SKAGGS Blog -

Icelandic President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson

The Driving Sustainability Conference is produced by FTO, short for Future Energy or Framtidarorka in Icelandic. Iceland is unique in the sense that the country’s usage of energy is already 80% sustainable. Removing fossil fuel vehicles from the roads would make Iceland’s energy usage 98% sustainable and therefore the most sustainable country in the world. The conference was born out of that dream and with 3…

Steel Grate

Since I was a youngster, I’ve always had a passion for photography. I was obsessed with it when I was in High School to the point that I talked my Dad into letting me build a darkroom in the basement of his office building. I spent hours down there trying everything possible with an enlarger and photographic paper. I even got to the point of developing color negatives and…

I was headed to the gym Saturday crossing over the Brooklyn Bridge and couldn’t understand why there was a stream of cyclist for as far as I could see in either direction. After exiting the bridge near City Hall, I saw why. The street was closed and there were hundreds of people riding, running, skating and walking up Centre Street to Park Ave. I decided to skip the gym and see…

The architect most famous for his Sydney Opera House died today at the age of 90. The International Heard Tribune has a good article on him and the issues he had with building one of the most iconic buildings in the world. I think Frank Gehry said it best when Utzon won the Pritzker prize in 2003 saying that Utzon

“made a building well ahead of its time, far ahead…

There has been a lot of talk about this and while we try to keep politics out of our blog, occasionally we do drift into political issues. I’m not in favor of the government bailing out the auto industry primarily because I don’t think it is their business to do so. What the government could do in this case is order an entire new fleet of government vehicles that are either hybrid…

About 2 years ago, I added the title of this post to my email signature. I don’t recall having seen this before and it just seemed like a logical thing to do given the amount of emails I see printed out at meetings and being read by people on the subway as they head home from work. I’m also happy to see that this phrase, or variations of it, seem to be…

How could it not be when the man himself, Stevie Wonder, was in the house! I was fortunate to be able to attend Harper’s Bazaar’s 140 year birthday party last night and to my great surprise, the secret “guest performer” was none other than Stevie Wonder himself!

Stevie Wonder has been an artist that I’ve known of my entire life. I’ve never been a huge fan of his, but…

I stopped by my favorite cafe on this cold, cold New York morning to get a cup of tea and warm up. Doug, the owner of Le Colombe, served me and told me he had something to show me. He pulled out a book of his photography, which included a series of photos of birds in flight, sitting on power lines and perched on window ledges. The several shots he had in…

Wednesday evening, I had the honor of attending Popular Mechanic’s Breakthrough Awards. Here, I had an even greater honor of meeting and talking to Jeff Han and getting to put my hands on the Hands-On Computer. I first heard of Jeff from the 2006 TED Conference where he first presented his Multitouch technology. His presentation, which can be seen here (and which has been viewed more than 6,000 times…

As some you probably heard, Radiohead released there last album, In Rainbows, for donations only a week ago. Most people, especially those in the record industry, probably thought they were crazy. Well, the results are in - in one week, Radiohead sold 1.2 million albums at an average donation price of $8 grossing roughly $10 million! No middleman, no promotion and they exceeded their launch week sales of their last…

We are currently working with a client on a new brand identity and during a presentation a few weeks ago, the subject of ligatures came up. The client wasn’t familiar with the term however, they loved the fact that we were using ligatures in a particular word in a particular way (obviously, I’m not a liberty to say much more about this project). I explained what ligatures are, why they are used…

The ubiquitous character sequences that breathes emotion into the static nature of monospaced character email turns 25 today. The first emoticon was first used on September 19, 1984 at 11:44am during a discussion about humor in context of online communication by professor Scott E. Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University. CNN has the story of the “smiley”, but more importantly is what it has done for online communication.

Emoticons reflect the…

A great article in the August 12th issue of the New York Times Magazine about a how a graphic designer and a typographer and their obsession with fonts and legibility led to a painstaking effort to clean up America’s road signs, one letter at a time.

The Road to Clarity

Be sure to have a look at the slideshow on how road signs needed to be improved to…

An interesting study came out earlier this week which found that children, some as young as 3, found food wrapped in McDonald’s packaging six times tastier than identical food in plain wrappers.

This study comes on the heels of other research linking skyrocketing childhood obesity rates to advertising and corporations backing away from marketing aimed at children under the age of twelve. Dr. Victor Strasburger, author of an American…

I’m a foodie at heart. Imagine my surprise when I found out that one of my favorite chefs had collaborated with one of my favorite companies to create the upcoming film Ratatouille about an aspiring rat, Remy, who wants to save an established French restaurant. A couple of days ago, the New York Times printed a great article about the collaboration between Thomas Keller and Pixar on the…