It’s that time of year again. There’s something about the festive season that says self promotion here at ico.

Last year we designed a website that automatically turned all of the tweets with the hashtag ‘xmas’ into typographic snowflakes, and displayed them as falling digital snow. From this we could also extract individual tweets which enabled us to send unique Christmas cards to friends and clients.

The next logical step was to create a physical document of these global digital communications. With this in mind, we recorded all the Twitter messages sent on 25th December 2010. We then took the unusual route of using Processing to layout all 6651 tweets and tweetflake illustrations across the cloth bound tome’s pages. Arranged in chronological order, the book becomes a work of reference. Look closer and each tweet holds its own personal sentiment. Whether serious, touching, funny, ridiculous, or just plain rude, together the messages paint an honest picture of modern-day views and values associated with the festive season.

Are you one of the 6651? find out here.

Recipients who scan The Chase QR code are also invited to follow them and take part in their Twitter QRistmas Quiz, with the chance to take home one of a number of gifts featured on the wrapping paper.

“All Hail The King” designed by b-positive, printed by tind.

Based in Athens, Greece “Tind” (AKA Manolis Aggelakis and family) has been in touch with TDOD regarding his silk screen printing work.

tind stands for “This Is Not Designed”, we embrace the motto “everything is going according to NO plan” and we stand under no manifesto. We strongly believe that creativity and technicality go hand in hand in our business so we enjoy both designing and producing projects with main emphasis on right design instead of good design. We use silkscreen and program coding as our main form of expression thought we always search and intergrate new forms of technology in our armory, so we can push projects further one step at the time. We are thinkers, solvers and the expediters of your dreams.

“Die Rakete”

“Murphy’s Law”

Along with working independently and collaboratively, tind has run a workshop about Silkscreen and Typography (some work featured below).

FAN – C by Sophia

T by Τζιανάκης

Take a look at more of tind’s work here and here. Also here is a previous interview he kindly sent along as well. Thanks tind – TDOD.

No it’s not …it’s a pair of gelding irons boys….oouch

A look inside the sketchbook of Paula Scher.

“The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, reliably repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that read: people were here.

At the same time, like any photograph, satellite imagery is also immediately an image of the past. That is, to look at satellite imagery is to look not only down upon ourselves but back in time, even if only by a matter of hours or days. In recording the moment at which things as bizarre as water parks and racetracks covered the earth, the photograph also implies that moment’s own passing, encoding each tiny structure with vulnerability and pre-emptive nostagia. My desire to collect these pieces stems not only from the fascination of any collector but from a wish to save these low-resolution, sporadically-updated pixels–these strange pictures of ourselves–from time and the ephemerality of the internet.”

97 Cooling Towers

104 airplanes

120 stadiums

77 waste and salt ponds

125 swimming pools

Every basketball court in manhattan

Click here to see more & view images bigger.

Landmarques is the first print series from Preston design studio Design By House who are based in The Watermark Building.

Having become interested in the stories behind some of the world’s great landmarks Design by House began to explore ways of expressing their iconic nature without succumbing to the silhouette. The results of this process lead to the ‘Landmarque’ print series; using layers of shapes and colour to recreate the familiar forms and invoke a sense of location.

The prints are being sold by several stockists in the UK including Nest, Utility, Scarlet & Jones, Design Supremo and Juno. International orders have also been placed with Mammoth Collection in Canada, Urbanities and Form Function style in Australia.

You can see the whole series here.