The National Design Awards program celebrates design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement.

Congratulations to the winners.

Interest in type, typefaces, typography and fonts has grown far beyond the graphic design community, yet few truly understand how and why these vital components of design are created and applied. This exhibition, organized by Monotype and designed by AIGA Medalist and Pentagram partner Abbott Miller for the AIGA National Design Center, celebrates 100 years of type as a constant influence in the world around us.

[Via Khoi Vinh]

Apple Inc granted its new retail chief 113,334 restricted stock units, the company said in a regulatory filing on Monday, valued at $68.1 million based on Monday’s closing share price.

Good people cost money. If Apple is convinced she is worth it, then pay up and let her do her job.

Samsung will ask the trial judge and an appeals court, if necessary, to reduce the damages awarded by the jury May 2 and yesterday to zero, John Quinn, a lawyer for the maker of Galaxy smartphones, said in a statement.

This slimy company is just unbelievable.

A custom-made, $10,000 guitar stolen in March from heavy metal rocker Zakk Wylde’s tour bus outside The Chicago Theatre has been recovered after being sold to a Chicago pawn shop, Wylde’s manager confirmed Saturday.

I can’t imagine how devastating it would be to lose a guitar like that. I’m glad to hear Zakk got it back.

Tom Dunham was the jury foreman in the case.

Mr. Dunham said the jury was curious about how Google affected Apple’s motivation in this case. Samsung’s smartphones and tablets use Google’s Android operating system. Apple hasn’t sued Google directly, but has sued Samsung and other device makers that use Android.

“If you really feel that Google is the cause behind this, as I think everybody has observed, then don’t beat around the bush,” said Mr. Dunham, whose job at IBM was to oversee developers expected to file patents. “Let the courts decide. But a more direct approach may be something to think about.”

His comments suggest that Samsung lawyers succeeded with arguments that Samsung was merely a proxy for Apple’s real target: Google and its Android operating system. Apple’s lawyers insisted that Samsung—and not Google—was the defendant in this case.

To support its point, Samsung presented evidence of an email sent by former Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs saying that Apple should wage a “holy war” on Google.

Straight from the horse’s mouth. I don’t pretend to understand all the complexities of this case, but didn’t this start out to be about wholesale copying of a groundbreaking user interface?

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ESPN:

With the world’s biggest sporting event, the FIFA World Cup, set to kick off in roughly 37 days, ESPN has now revealed how it plans to deliver coverage to you.

At a recent media event in New York City, ESPN President John Skipper and Co. announced that all 64 World Cup matches from Brazil would be streamed live via WatchESPN and ESPN3. Naturally, you’ll need a cable subscription to have access to the feeds, but the good news is that, since ESPN has full rights to the tournament in the US, you won’t be subject to any tedious blackout restrictions.

Most of the US won’t care/won’t watch but this is the biggest sporting event in the world. I’ll be watching every game.

Ozy:

Amid the security checks, cramped seating and baggage fees, it’s easy to pine for the glory days of air travel. When food was abundant (and included in the price of your ticket), you had room to cross your legs and fashionable air hostesses handed out cocktails and chewing gum. And if you wanted to light up, then — like most anywhere else — you simply lit up. A smoking section on an airplane … is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.

The smoke-filled cabin seems hard to imagine today, a quaint relic of a bygone era when travel also meant white gloves and meaningful customer service. But the right…was far from a given. Just 25 years ago, thanks to the efforts of an intrepid few, from key lawmakers to, yes, valiantly disagreeable flight attendants, a public health hazard went from established custom to punishable offense.

The fight to keep the “No Smoking” sign on in airplanes crossing the friendly skies was not an easy one.

I remember when it was legal to smoke on planes. Seems insane now.

Rectangles inside other rectangles: this is what our webpages have always been made of. We’ve long tried to break free from their restrictions by using CSS to create geometric shapes, but those shapes have never affected the content inside the shaped element, or how the element is seen by other elements on the page.

The Mobile Application Distribution Agreement, or MADA, is a deal that applies to phone and tablet makers that want to use Android applications such as YouTube or Gmail. Among other things, the MADA requires phone makers that want one of the Google apps to install all of them.

It’s all or nothing.

Information and downloads are on Avid’s Web site.

PC Magazine:

Why would one of the most innovative technology companies in the world be glacial in redesigning one of its most iconic products? Why would it want the MacBook Air to look…dated?

The answer seems pretty simple. The design hasn’t changed because, frankly, it hasn’t needed to.

What changes, if any, would you make to the Air?

The Codist:

I started my career in 1981 working for 3 years at a defense contractor. By 1985 I started my first company to develop and then sell a spreadsheet like application for the Mac called Trapeze.

So what was it like back then in the dark ages? Quite different than today in many ways; not so different in others. There was no internet, no Google, no StackOverflow. It was just you and your friends and your brain.

Warning, antique history!

Ah, the good old days.

The TV business has moved deep into commodity territory, spread as thin as can be. Consumer electronic sales are down, as focus shifts to non-Sony categories. The PlayStation is a bright spot, but just not a large enough business compared to the whole.

Tough times for an innovative firm that brought us a lot of new technologies over the years.

New York Times:

In San Diego, a construction worker who said his iPhone had been stolen at a reggae concert chased the pilferer and wound up in a fistfight on the beach that a police officer had to break up. A New Jersey man ended up in custody himself after he used GPS technology to track his lost iPhone and attacked the wrong man, mistaking him for the thief.

Even an off-duty Los Angeles police detective pursued his son’s phone, which had been stolen at a soccer game. The officer, who asked that his name not be used for fear that civilians would follow his example, and his son used GPS to track the phone leaving the field.

They got in the car and followed it — first to a mall, then to a nearby home. The officer knocked on the door, and then his son called the phone, which went off inside the bag of the boy who had taken it from the field.

The officer urged anyone whose phone is stolen to call the police, noting that he had had three other off-duty officers with him.

Interesting read and solid advice. If someone steals your phone, call the police.

A cheerleader’s defamation lawsuit against a gossip site has big implications for sites that carry third party content of any kind. At the core of the suit:

“If websites are subject to liability for failing to remove third-party content whenever someone objects, they will be subject to the ‘heckler’s veto,’ giving anyone who complains unfettered power to censor speech,” according to briefs filed Nov. 19 by lawyers for Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon, Gawker and BuzzFeed, among others.

In other words, should Facebook or Twitter be liable for statements posted by one of its users? Should Amazon be held liable for the accuracy of a review posted on its site?

That is one heck of a markup.

Vanity Fair:

For three years, Apple and Samsung have clashed on a scale almost unprecedented in business history, their legal war costing more than a billion dollars and spanning four continents.

Beginning with the super-secret project that created the iPhone and the late Steve Jobs’s fury when Samsung—an Apple supplier!—brought out a shockingly similar device, Kurt Eichenwald explores the Korean company’s record of patent infringement, among other ruthless business tactics, and explains why Apple might win the battles but still lose the war.

Great read.

I’ve seen a number of articles purporting to lay out the evils or the benefits of video games for kids. This article actually does a good job of laying out the pros and cons, reasonably objectively. Personally, I’m pro video games, with a healthy mix of other activities mixed in.

[Hat tip to Ryan Mark]

Ever wondered how a laser works? Follow the link. It does get a bit technical, but I found it to be reasonably understandable and incredibly fascinating.

Heavy rains triggered the collapse of a retaining wall on one side of a railroad track. The road has partially collapsed when this video was shot. The guy who shot the video? His Jeep was one of the cars that got swallowed up.

The action happens about a minute into the video, and it happens fast. It does get a bit loud, so you might want to turn your volume down if you are at work.

This has happened before. Apple came away with worldwide rights to the iPhone name.

Happened with the iPad too.

My opinion? If Apple does come out with an iWatch product, they’ll find the path to protect the name legally.

Finally.

The big story here is that Bill Gates has been selling his Microsoft shares on a regular basis:

Gates, who started the company that revolutionized personal computing with school-friend Paul Allen in 1975, has sold 20 million shares each quarter for most of the last dozen years under a pre-set trading plan.

And now Steve Ballmer is the largest shareholder:

With his latest sales this week, Gates was finally eclipsed as Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder by the company’s other former CEO, Steve Ballmer, who retired in February, but has held on to his stock.

According to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, Gates now owns just over 330 million Microsoft shares after the sales this week. Ballmer owns just over 333 million, according to Thomson Reuters data.

If this trend keeps up (and he’s been doing this for about 12 years, so this is a true trend), Gates will have zero Microsoft shares in about 4 years. Will be interesting to see if he allows that to happen.

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If you are in the market for a new MacBook Air, take a read.

Yesterday I posted a link to an article on the great works of software. My short list:

I would have placed Unix at #1, the original Mac OS at #2, Mac OS X at #3, and iOS at #4. But hey, that’s just me.

Yeah, totally missed the Apple I and Apple II, Apple DOS, and Woz’s version of BASIC. Not sure where they should go on the list, but Apple DOS and BASIC certainly belong.

The linked article is Woz reminiscing about his journey creating BASIC for the Apple I.

The key to games was BASIC. Bill Gates was unknown except in the electronics hobby world. Everyone in our club knew that he’d written BASIC for the Intel microprocessor. I sniffed the wind and knew that the key to making my computer good (popular) was to include a high-level language and that it had to be BASIC. Engineers programming in FORTRAN were not going to be what would start a home computer revolution.

The problem was that I had no knowledge of BASIC, just a bare memory that it had line numbers from that 3-day high-school experience. So I picked up a BASIC manual late one night at HP and started reading it and making notes about the commands of this language. Mind that I had never taken a course in compiler (or interpreter) writing in my life. But my friend Allen Baum had sent me xerox copies of pages of his texts at MIT about the subject so I could claim that I had an MIT education in it, ha ha.

A great article.