Here’s an interesting question: What do Star Trek and the Country Music Awards have in common? The answer is literally right under your nose.

Give up?

It would seem that whoever was responsible for the design of the 41st Annual CMA Awards on ABC decided to “borrow” the iconic Starfleet arrowhead emblem–I noticed it myself while leafing through this week’s edition of Entertainment Weekly. I was so taken aback by the color scheme (a charcoal-colored brushed metal, or a stone/smoke color, as seen below) and the presence of the emblem (embossed) that for a moment I thought I was looking at an ad for a boxed set of Star Trek DVDs.

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• Baxter of California packaging design
  I discovered this brand on my recent trip to Los Angeles–their daily face wash was part of the Chamberlain West Hollywood’s in-room “beauty bar” (a selection of various products available for use à la carte, kind of like a cosmetic mini-bar). The minimalist yet gorgeous product containers make the pragmatist in me jump for joy, and the fact that they’ve used OCR-A and–be still my heart–ASCII art on the label makes the whole line a lovely compromise between today and yesterday (post-post-modern?). Plus, the fact that the products are actually good is a nice bonus.
• New York Magazine: Design revolutionaries
  New York Magazine’s annual design issue eschewed the standard (usually boring) list of “innovative products we like that happen to cost way more than they should” in favor of profiling some of the most noted design minds of our time, like Massimo & Lella Vignelli and Eva Zeisel. The list is far from perfect, however; some of the inclusions are puzzling (Martha Stewart–isn’t she more of a business innovator rather than a design innovator?) while there are some conspicuous absences (I’d argue for the inclusion of David Rockwell, for one). At least the profiles were augmented with a two-page spread of “25 More Design Revolutionaries,” though the detail given on each is tepid at best. Still, I applaud the magazine for taking a new approach to a mass-market article on design.
• Installing Mac OS X 10.5 on a PC
  I had no idea it was so alarmingly easy to install OS X on a PC. I don’t condone the practice at all, and am puzzled as to why someone would want to do so (oftentimes such hacks remove the ability to hear sound, for example). As one of the commenters on the article points out, “…Apple will not release a PC version [of OS X] because it can not support it… Supporting lots of hardware will shatter the ‘well known stability’ of MacOS.”
• Building a business as “just” a designer
  37signals answers the question, “Can I build a product business if I’m just a designer?” This is a problem I myself have had to consider; I’m blessed that I hold a full-time job as an in-house designer/creative director, but I still do freelance work. I’ve found it essential to network and build connections with talented folks like photographers, CSS/XHTML experts, Flash engineers and PHP programmers to make certain projects really fly. It really is more of a “collective” approach to work, but when you have the right people in place, it works really well.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the New York City metropolitan area, there’s a small but well-known chain of deep discount department stores called Century 21 (warning–Flash site with obnoxious music). You can oftentimes find great deals there, and that’s the major appeal; they carry so much stock that turns over so quickly that every time you go in there’s something new.

I stopped by the store earlier today to pick up a new shower curtain liner and noticed a new slogan printed on the receipt:

While on its face this seems like a cutesy slogan that doesn’t mean anything, it’s actually problematic, as it highlights one of the nastier qualities of the store.

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• Mythology busters: 101 shirtless men at Abercrombie & Fitch
  It’s no secret that Abercrombie & Fitch sells clothes by plastering their stores, website and catalog with male models who are conspicuously missing their clothes. Improv Everywhere decided to see what would happen if they had 111 men take off their shirts in the chain’s flagship 5th Avenue store. The results are revealing–in more than one way.
• Calories on fast food menu boards
  Though boosters of legislation who want calorie counts posted on fast food menu boards have recently been dealt a few setbacks, the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s mockups of what these menus might look like are still interesting.
• The Daily Show: Huge video archive
  It isn’t entirely comprehensive (just yet), but The Daily Show has blown the doors off its archives and has video clips from all the way back to 1999. Let’s hope that they eventually add Jon’s interview with Kermit the Frog.
• Sex and money
  Variety reinforces that old dead horse: sex sells, and that’s one of the many reasons why the new Fox Business Network seems to be doing so well.

I return to New York tonight… in the meantime, here are four links I picked up on this week. Enjoy.

• The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
  Oh, who needs grammar and punctuation? Here’s a gallery devoted to the “best” “misuses” of quotation marks, including “explanations” of why they are “wrong.”
• Canon PowerShot TX1 reviewed
  Earlier this year, Canon released a new “hybrid” digital camera/video camera that offers HDTV movie capture (720p) as well as a 7.1 megapixel capture quality. It looks to be a fairly good compromise for someone who wants to shoot good quality video and also good photos. The drawback: A 4GB fast SD card can only store ~13 minutes of HD video.
• Flash-based image galleries
  A selection of free Flash-based image galleries that won’t require a lot of intensive work in ActionScript. Phew!
• Design in action: Turning shipping containers into housing
  Because most ports have a glut of empty shipping containers from China that are too expensive to ship back empty, some enterprising groups are turning these empty containers into housing. I understand that they can be tricky to insulate and wire, but some of the solutions featured here are quite elegant.