John McCain and Sarah Palin have been drowning themselves in the toilet for the last several weeks, and it appears that their noses will barely be above water by November 4. But at least they’re starting to be upfront about their only remaining strategy for getting into the White House. Check out this poster from the surprisingly honest ad campaign they launched this morning:

More stuff like this is here.

I have a spy at The Weekly Standard—let’s call him Z.—and he emailed me earlier today to say that Bill Kristol locked himself in his office first thing this morning so he could go into InDesign and crank out his latest Standard column about Sarah Palin. Kristol’s been writing about Palin for both the Standard and The New York Times, so he’s having trouble coming up with fresh justifications for her candidacy. It’s pretty thin gruel at this point, and he’s getting frustrated. Apparently his cursing has been audible throughout the floor all morning. Kristol stepped out for lunch a few minutes ago, and Z. went into the publishing system and printed up a copy of Kristol’s work-in-progress. Z. just emailed me a scan of the page:

(Visit the magazine covers tag for more exclusive Panopticist scoops.)

The scan might be hard to read at this size, so I’ve retyped the text and posted it after the jump.

[Continue reading "Exclusive: William Kristol Is Having Trouble Writing His Next Column About Sarah Palin"...]

This week’s issue just arrived in the mail, and it’s a keeper:

(Yes, I made this. For more stuff like it, see the magazine covers tag. The two primary fonts are Knockout and Mercury, both from the geniuses at Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)

More Potus info is here.

I swear I’m interested in things other than text and numerals that appear onscreen during television shows, but this is so interesting I have to share.

Fringe, the new Fox show co-created by Lost visionary J.J. Abrams, debuts tomorrow night at 8 p.m. I found a leaked version of the pilot a couple of months ago, but I didn’t get around to watching it until last night. Judging from the pilot, it’s basically a mediocre X-Files retread: federal agents + paranormal investigations + sinister bureaucracy + rampant paranoia. The cast includes Lance Reddick, late of The Wire and recently of Lost, and I love him. But otherwise the whole operation seems a bit contrived.

I was, however, struck by the very unusual way that the show identifies locations onscreen. The X-Files, for instance, handled these in the typical, longstanding way. If Mulder and Scully were in, say, Virginia, a location-and-time stamp would be displayed at the bottom of the opening shot of the sequence:

Arlington, Virginia
4:32 a.m.

Fringe handles location IDs in a way I’ve never seen before, at least on television: Each one is placed into the actual scene as a physical element that the characters pass by or the camera swoops through. I find this approach to be really jarring and show-offy. Have you ever seen anything like this before? (This series of clips includes one ID of a foreign location, but that information doesn’t really spoil anything.)

It’s possible that these will have been changed in the version that will be broadcast tomorrow night, but this is how things looked in the pilot I acquired in late June.

All Macs come bundled with a handful of dingbat fonts that most people never use, including Apple Symbols, Webdings, and Wingdings 1, 2, and 3. These collections contain a lot of versatile glyphs that are useful in all kinds of everyday graphical situations. But they also include dozens of mystifying icons whose origins and meaning are totally opaque. Like the one at left: What the hell does it signify? Is it a bulb-rest for a tired apostrophe? A whistle seat? A logo for a secret society? I bet Jonathan Hoefler would know.

This Sarah Palin nomination is going great! And now she’s laid out her geopolitical philosophy in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.

(Yes, I made this. Go here for more stuff like it.)

In the late ’90s, I occasionally did freelance typesetting for a small firm that designed annual reports for AOL, Boston Properties, Tommy Hilfiger, and other corporations. It was a really good gig, and my Quark skills improved enormously from having to lay out elaborate financial tables in meticulous, pixel-perfect fashion.

It was at this firm that I acquired the hilarious Publishers Clearing House spoof below, which was tacked to a bulletin board in a corner of the office. I pulled it down and made a color copy of it. All the jokes are about the advertising industry, and everything’s very inside-baseball. So it’s likely that this originally appeared in some sort of advertising-industry trade publication. I have no idea where it was published, and I’ve always been curious. If you know, please post in the comments!

I’ve been wanting to post this for several years, but its unwieldy size and awkward layout made it difficult. Even with the new Panopticist design, I’ve had to cut this up in Photoshop so I can post a readable version.

Anyway, pretty much everything in this is funny and spot-on, and there are dozens of perfect little details. As the tagline for Popular Concept says, “It’s Stuffed Full of Zingers!” Here’s the whole thing; zoomed details are after the jump.

[Continue reading "Hot Deals! Subscribe to X-Acto!, Boot Lick, Bathroom Stall Digest, Professional Award Judge, and Other Advertising-Industry Magazines"...]

Hello. As of yesterday there have been some major changes around here. I’ve spent the last two weeks adding a search engine, tweaking the layout and typography, putting in place a robust tagging scheme, creating a big master archive page, and adding lots of other little bits of functionality.

Apart from the tags and the search engine, which allow the slicing and dicing of Panopticist content in all kinds of new ways, the biggest change is to the layout itself. Inspired by the brilliant work of Khoi Vinh and the people behind the Blueprint CSS framework (which itself was inspired by people like Khoi), I’ve killed the cluttery left sidebar and added some code that allows me to run much wider graphics and videos by pulling them out to the left using negative margins. Videos like the one featured in “High-Def Backyard Shootout” can now run almost 600 pixels wide, when previously they were limited to the 380-pixel width of the center column. This opens up some great new possibilities, like the ability to run the magazine covers much larger than I could before:

Underlying everything is a nine-column grid that has been subdivided into one or two smaller grids.

One genius aspect of Khoi’s approach is that it solves a great web-specific design conundrum: When a column is wide enough to accommodate large graphics, the type size often has to be scaled up so it matches the proportions of the column width—and this can throw off the balance of the whole layout. In print, big graphics don’t have to mean big type, but on the web they often do. By keeping the type in a relatively thin column and pulling graphics out into the whitespace (er, brownspace) at left, these two priorities no longer clash—and it also results in a much more dynamic and exciting layout, because visual elements can burst through the boundaries of the columns. Imprisoned no more!

There have been some other major changes here too. Inspired by the fun all the cool kids are having with their Tumblrs, I’ve tweaked Movable Type to allow me to post some new kinds of content quickly: first, a linked, styled quote I’ve dubbed a Callout; second, embedded mp3s, which I can now post with a few clicks; and third, Five-Word Links, which used to be a separate element but are now integrated into the larger blog, with their own archive page and everything.

That’s it for now. If you notice anything awry, I hope you’ll email me at hearst@nyc.rr.com and let me know.

I guarantee this is the weirdest and yet most rewarding thing you’ll see all day. It’s a video for a Russian metal band’s tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev. On the video’s Vimeo page, the director, Tom Stern, writes:

I did this video for a Russian Metal Band called ANJ. It is pretty crazy. When I saw the lyrics it seemed to be an earnest tribute to Mikael Gorbachov (that’s how the Russians spell it), so I was a bit confounded about what the video concept should be, but then I had a brainstorm to take it way over the top and I think it was just the thing. Suffice to say it’s half Russian History allegory as told through an old zombie movie made in the Soviet Union, and half animated Soviet Propaganda posters.

(Vimeo videos can stutter when they haven’t loaded completely, so let this finish loading before watching it.)

[via Mark Lisanti.]