I think I've said it here before; I'm a big cycling fan. Yesterday, Lance Armstrong won a record seventh straight Tour de France. It was a truly impressive feat of athleticism. (Can't wait to see Ivan Basso win next year!) This year's Tour also mark the last race Armstrong will race as a professional (or so he says right now). The various corporate folks behind Lance (Nike, Giro, Trek, etc) always go all out, especially on the last day of the race, decking out the entire team in special (usually yellow, the color of the winner's jersey) gear. This year, though, they went an extra step in the last week (seven days for seven victories!) and customized Lance's bike with icon stickers to tell the story of his life.

Barcelona-based Espaipupu is hosting an exhibition of customized Vans sneakers. There's some nice work here. It's a far cry from the ball point pen I used on my sneakers as a teenager. Many pairs are for sale.

If don't have the time to hand paint your own shoes or can't afford the ones at Espaipupu, then try out Converse's custom shoe builder. Nike has one too. (Of course Nike owns Converse now, so it's not surprising that the online application works the same way.)

The two approaches here point to the rise of the personal fabrication movement. See Neil Gershenfeld's Fab Lab and the Personal Fabrcation Special Interest Group (both from MIT) for starters.

[via core77.com]

Nick Schaffner over at 53x11.com is a musician, a designer and a cyclist (thus the site name: a gear ratio on a racing bike). Back in May, he released an Anti-Anti-Piracy seal as an antithesis to the new FBI seal that was making an appearance on audio CDs around that time. About a month later, he discovered the Creative Commons' Share Music License logo. Both ideas are interesting approaches to the same problem.

Copyright laws are severely outdated. Design as an "industrial art" has always been on the edge of commodity and art. So how do we, as creative individuals, deal with the new arguments concerning intellectual property?

The software development community has a thriving open source movement. How and where might the design community create its own collaborative environment that will allow for innovation and the freedom of ideas?

More reading:
Creative Commons Press Kit
Lawrence Lessig

Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users has an interesting essay on the power of logo t-shirts in our culture. We have very emotional attachments to logos, particularly when they happened to be printed on a t-shirt (though, stickers are pretty cool too). This attachment seems to go far beyond rational brand allegiance. Our logos define not just the products we use, but the market tribes we identify with. You don't want to get in the middle of an argument between Ford-logo-wearing and a Chevy-logo-wearing guys, anymore than you want to get between Apple and Microsoft lovers (although…and this is coming from a PC user…Microsoft logo t-shirts don't seem to be nearly as cool). Sierra's fanciful suggestion that we create the culture before we create the product is not such a new idea (remember the Nissan commercial not so long ago that didn't even show the car?), but it should remind us how important design is in the process of creating that culture.

Artist Andy Deck has released this online collaborative software for poster-making called Imprimatur. It allows multiple designers to work on a single canvas. The interface will be familiar to anyone who has used any digital image creation software. It's as interesting for the ideas behind it (bringing to the fore the collaborative nature of the design process, DYI poster creation, increased political dialogue, etc) as for the actual execution, but it's still an interesting idea, both as a tool and as a work of art itself. Check it out and create something today!

[via Rhizome.org]

Check out this cache of Propaganda Images from Soviet Magazines. Some of them are really beautiful, some of them are a little kitschy, some of them are truly idealistic, and some of them are incredibly frightening. All of them are interesting though. And you have to say this for them: they really knew how to use the color red! (There's something really luxurious about the flags—see the image at right—which seems somehow antithetical to the communist doctrine. Or perhaps this is the luxury promised to all?)

[via Dan Krall on Drawn!]

A great logo is a thing of beauty, an icon that goes beyond just the representation of a company. A great logo accrues its own meanings, becomes a thing unto itself, something that at times outpaces even the performance of the entity its meant to stand for in the first place. But what happens when you get a bunch of these nuggets of meaning and cram them into an incredibly tight space? Well, that's what we call sports sponsorship!

I'm a big cycling fan, and the month of July is the most sacrosanct of cycling months. July brings with it the Tour de France.