I feel like I’ve just been relieved of a tremendous burden I never knew that I had. For serious, I am so happy to learn the story of how Trapper Keepers came to be. For those who did not grow up with them as a coveted school supply&#58′;

“Launched in 1978 by the Mead Corporation (which was acquired by ACCO Brands in 2012&#41, Trapper Keeper notebooks are brightly colored three-ring binders that hold folders called Trappers and close with a flap. From the start, they were an enormous success: For several years after their nationwide release, Mead sold over US$100 million of the folders and notebooks a year. To date, some 75 million Trapper Keepers have flown off store shelves.”

Read the whole story ̵ which I admit is somewhat unremarkable, but which I savored word for word nevertheless — at Mental Floss. Via Digg.

Artist Diem Chau carves miniature sculptures on the tips of writing implements.

See more at her site. Via Potluck.

Hustwit is the director of three already classic documentaries about design: “Helvetica,” “Objectified,” and “Urbanized.” For each, he scored copious interviews with design luminaries, including:

“Paola Antonelli, Alejandro Aravena, Chris Bangle, Michael Bierut, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Neville Brody, Tim Brown, David Carson, Matthew Carter, Candy Chang, Yung Ho Chang, Wim Crouwel, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Tobias Frere-Jones, Experimental Jetset, Dan Formosa, Sir Norman Foster, Naoto Fukasawa, Jan Gehl, Jonathan Hoefler, Jonathan Ive, Hella Jongerius, Bruce Katz, David Kelley, Rem Koolhaas, Rahul Mehrotra, Bill Moggridge, Marc Newson, Oscar Niemeyer, Enrique Peыalosa, Michael C. Place, Rick Poynor, Dieter Rams, Karim Rashid, Alice Rawsthorn, Stefan Sagmeister, Paula Scher, Erik Spiekerman, Davin Stowell, Jane Fulton Suri, Massimo Vignelli, Rob Walker, Hermann Zapf, and many more… over 75 of the world’s most creative and innovative people. ”

Because of the constraints of documentary film length, his movies only include a small fraction of the wisdom conferred in those interviews. Hustwit is now raising money via Kickstarter to turn the interviews in a book.

The final product will be a “high-quality paperback, approximately 400 to 500 pages long,” and is being designed by Michael C. Place. Find out more and back the project at Kickstarter.

Highly entertaining images captured from The Stasi Museum, which immortalizes the paraphernalia and tradecraft of East Germany’s infamous state security apparatus. These shots highlight the Cold War era’s infatuation with hidden cameras, like the one below, with its lens disguised as a coat button, allowing the camera itself to be concealed under the garment.

Other examples include cameras hidden in tree trunks, watering cans and of course brief cases — straight up Sean Connery style. See the images here.

“Have you ever felt like being alone in the world, without communications and the comfort of our daily life? Well I have a word for you, the Arctic.”

Photographer Jonathan BjШrklund took these breathtaking photos of the Arctic. They are consistent with the Arctic you see in your imagination, but unexpectedly more colorful, and about a hundred times more majestic. See all the photos here.

This is a crowdfunding proposal to build a new kind of user-upgradeable phone made of modular parts. The concept lets the user swap out components as necessary, so if you feel like you want a faster processor or a better camera or a bigger battery, you can just pop out the old one and replace it with a new one. Similarly, if a single part breaks — like, say, the screen — just that part can be replaced, saving you the pain of having to toss out the whole unit or buy an entirely new one.

The video is incredibly well done and very compelling, though it does seem like an idea that’s too good to be true. I know very little about industrial design but it strikes me that there’s a certain na№vetж to the idea that a commercially and technologically viable phone can be made from a fully modularized, endlessly reconfigurable system of parts. Then again, maybe we’re at a stage in technology where a little bit of na№vetж or audaciousness is all that’s necessary to build something truly amazing. If the Phonebloks team can do it, it will certainly be that. Watch the full video.

Ameet Ranadive, product manager at Twitter, dives into the conspicuous gap between consumer time spent on mobile devices and ad spending on mobile devices. In short, ad spending lags consumer attention, and mobile usage and behavior are the reason why. These are hard problems but they’re solvable — and they represent a tremendous opportunity. Full article here.

This post by startup Intercom is a little self-serving, but it does hit the nail on the head for something that is happening right now: a fundamental shift towards a new interface paradigm based on cards, or compact, specialized, focused units of mobile-optimized functionality. To its credit, Google has been talking about this for some time, and others are starting to concur. In my view, cards could very well be what the mobile web is supposed to look like. Read more here.

Photographer and friend Joseph Holmes project “The Booth” captures the dying days of film projection with these beautiful portraits of the people who run the projectors and the hidden rooms that house them.

You can view the entire series online, but starting in October and running until early February, you can see prints in person at The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York.

This is the kind of nonsense that results from fundamentally misunderstanding what a logo is. As has been widely reported (and lamented by designers), Yahoo engaged in a bit of stunt identity design over the past month or so, fielding thirty re-imaginings of the company’s logo, one per day, You can see the first twenty-nine on this page, and when it loads in your browser, don’t feel bad if you think for a moment that you’ve stumbled across one of those sites that promises you hundreds of fonts for free — most of these logos are half-hearted at best.

To Yahoo’s credit, they did not put the logos forward as candidates, i.e., they refrained from asking the Internet to vote on them. That didn’t stop market research startup Survata from doing just that, though.

“We were curious about which logo consumers preferred as the best fit for the Internet giant, so we used the Survata logo testing tool to find out. We asked 12,725 respondents to pick their favorite of five logo variants (randomly selected from the 28 variants released prior to publication).”

Just skimming the results they’ve published on the Survata blog demonstrates the absurdity of both their own research and the fact that Yahoo put these logos out into the world. This “face-off chart” in particular has all the charm of pulling out a spreadsheet on a date.

A logo is really a visual manifestation of all the complex ideas, values and people that fuel a company — crunched and munged and somehow blacksmithed together to look simple and understandable. It does nothing for one’s confidence in the Yahoo brand to see that the company cares so little for its public image that it would be willing to float thirty random, meaningless expressions of itself out there, expressions that have clearly not been through the real process of logo development. It just looks like Yahoo doesn’t take this seriously.

Imagine that I threw four wheels and a mess of auto parts together, with no regard to how they actually function or work as a single machine, and said, “What do you think of this car?” Actually it’s as if I did that thirty times. And then someone came along and asked 12,000 people to vote on their favorite pile of wheels and auto parts. What good could come of that?

Feast on Yahoo’s thirty or so logos here, and read the Survata report here. Also, if you’re a company in the market for a new logo, please don’t follow these examples.