My friend Alex Cornell made this short movie speculating on what a future with drone technology might be like.

Because I know Alex as a friend and designer, it’s hard for me be objective — do I find this remarkable because I know the filmmaker, or because it’s genuinely impressive? It’s not just the camerawork and effects that I think are so good; Alex and his crew really nailed the voiceover work too. At the very least, it’s an entertaining three minutes.

Someone clever is very proud of themselves:

“In 1957, Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann set out to create a new sans-serif typeface for the Swiss design market. Their goal: to create a highly legible and completely neutral expression of the Modernist design movement to which they belonged. This typeface was to have no intrinsic meaning, allowing the content to convey the message… It is in this spirit that Guts and Glory have created the ultimate Modernist perfume — a scent distilled down to only the purest and most essential elements to allow you, the content, to convey your message with the utmost clarity. Air. Water. You.”

Available in a numbered, limited edition of 3,000 for US$62 per bottle from Moss Pop.

Beautiful work from this two-year old studio founded by Óscar Germade in Barcelona. I’m particularly fond of the way the work samples are photographed.

More work at Solofficial.com. Via Typewolf.

A charming, hand-animated ode to a passing era in interface design. “As skeuomorphism fades from popularity, ‘Skew’ turns the idea on its head: we re-made some well known skeuomorphic interface designs in the materials and objects they were trying to imitate.”

Watch the video here.

This is lovely. It’s a super-cut called “Projection: Eighty-five Years of the Projection Booth in Movies.”

“This 12-minute film created by Joseph O. Holmes features clips from forty-six different films that take place in a projection booth, from Buster Keaton’s ‘Sherlock, Jr.’ all the way up to Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Basterds.’ The short debuted at the Redstone Theater at The Museum of the Moving Image on October 4, 2013, as part of the opening reception for Holmes’s ‘The Booth: The Final Days of Film Projection,’ an exhibition of photographs which continues through January 2014.”

You can watch “Projection” on Vimeo.

By the way, images from “The Booth” are included in Holmes’s 2013 Annual, which is available for order now.

This “frequently-updated compendium of web app first-run experiences” could turn into a valuable resource. Its purpose is to break down the design, user experience, marketing and customer touchpoint aspects of how various successful Web products bring first-time users into the fold. The list of teardowns so far is not enormous, but each is thoughtful and revealing. My biggest complaint, though, is that these are focused on the desktop Web; teardowns of mobile native apps are much more critical, I find, and would make for a much more revealing survey.

Visit Useronboard.com.

This new book written and gorgeously designed by my friend Francesco Franchi is an awesome argument for print and editorial design and the continued existing of beautifully produced books — basically a superb refutation of many of the things I’ve found myself arguing against (even though I don’t really mean to) on this blog.

You can read more about it at Gestalten or order your copy at Amazon.

Hugo Award-nominated author Ben Rosenbaum spins this tale of a zombie apocalypse, told through Facebook postings within a circle of friends dealing with an infection and internal Facebook company emails debating on adding a feature to identify friends as zombies. It’s hilarious but incredibly specific to the worlds of using and building social networks. What’s also interesting, to me, is how the writing emulates the interfaces of status updates and user emails, almost replicating them — user interfaces as fiction. Read the short story here; you probably won’t be able to stop scrolling.

John Hilgart’s 4CP blog takes a detailed look at this amazing cover from the original Mad Magazine.

“Disguised to look like an interior page full of novelty ads, it is so dense with tiny print as to be almost illegible at original printed size. Business matters are handled in two small boxes at the top (with a delightful splash of color), while forty-six novelty ads cover the rest of the space. It is so true to the originals that it parodies that it’s almost indistinguishable from them from more than a foot away.”

We are accustomed to satirical graphic design these days, but I imagine this issue must have confused lots of stockists if not readers.

Hilgart has details of all forty-six ersatz ads in his blog post. I’ve actually written about Hilgart’s vintage comics blogs many times on this blog, and I’ll probably continue to do so as long as he blogs because I’m such a big fan. Even better, he’s just started a version of 4CP on Tumblr.

For four-plus years, Adrian Curry has been turning in a regular column at MUBI Notebook called “Movie Poster of the Week.” The name is a bit of a misnomer, because every entry features at least a half dozen fascinating specimens of posters past and present; it’s as compelling a survey of the intersection of cinema and graphic design as any out there.

If weekly strikes you as insufficient, Curry also maintains a Tumblr called Movie Poster of the Day, which as the name suggests presents a single poster once a day. It’s great too, but the writing at MUBI is a reward in itself, so visit Movie Poster of the Week first. Oh, also, MUBI is phenomenal.