God bless Obamicons. Thanks to Ben Terrett for the link, he’s got loads of them…

In the words of Ian and Alex who run The Art of the Title Sequence website: “Remember when your heart sank just a little when you realized the Pink Panther movie wasn’t a cartoon?” Check out their site for examples of great typographic, illustrative and imaginatively composed film and television title sequences. You can watch them in good quality too and then stick around to discuss in a suitably highbrow fashion…

In the meantime here are some of my favourites from the site…

…the obligatory Hitchcock, this time it’s Vertigo:

The haunting typographic treat which is Alien:

Read the rest of this entry…

Clever advert for the iPod on Yahoo’s website…

Finally, there is now a half decent chance of being able to find something again that you added on Ffffound in the past. I was only wondering the other week if there was any way to actually get at your Ffffound collection, well now you can.

For years I kept a ‘nice things’ folder on my machine, where I put anything cool I came across online. Since I started using Ffffound though, the nice things folder has become a little neglected and as soon as something is ffffound, it is almost as quickly llllost.

Check out Ddddownload, you can download your Ffffound collection (or anyone else’s for that matter). Just type the username in and give your email address and a ZIP file is emailed to you. It takes a while if you have a lot of stuff (mine took 20 minutes and weighed in at 145Mb for 1500 items) but after it arrives it unzips everything intact.

Nice, now can someone email me a link to where all my odd socks have gone?

I think my favourite website is currently www.barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com which is a little oddity created by Matthew Honan who says of the web “I loved that I could pluck some odd thing out of my brain and someone, somewhere out there would relate to it. Might even love it.”

The page just serves up short phrases, some of which are really lovely and poke affectionate fun at the feelgood Obama factor. Have a look and refresh the page a few times, there are some great lines on there. The new bicycle trend has now spread, there was also a Hillary Clinton version (it’s down now) and yes, John McCain has one too, although it simply says JOHN McCAIN IS SUPER AWESOME! no matter how many times you refresh it. Hmm…

My guerrilla efforts at work to pin up a few of the Obama phrases around the studio also resulted in some McCain retaliation:

Let’s hope his aim isn’t so good these days…

Brand Tags is a fascinating little site. In it’s own words: “The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.”

The idea is, of course, fascinating because it is true, even if the word ‘is’ gets in the way. The site then goes on to show you a logo representative of a brand (some of which us UK people might not know as there is a bit of a US bias at the moment) and then you are prompted to enter your first thought. It’s like Mallet’s Mallet but with brands and without the ludicrous spectacles.

After you have entered in a word or phrase you get another brand and so on… You can look at all the words and phrases the brand has been linked to by other people and you can even get presented with the words and try to guess the brand from that. The tags are shown in a nice typographic DNA cloud-like list and some of the results might surprise you.

A great idea, and nicely done. It’s interesting to see just how different your perception of something might be to other people’s, or indeed be validated by your spot on response. Just goes to show how ephemeral brands really are, they’re not logos but psychology after all.

Thanks to Gianni for the link.