, the site doesn't work properly in our browser of choice. Use Firefox instead.) Upon arriving at the site, you're presented with a blue and green pixelated map of the world. One pixel is red, and that's your chance to make a change and vote. There's also an interesting time-ramped movie available of the map's evolution.

A commenter on the post mentioned an interesting possibility: bias. The post is written in English - could that lead to any kind of geographic malformations? I guess it'll be interesting to watch how the map plays out.

Sony's DRM rootkit debacle is still doing nothing but spiraling downward. Just in case you aren't familiar or haven't been following, check out BoingBoing's time-line of events that starts at square-one with the discovery of this malicious trick from one of the world's largest music labels.

If you are up to speed on the situation now, why not show some love for Sony's underhanded attempt at wreaking havoc on your PC with a tshirt? For a mere $12 USD you can be the proud owner of an "I heart rootkit" tshirt, displaying your tongue-in-cheek support for a record label that simply refuses to join the rest of us in the 21st century. The shirt's on pre-order right now, and should be shipping by Nov. 29th.

I heart Creative Commons. A lot. There's quite a bit going on with the org right now, and I wanted to point out a few key things. One for those who aren't as familiar with the org as they'd like to be (or should be!), a podcast where one of the org's founders discusses and debates what they're trying to accomplish, and finally one for those who'd like to lend some support.

1) One of CC.org's founders, Lawrence Lessig, has been posting a sort of series in review of review of what their org is, what they're trying to do and how they came about to be. He's been writing in a series of installments at the site, beginning with "CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on How it All Began." Lessig goes back to square one, explaining where some of their initial inspiration came from and the unique problems they aim to solve. For anyone who's wanted to know more about what CC is all about, this is a great place to start. You can also sign up for these installments to arrive by email, direct from Lawrence's computer to yours.

2) One of my favorite podcasts, This Week in Tech, featured Lawrence Lessig last week (iTMS link). A few well-known tech heads, among them Leo Laporte and John C. Dvorak (one of my mortal enemies), went back and forth with Lawrence on the real problems that CC is trying to solve. It's a good listen and a great podcast overall.

3)They need your help. Creative Commons is a non-profit, but for the IRS to recognize them as such, they need to rake in some significant public support, so they're holding a fundraiser. Check out CreativeCommons.org for more details.

It never ceases to amaze me how Flickr is still able to get cooler with each passing day, as I've stumbled on yet another cool toy that plays with their site. Spell with Flickr lets you enter a string of text and it'll return Flickr images of those actual letters, ultimately spelling your word or line of text with images. I guess the author created this a while ago, and Flickr's API must have changed since then because the site will give you warnings when returning results, but it still finishes, at least for me.

I am, once again, so behind the times, as Be a Design Group blog has released two more installments of their Be Aware series. Be Aware 6 includes web tips, a typewatch, a lego camera, as well as a warning of the onset of alternative web-enabled devices and the new challenges they'll present for web designers. Be Aware 7 offers musings on design education, quotes, business, a SmartTransform plugin for InDesign and a new podcast at the iTMS covering - you guessed it - design, containing interviews with some fairly prolific designers.

Someone found a number of undeveloped rolls of film from cameras circa ~ 1920-1960 and decided to bring them to life. There's an eerie sense of wandering sentimental value to these images, especially since, until now, no one has ever seen them. The site's creator organized the images by the type of camera they were found it, offering a nostalgic look at the past.

[via BoingBoing]

Being that I'm a big alternative fuel and transportation fan, I really believe the Segway is a great idea that just needs some polishing to really find its stride. While a free GPS isn't quite an evolutionary leap or bound, it certainly couldn't hurt, right?

Apparently, Segway is now offering a free Garmin GPS with the purchase of a Human Transporter through January 2006. The "Find Your Way with Segway" offers a free Garmin eTrex Legend ($170) or eTrex Legend C GPS handheld unit ($250) with each shiny new Human Transporter, Cross-Terrain Transporter or Golf Transporter.

Now, if only they could fix that nasty issue with some users falling off...

[via Gearlog]

From the "some people have far too much time" corner of the net comes the R2-D2 Case Mod. The case's creator, Ken Kirby, sure went the full nine yards, as he had to build an R2-D2 replica from scratch - that isn't some model he bought from a shop. Ken packed some decent hardware inside R2, with a P4 overclocked to 3.71 Ghz and a Radeon 9800XT 256 MB video card, but I'm sure it's the cooling system that keeps R2 at a breezy -38 degrees celsius that pushed the case's weight up to 100 pounds. Check out the full article over at ExtremeTech for an explanation from Ken on how R2-D2 became a PC.

[via Gearlog]

As if gamers don't have enough to do inside of today's bleeding edge games, they've now picked up a bit of an artistic hobby by creating pixel art - inside the game they're playing. I found this over at Boing Boing which pointed to Garry's Mod, a community based around creating this tedious art in a mod of Half-Life 2. Check out Mario (pictured), Metroid's Samus, Sonic and Spongebob. If you're really getting interested, check out their Wiki for everything you need to know to get in on the pixelated fun.

Michael Anastassiades has designed an Anti-Social/Social Light for the Design for Thought exhibition, bringing a whole new meaning to the term "mood lighting." In order to keep glowing, the social light actually needs to be talked to. As you might guess, the anti-social light pulls a 180, requiring complete silence to stay lit.

Check out the rest of the exhibition's site for more unique perspectives on many traditional design solutions.

[via we make money not art]

I'm a huge fan of the tshirts of Threadless, and I thought one of their latest offerings, titled "I Heart Color", was just too clever to not mention. For those unfamiliar with the goodness that is Threadless: they're basically a unique example of what happens when a tshirt site employs a democratic process. Seriously. Designs can be submitted by anyone, and they go through a one week voting process. Who votes, you ask? Why, you do, of course. Shirts that receive enough love go to print, and their catalog expands by the week. Some great designs have come out of their site, and I do believe I'm going to have to work out some sort of "Threadless budget" soon if I want to keep eating. I highly recommend checking out their catalog.

I'd also like to offer them a serious plug for respect, as they recently raised over $100,000 for Katrina relief donations by selling a particular shirt for $10, and donating $20 for each shirt sold.