So I was searching around, trying to figure out how to get my Google Reader to alphabetize my subscriptions list because it makes it easier for me to find a specific site when I want to. It used to do it automatically every time I added a new feed, but a while back it stopped, and just put them on the bottom of the list as I added them.

After researching, I discovered that if you use drag and drop to move feeds around in your list, it stops sorting by alphabet, so I figured I must have done that on accident at some point (because I didn’t even know about the drag and drop feature to begin with). As I googled for a solution, it seemed that most people never discovered how to switch it back, but after poking around in my Google Reader interface for a while I finally figured it out and smacked myself in the forehead because it was so easy.

Anyways, this is not the type of thing I usually post on my blog, but I thought I’d share for those that were as confused about this as I was.

Gentle Pure Space is now a whole year old! The above image is just a typographic photography experiment I’ve done recently. I don’t know if my blog is important enough to get all nostalgic on the readers yet, but some of my personal highlights were:

1) Getting mentioned on some of my most inspirational blogs, like I Love Typography, Swissmiss, Black*Eiffel and Chris Glass.

2) Surpassing my goal of 100 subscribers in a year.

3) Getting some of my posted images ffffound, especially when one of my own photographs got ffffound.

4) And Mostly, seeing all the neat stuff on the internet that maintaining a blog forces me to dig through.

Thanks to all my readers, hope you guys have been inspired now and then.

Barack Obama’s official presidential portrait has just been released. Seeing him in this familiar pose just gave me chills. When I was a child looking at the rows and rows of white male portrait shots in the appendices of my textbooks, it didn’t seem like I’d would see something like this so soon in my life. It was taken by newly-announced official White House photographer Pete Souza. I thought it was an interesting fact that this is the first one taken with a digital camera.

Click the above image for a full size download.

I made this 1680×1050 widescreen desktop wallpaper featuring the Aphex Twin logo for a friend and thought other people might want to use it. It was just a quick thing for fun, so that’s the only size I have, but hopefully it’s useful for a few people.

I just noticed that I have hit the 100 subscribers marks on my feedburner stats! My goal was to reach that in a years time, but I have done it in about half a year. I never thought there was that many super nerds out there, but my faith in humanity’s nerdiness has grown. It’s hard work doing this, especially since I try so hard to find things that are relatively under the blogophere’s radar. Thanks to the artists that make the hunt inspiring, and thanks to the readers that give the artists an audience worth inspiring.

I found the phrase Fragile manipulate with care printed on a box at work and I thought the wording was strange in a good way. Usually they say “handle with care”, but this way is a lot more poetic and up for interpretation. I thought it would make a somewhat provocative piece of art so I ripped it off and took it home with me to hang in my room.

I just found out about the Flickr group called, Typography Friday which encourages designers to create a typographic design for fun every friday. It sounds like fun and I decided to submit the above wide screen desktop wallpaper I made of a little ghost and a typographic “Boo?”. You can download the 2560×1600 size here, and resize it down to your needs if necessary.

My design was featured in Smashing Magazine’s desktop wallpaper calendar collection for May 2008. The download links for a variety of sizes are in the post on their website. There’s even versions without the calendar on it. It’s a cool idea, the only thing that bugs me is the watermark requirement. Some of the designs are ruined by it. I tried to blend it nicely into mine, but I will still offer versions without the watermark here on my site. Check this post for an update on or slightly after May 1st if you are interested.

Update : Here they are

With Calendar: 1920×1200 | 1680×1050 | 1600×1200 | 1280×960
No Calendar: 1920×1200 | 1680×1050 | 1600×1200 | 1280×960

I recently designed a 3 part poster series for earth day. The idea is to get people to think about the things they take from nature and the things they put into it and decide if they are “trading fairly” with nature. It was made by taking my illustrations and printing them out, then putting them in actual outdoor scenes and taking a photo of it.

I love the creative solution for publishing the sustainability facts for this house design. The nutrition label layout makes the figures much more “digestible” (sorry, that pun wasn’t planned, I swear). It might get more people to think that they should treat house shopping in a similar way to food shopping. When most people pick out food they consider the taste and the health benefits before deciding what to get. The idea being to balance what gives you instant pleasure with what will be better for you in the long run.

In the same way, with a house, it should be on the consumers mind to make sure you get a house that is good for you and the planet in the long run, as well as something that you will enjoy living in on a day to day basis.

via Treehugger

I took a screen shot for prosperity:

Not only was it the most popular suggestion, but the top four most searched for phrases on google beginning with “is” are inquiries about Obama being a muslim. I didn’t even realize that this was such a big issue because the media seems to mostly focus on his ethnicity versus Hillary’s gender. It would be nice if it came down to things like, I don’t know, issues and moral character. The sad part isn’t the amount of people that googled the question, because they would have probably ended up on the Snopes article that says the rumor is false. The sad part isn’t even the large amount of people that didn’t bother to google it, blindly taking the chain e-mail, or myspace bulletin, for fact. The sad part is that it even matters.

found on thesixtyone.com