From the boys who brough you Helvetica, comes Objectified, a feature-length documentary about our relationship to manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them.
It is a bit surprising that it has taken movie makers this long to create movies centered around very niche, but insanely popular, design topics; yet unsurprising that director Gary Hustwit brought two movies to print which look to be making a proper bit of grownup cash.

Wildwood Plaza, originally uploaded by sebmouttet

ABC Verlag corporate design international, originally uploaded by sebhayez

If you have 20 minutes today, please watch Merlin Mann’s MacWorld presentation entitled Toward Patterns for Creativity.
As someone who’s job it is to be creative day in and day out, Merlin gets it.

The US House of Representative just passed H.R.1 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 244-188 after defeating the Republican’s proposal which was a collection of long-sought tax cuts. After a few legislative maneuvers (including trying to get recommit the bill with instructions back to the Appropriations Committee – effectively killing the bill), the bill was passed.
Note that all 177 Republicans vote against the bill. So President Obama hands a fig leaf out to the opposition, including tax cuts, and the Republicans complain for a week and then vote against it. Nice.

Get the whole Map Symbols & Patterns for NPS Maps.

Above is Draplin’s Superbowl Logo, one of eight logo redesigns commissioned by the New York Times:

There has long been a logo on the Super Bowl field. Only now is there a field on the Super Bowl logo.
For something designed to market the N.F.L.’s biggest game, the official logo featured no football until Super Bowl XXVI, no nod to the league’s familiar shield until Super Bowl XXXIV and no hint to the two conferences that send representatives until Super Bowl XL — not counting the first game, which was not called a Super Bowl at all.
But the 43 Super Bowl logos illustrate more than an annual championship. They draw a line through the league’s growth, the trends of graphic design, even the vagaries of one nation’s popular culture.

See all eight designs.