The copier company has a well-established history of resisting efforts to make its brand a proprietary eponym and not to use it in a generic way—like Kleenex or Q-Tip or Zipper or google—but this letter (via Nag on the Lake) that a long-time literary correspondent for the The New York Times received is surprisingly stern in tone. Ms Kakutani (misidentified as a mister in the missive) is berated for having used the company’s as a verb and in lower case for an article she wrote (now the trademark appears in lower-case since 2008 and with this logo, which itself may be a copy). The veteran reporter is penning a memoir and found the letter among other ephemera whilst researching for her book.
Saturday 29 July 2017
strongly-worded letter
Friday 28 July 2017
g-mark of approval
In celebration of supporting six decades of competition to improve ergonomics and functionality the Good Design Awards (here’s one of last year’s winner) has opened up a boutique store in Tokyo that features a expertly selected range of the annual contest’s best in show.
With some forty four thousand honoured entrants, the shop couldn’t accommodate the entire inventory but this emporium is surely going to be a place to go to for inspiration. The awards have its origins in the mandate by the country’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry in 1957 to establish a rating system (the G-Mark) to recognise, commend and promote excellence in design and the chief factor for inclusion is whether an object or concept can make people’s lives more prosperous and enriches society as a whole. So many abstract and otherly-versioned things get transformed into amusement park rides, put on stage or otherwise repackaged with questionable judgment but this idea—to showcase talent in a retail setting that’s closer to a museum-going experience—strikes me as brilliant and inviting.
tabula rasa
Why you never wear GREEN on TV๐ค pic.twitter.com/IsC8TuE3Ei— Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) July 28, 2017
wayback machine
Brilliantly, as Waxy informs, the Internet Archive (previously here and here) is curating daily snapshots of a dozen of major internet properties (CNN, Reddit, YouTube, Amazon, the BBC, Yahoo! News, et al.) of how these web sites looked a decade ago. The historical chronicle elicits a sense of nostalgia and contextualises where we stand now.
