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| Welcome to the first 2007 issue of the Another Limited Rebellion’s Designletter. This issue marks the premier of our redesign, which for the first time features html formatting and graphics. We’ve also shortened the length, with the goal of sending more (easily digestible) issues throughout the year. Please let us know what you think of this new direction and bear with us as we work out the kinks. As always we welcome your comments and suggestions on the content as well. Don’t forget to visit the ALR blog for more updates and items of interest on a near daily basis. Thanks for reading!
-Noah Scalin, ALR founder [01] ALR news  ALR recently completed work on a redesign of The Green Glass Company logo which will be implemented soon. Green Glass creates elegant, functional glassware out of repurposed bottles with minimal processing in their Wisconsin facility. They sell their wares in stores across the country and also via their website http://www.greenglass.org [02] ideas + action  Mouths of the world, unite! The Mouth Revolution has begun on a website dedicated to the organic foods movement and features a movie starring fed-up radical mouths in black berets leading a revolution against trans fats, GMOs, pesticides and artificial ingredients. The film is from our friends at Free Range Studios, which created two of the most popular Internet films of all time, The Meatrix and Store Wars. Join the revolution by getting informed about organic foods, supporting your local whole foods store and farmers market, and uploading an image of your own mouth. (Submit before April 1, and you may even win a Free Revolutionary T-shirt). It’s at http://www.MouthRevolution.com.
[03] design [04] advertising [05] resource  Ever wondered about the relationship between language and politics? The State of the Union website gives viewers a visual context for understanding the connection between the two. How? It’s created a visual map of each of the 200-plus State of the Union addresses given since 1790 using significant words from the text to produce a graphic snapshot of the country at the time. The site also gives each speech a Flesch-Kincaid score suggesting the U.S. school grade level for which the text is comprehensible. In comparing Georges at opposite ends of the presidential spectrum, Washington’s January 1790 speech of 1,985 words earned a Flesch-Kincaid score of 22.4. Bush’s January 2007 speech of 5,595 words scored a 9.9. Go see it at http://www.stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/index.shtml.
[06] technology  In this age, it’s so easy to use technology to harm, but the 59 Smartest Orgs page highlights nonprofits using it to do some serious good. To compile the list, Squidoo, NetSquared and GetActive ranked nonprofits on how intelligently they used the web. In their words, “These aren't just orgs that throw up a video or a forum or a MySpace page and stop … they are busy aligning their missions and models and stories to support the new marketing online.” On their list: #8 Doctors Without Borders for using videos and blogs to recruit volunteers and interns and #55 New Orleans Voices for Peace for providing hurricane-ravaged communities with web access. It’s at http://www.squidoo.com/org20.[07] lexicon [08] nosh  MIT students want to put your name into space. To earn the money to launch a research satellite, they came up with the idea of offering people and corporations a chance to put ads on the satellite via the site http://YourNameIntoSpace.org. "We needed more funding and realized that we're sending up this satellite into orbit with all this space on board used for nothing – so why not sell it to people who want to express a message?" said Thaddeus R.F. Fulford-Jones, a doctoral candidate at MIT. “It allows them to become part of the mission." Enterprising? Sure. Cool in the abstract? You bet. But it also brings to mind Robert Fulghum’s famous misplaced-priorities quote, "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." |
written by Jo Lord edited by Noah Scalin about designletter Designletter is a semi-regular update on the activities at Another Limited Rebellion, the world of socially conscious design, and beyond. Another Limited Rebellion is a socially conscious design firm committed to helping businesses and organizations bring positive changes to their communities in a sustainable manner. Noah is a lifelong activist whose first protest marches were spent in a stroller and then on roller skates. In addition to starting Another Limited Rebellion, Noah created the community supported agriculture group Sprout and teaches a course on socially conscious design called Design Rebels at Virginia Commonwealth University. Jo is a socially conscious writer who eats vegetarian, drives a 40-mile-a-gallon car and recycles like mad. When she isn’t fretting about global warming, nuclear proliferation, the nursing shortage, trans fats and the correct way to hang toilet paper, she volunteers for cool organizations and anxiously awaits November 2008. Sign-up or read back issues here. |
“There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew,” said Canadian writer and professor Marshall McLuhan back in 1964, In other words, no free rides. That applies to those of us in graphic design, too. 
The Anti-Advertising Agency doesn’t think our cities have a graffiti problem. They think our cities have an advertising problem. The group calls advertising the vandalism of the Fortune 500 and wonders aloud why graffiti is a crime and advertising isn’t. Recently, they teamed with Graffiti Research Lab for a guerilla-marketing project called 