Designer, illustrator and artist Stephen Wildish made these poster-like film graphics that, to my mind, are much cleverer than the standard film poster er-imaginings that designers often create these days to promote themselves. Each graphic is a visual quiz in which you try to identify a notable film title that corresponds to each letter of the alphabet. Here’s the one from the 2000s:

For film buffs, these are quite entertaining and surprisingly challenging (to his credit it’s not the accuracy of the illustrations that makes them tough). Wildish has also created one each for the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s. See them all at his blog and visit his portfolio site.

Come see me next Fri 20 Jan at the WebVisions conference when it rolls into New York City. I’ll be appearing on stage with my good friend Alice Twemlow, chairperson of D-Crit, the Masters Program in Design Criticism at The the School of Visual Arts. Our session is called “Design + Entrepreneurship,” and we’ll be talking about the unique opportunity that designers have today to create the kinds of new businesses that only designers can imagine. This, of course, will cover Mixel, and I’ll talk about the genesis of that product and how we turned it into a company.

Here’s an added bonus: if you use this link you can get 40% off the cost of the conference as well as a free pass to Kevin Hoyt’s “Web Standards Playground” workshop. Register here.

I wrote about Ariel Aberg-Riger, one of my favorite up and coming artists, back in September. Since then she’s become both a friend and an incredibly prolific user of Mixel (and even a curator of standout mixels by others).

Ariel’s first gallery exhibition is opening this Friday at TODA in Brooklyn. It will showcase many of her wonderful drawings and, as an added bonus, she’ll be drawing portraits of visitors to the gallery from 4 to 6:00p that afternoon. More info here.

A roundup of sequels, prequels and franchise extensions that will make their appearance at a multiplex near you in the next twelve months. Also included for good measure in the second part of this article is a survey of the wannabe franchises debuting in 2012.

It’s probably not necessary to lament the preponderance of these kinds of movies relative to the number of original ideas in movies today, but jeez, some of these get me depressed just reading their descriptions. Anyway, it all makes for fascinating reading, which is par for the course for the excellent Box Office Mojo. Read the post here.

Another great article from Design Staff, the design-for-startups blog that I wrote about earlier in the month: Writer Braden Kowitz offers one approach to interviewing design candidates:

“…Set up a well-scoped design problem and ask a candidate to solve it on the spot. It can take anywhere from 15-40 minutes depending on depth and complexity. It’s such a good technique because there’s no faking (like showing portfolio work from a big team effort) and when moderated well, it can simulate working together.”

It’s difficult to craft just the right kind of challenge though, and Kowitz suggests that the trick is to pose a problem that can’t be solved perfectly and therefore has many possible solutions.

“The point of the design exercise is not whether someone can get the right answer; it’s to see how people think. And the best way to keep people thinking is to invent a problem that’s impossible to solve.”

This is a more hands on approach than I ever used to hire designers myself, though I don’t doubt its usefulness (and in fact after reading this I may consider employing something like it in the future). In my experience, asking a design candidate to explain in great detail the origin, development, launch and aftermath of a project from his or her own portfolio was almost always enough insight into that person’s thinking processes for me to decide whether or not they would be a good hire. Still, it’s true that the problem of hiring designers, especially for startup founders not accustomed to evaluating design talent, is a tough one. I might write a bit about my own approach in the near future, but in the meantime, be sure to read Kowitz’s post at Design Staff.

I like it when a Web site chooses a name that spells out its purpose explicitly, yet still manages a bit of unexpected humor. Such is the case with Forget the Film, Watch the Titles, which showcases an eclectic array of film title design. My favorites are the ingeniously simple ones, like “The Tall Blond Man with One Red Shoe,” which is nothing more than a pair of hands doing banal card tricks, and “Ex Drummer,” which rolls back a long sequence in reverse. There are some duds, too, though, like “xXx: State of the Union,” which succumbs to the recent trend of virtual cameras flying dramatically in and out of corny CG-animated spaces. Anyway, there are almost two hundred of these at the site for you to waste an afternoon on. Enjoy!

Animation writer and historian Amid Amidi, editor at the fantastic site Cartoon Brew, takes a critical look at the “photorealistic cartooning” used in Spielberg’s adaptation of the classic Hergé character.

“Animation is evolving so rapidly before our eyes that we can barely keep pace with these changes. We desperately try to apply old labels and definitions and find them insufficient. Still, ‘Tintin’ at its core is pure animation created frame by frame. True, it was augmented by other processes, but the end result was achieved distinctly through frame-by-frame techniques. And if the mark of a true piece of animation art is the director’s control over every element within the frame, then never has this been truer than in ‘Tintin.’”

It’s an interesting perspective on the current artistry in animation, which is still undergoing massive change thanks to the advent of computer graphics. Amidi’s take is that the film is an important milestone if not wholly successful, and that it is instructive in many ways for the future of the craft. I haven’t seen “Tintin” yet, but I’m very eager to see how successful the techniques that Spielberg (and producer Peter Jackson) used are in conveying both its narrative and in doing justice to the character’s roots. Read the full post here.

This concept for “a charity donation platform using New York City subway cards” is a project from students at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. The idea is to capture the bits of monetary value that often remain on MetroCards but that are too insubstantial for many riders to bother with. The students envision a kiosk-like device where a rider can swipe their card and the remaining value gets transferred to a centralized charity fund.

It’s a nice idea. I haven’t been to a senior thesis show at ITP for several years, but this concept seems more sophisticated and less superficial than many of the others I’ve seen from that program. However, I have my doubts as to whether the Metropolitan Transit Authority is really looking to help its consumers direct those bits of remaining value to a charity fund. Given their seemingly chronic budget shortfalls, I can’t imagine the “lost” money isn’t already accounted for in their spending.

Anyway, find out more at MetroChange.org. There’s also lots of content about what went into the project at the accompanying blog.

This week I was lucky enough to be invited by the venerable Jeffrey Zeldman to be a guest on his podcast “The Big Web Show.” We jumped on Skype yesterday morning and recorded a ~45-minute conversation that covered such topics as my experience at art school, how I got started doing design, my career co-founding a design services business, my tenure at The New York Times, and of course my work on Mixel, the social collage app we launched last month. It was lots of fun, and many thanks to Jeffrey for the invitation.

You can get an overview of our discussion, audio of the episode itself and a link to subscribe to “The Big Web Show” over at Jeffrey’s blog.

Chris Wild’s Retronaut is an amazing compilation of visual artifacts from the musty past. I came across this entry tonight: a shockingly beautiful set of photographs from Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated voyage to Antarctica in 1915.

They look like they may be hand-tinted but apparently they are in fact color photographs, with an ethereal, almost ghostly quality. See the full blog post here.