Yesterday afternoon Australian design and creative community Australian Infront unveiled a new identity and website, in a revamp that sees the long-standing kangaroo logo/icon replaced with a fresh, all new, look (as above).

To coincide with the website and brand redesign, an exhibition of the top ten works submitted to Infront’s latest Visual Response (VR) design challenge, “Native”, took place at Lo-Fi Collective in Surry Hills, Sydney, last night.

Melbourne based designer Henrik Josefsson took out VR’s top prize from a field of some 170 participants. I’ve posted more photos from the night, including snaps of the top ten VR images, over on my Flickr page.

Filed to the “you learn something new everyday” category, there is in fact a correct way to taste vodka:

Vodka is traditionally drunk neat. It is often served frozen, though in order to really grasp its subtleties it is better to taste it at room temperature. The procedure for tasting vodka is similar to tasting wine – smell it first. This is a difficult process with clear vodka as it has a lot of alcohol and few flavour compounds. Next, take a sip. Hold the vodka in your mouth for a few seconds and carefully exhale through your mouth a little before swallowing. This allows the spirit to warm up in your mouth, releasing some volatile alcohol, which is then blown off. Finally, in between sips, drink some filtered water to help cleanse and cool your palate and preserve it long enough to taste a few vodkas.

(Photo by Christian Senger)

A collection of Instagram photos taken by French artist and photographer JR in North Korea. I get the feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot more of places like North Korea thanks to the combination of smartphones and photo sharing apps.

The making, or more specifically, the rolling of top-shelf cigars, a process that is still largely manual, and considered to be a craft.

By no means as easy as it looks.

An idea of how the world looked in 1962.

Of particular interest is this photo of John Mauchly, a US physicist who also designed computers, with a suitcase size computer, not exactly commonplace fifty years ago I’d say, who “predicted everyone will be walking around with his own personalized computer within a decade”.

On the money but for the time frame.

A jaunt through an alternative universe, or what might be seen if you looked through an electron microscope, “Hartverdrahtet” is powered by code that weighs in at just four kilobytes, the approximate equivalent of a blank Word file.

Hartverdrahtet by Akronyme Analogiker is a three minute long audio-visual trip into a procedural fractalverse, compressed into a minuscule piece of software. No bigger than 4096 bytes – less than an empty Word document, as demoscene activists like to point out – the executable file contains all the mathematics needed to generate the unfolding visual complexity and audible ambience upon a double-click. A solo effort by a talented coder who calls himself Demoscene Passivist, Hartverdrahtet reveals a mesmerizing cosmos observed through what could be an electron microscope – ethereal, greenish and a little eerie.

We may never be able to bound around the solar system or galactic space in warp drive like spaceships, but as a consolation we do have the International Space Station, and the steady stream of photos taken by its crew, such as this stunning night time image of London.

Spaceships bearing a striking resemblance to the USS Enterprise, from “Star Trek”, could be operational in about twenty years, though their range would be limited to travel within the solar system. That’s better than nothing mind you.

This version of the Enterprise would be three things in one: a spaceship, a space station, and a spaceport. A thousand people can be on board at once – either as crew members or as adventurous visitors. While the ship will not travel at warp speed, with an ion propulsion engine powered by a 1.5GW nuclear reactor, it can travel at a constant acceleration so that the ship can easily get to key points of interest in our solar system. Three additional nuclear reactors would create all of the electricity needed for operation of the ship.

The metrosexual’s digital equivalent, the datasexual, is quietly, yet surely, making their presence among us known. If you have a penchant for recording, and I imagine, publishing, all manner of personal data, you may even be one yourself, especially if infographics, data visualisations, and the annual – always a joy to peruse – Feltron Reports, float your boat.

The origin of the datasexual in all likelihood started with the humble infographic, which is a highly stylized and well-designed way to talk about all the data out there on Web. The infographic trend was followed by the data visualization trend, which made it even cooler to display data in innovative new ways. These data visualization tools eventually gave us cultural artifacts like Nicholas Felton’s annual Feltron Reports, which made the obsessive recording of everyday activities seem cool.

A new book, 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design, written by Steven Heller and Veronique Vienne, sets out some of the more powerful ideas and concepts that shaped graphic design:

From concepts like manifestos (#25), pictograms (#45), propaganda (#22), found typography (#38), and the Dieter-Rams-coined philosophy that “less is more” (#73) to favorite creators like Alex Steinweiss, Noma Bar, Saul Bass, Paula Scher, and Stefan Sagmeister, the sum of these carefully constructed parts amounts to an astute lens not only on what design is and does, but also on what it should be and do.