Some interesting design links from today:

Pentagram is a (seriously) multimedia design shop. Architecture, identity, web sites, interiors, print, you name it. I’m blown away by any firm capable of doing all that. And they seem to do it well— check out the portfolio.

Cinema Redux: “This explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.”

The design and construction of a new Edward Tufte sculpture. Described by the artist on his excellent message board, Ask E.T. See also Dia:Beacon, which I can’t wait to finally visit…

TouchGraph GoogleBrowser: Type in any URL, and get a nice graph of related sites and media (from Amazon) via the Google API. See also, anacubis’s Google/Amazon Demo, if you can. Not only does it require Windows/IE, it also recommends 1280x1024. So I haven’t seen it yet.

Ambient Devices— right here in our fair city. They got some major BBC coverage today, and were on Slashdot I think. I’d really like to get an Ambient Orb and try out their custom API on it. Sounds like a nice, elegant display device. I bet they took the John Hancock Building’s coded weather beacon as a major inspiration.

Engineers Without Borders. Most of the interesting engineering problems are in developing countries, where they have the opportunity to build infrastructures from scratch. Engineers must come up with economical solutions. Organizations must create a direct support infrastructure (so money goes where it’s needed). And of course, as Whitney said last night, it’s too easy to stop listening and try to tell people what they want—the “I’m going to go fix Africa” approach.

Raven Maps look beautiful. Also along those lines, Understanding USA is an interesting book. Unfortunately, the graphics on the web site are shrunk just enough to be totally useless… an unintended statement on the unbearably low resolution of computer monitors? Todd got the book—I’m looking for a spare moment to peruse.