Reference Page: December 2005

Message in a Bottle
No more jumbled stickers and miniscule type on hard-to-open bottles—good design has finally made its way to the pharmacist’s desk. For more on ClearRx, check out Target’s minisite, target.com/clearrx/clearrx_sitelet.jhtml, which shows off the new bottle’s features in 3-D. At SIMpill’s online home, www.simpill.com, a rotating 3-D image of the bottle under “Products” is complete with an animation of battery installation; and www.talkingrx.com presents a comprehensive overview of the speaking pill container (to order, call 888-798-2557).

Street Cred
Tacoma skateboarding advocate Peter Whitley—who convinced the city to include micro parks in several public development projects—is also one of the regional managers of Skaters for Public Skateparks, www.skatersforpublicskateparks.org, which offers detailed tips on planning, design, fund-raising, and more. For example, the group suggests that insurance coverage for skate parks is unnecessary, given the reach of standard municipal insurance policies. Who knew?

Growth Potential?
The image looking southeast from Baton Rouge to New Orleans was generated by the recently launched Google Earth 3-D program, which can be downloaded at earth.google.com. (For now the free beta version runs only on PCs, but Google is working on Mac compatibility.) With extraordinary flexibility and magnifying power, the program allows users to map any place on Earth, add or subtract topographical features like terrain and buildings, and virtually fly around the globe. The imagery is patched together from satellite and aircraft photos taken over the past three years. Cities in the Western Hemisphere feature the highest-resolution details, in some cases greater than a meter.

Flash Light
The holiday season is upon us, along with the perennial question: What do you buy for the designer who has everything? Perhaps he or she would appreciate a humorous yet stylish light to adorn a mantel or illuminate the bathroom at night. Go to www.emulationkit.com for product details and a where-to-buy list.

Replacing Home
Whether it’s a matter of rebuilding New Orleans and the World Trade Center, or just sifting through the mountains of information and opinions on both endeavors, it’s difficult to know where to start. For the former, a good place to begin is Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_Hurricane_Katrina_on_New_Orleans; its usual link-sprinkled overview is particularly thorough in this case, including everything from analysis of the levee system to footnoted links for op-ed articles. Read reformed conservative Arianna Huffington’s take on the flawed investigation of the federal response at www.commondreams.org/views05/0916-30.htm. For a World Trade Center information clearinghouse go to www.projectrebirth.org, online home of a nonprofit whose laudable mission is to “document the entire reconstruction of the World Trade Center site.” One of the many pieces collected there is a biting Slate commentary by Witold Rybczynski on the Freedom Tower security measures, slate.msn.com/id/2124886, also skewered by our own Karrie Jacobs. New York’s tabloids predictably took the hack governor’s line on the International Freedom Center: www.nydailynews.com/front/story/322357p-275583c.html.

Up in Michigan
The West Michigan Sustainable Business Forum, www.sustainable-busforum.org, promotes environmentally sound businesses that are also profitable. One SBF member, the wind-turbine company Mackinaw Power, www.mackinawpower.com, has worked with the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Environmental Resources Trust, www.ert.net, on developing wind-power projects in the state. The Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association, www.glrea.org, is another of the region’s green groups encouraging solar and wind power, energy efficiency, and clean-fuel technology. The American Wind Energy Association, www.awea.org, supports a similar agenda on a national scale.

In Praise of Gentrification
According to Steven Rathbone of local metal band Lair of the Minotaur, the last rock show at the Detroit coffee shop Zoot’s was “just pure mayhem. I don’t think there was a piece of furniture left unbroken.” The full interview is online at www.roughedge.com/features/lairoftheminotaur1104.htm. With any luck north Brooklyn’s waterfront transformation won’t be quite so violent. The ambitious plans, complete with boilerplate artistic renderings, are on New York City’s Department of City Planning Web site, at www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/greenpointwill/greenoverview.shtml. You can keep tabs on the ongoing legal battle over the neighborhood’s proposed power plant at www.stopthepowerplant.org and www.transgas energy.com/faqs.htm. Guess who takes which side.

Philadelphia Dreaming
Father Major Jealous Divine—the charismatic leader of the Peace Mission Movement—claimed to be Christ incarnate and once implied that he’d had a (preternatural) hand in the death of a judge who had imprisoned him in a racially charged case. For more on Father Divine, go to PBS’s excellent timeline of the history of the African-American religious experience: www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/journey_3/p_10.html. More of Michael T. Regan’s Divine Lorraine Hotel photos, along with an extended essay on the building’s history, can be found in the Philadelphia City Paper: www.citypaper.net/articles/2005-01-13/cover.shtml. At the Library of Congress’s American Memory Web site, memory.loc.gov/ammem, type “Divine Lorraine” in the search window to see 32 black-and-white shots by Joseph Elliott of the Willis G. Hale-designed hotel in all its late Peace Mission-era splendor.

Voicing the Visual
If the Web’s many eulogies to discontinued Apple models give you uncomfortable flashbacks to the early 1980s, have a look at the specs and listen to sound samples of the company’s recently unveiled VoiceOver screen-reader technology at www.apple.com/macosx/features/voiceover. Among its many features, the program allows users to customize phrases so that, for example, an emoticon such as “;)” can be recognized as a wink rather than an error. The easily changeable text at Lighthouse International’s VisionConnection site, www.visionconnection.org, is equally essential for vision-impaired Web users—and it’s hugely useful for everyone else. For a crash course in color theory and how it relates to graphic-design accessibility in the news business, go to www.poynterextra.org/cp/index.html, an interactive project from the Florida-based Poynter Institute.

March of the Penguins
Although only a fraction of Penguin’s gorgeous Great Ideas series is currently available in the United States, anyone can gush over all of the books by entering “great ideas” into the search tool at www.penguin.co.uk—or you can order them for a hefty shipping charge. Elsewhere on the publisher’s site, the 70 books from the rainbow-hued Pocket Penguins set are arrayed for virtual, Flash-enhanced browsing: www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/happybirthdaypenguin/content.html. If you need some creative inspiration the St. Bride Library, a graphic-design resource for Penguin designer David Pearson, welcomes scholars and schoolchildren alike into its reading room for no charge. Plan your trip to the library’s many-thousands-deep collection at www.stbride.org.

Friends in High Places
Just as one would expect from such skilled organizers as Joshua David and Robert Hammond, the Web site for the High Line project—www.thehighline.org—is well designed and complete. Along with maps and photos by Joel Sternfeld and others, the Friends of the High Line site offers visitors an array of links to related community groups, organizations, and city departments. Not least among them is the site for New York’s Department of City Planning, www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/home.html, which lists details of West Chelsea’s recent rezoning. To get a sense of just how wonderful the repurposed freight line could be when finished, go to www.promenade-plantee.org to see pictures of the Promenade Plantée, a Parisian elevated rail track, under the gaze of the Web site’s resident Persian cat.