I don't know anything about wine, but I like the looks of Vinport's limited-edition Star Trek wine featuring label art by Juan Ortiz. The labels represent classic ST episodes: "The City on the Edge of Forever," "Mirror Mirror," and "The Trouble with Tribbles." Star Trek wine (via Laughing Squid)

Here's wallpaper that looks like a collage of classic Penguin covers, from Osborne and Little. Lots of retailers carry it -- the John Lewis site lists it at £65 for a 10m x 52cm roll.

The PENGUIN LIBRARY wallpaper is a collage of front covers of those iconic early paperbacks from this famous publishing house and includes Ariel, the very first Penguin paperback published in 1935. The book covers were chosen for their diversity of colour and to illustrate the breadth of Penguin’s publishing backlist. Great care was taken in the design to truly represent the original paperbacks in all their, sometimes well-read and a little worn, glory. The resulting PENGUIN LIBRARY wallpaper is a glorious colourful ‘conversational piece’ which we hope will be received with as much affection as the books themselves.

Press Release - Penguin Library wallpaper (via Bookshelf)

The Long Forgotten blog hits another one out of the park (Disneyland park, that is), with a thought-provoking post on the history of the color scheme for the Haunted Mansion, and the way that color is used to set and maintain the mood:

“For Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, we wanted to create an imposing Southern-style house that would look old, but not in ruins. So we painted it a cool off-white with dark, cold blue-gray accents in shadowed areas such as the porch ceilings and wrought-iron details. To accentuate the eerie, deserted feeling, I had the underside of exterior details painted the same dark color, creating exaggerated, unnaturally deep cast shadows. Since we associate dark shadows with things hidden, or half hidden, the shadow treatment enhanced the structure’s otherworldliness. The park maintenance painters like the haunted effect. I even received calls from guests who wanted to know the brand and swatch number of the paints so that they could use them on their own homes.” . —John Hench, Designing Disney (NY: Disney Editions, 2003) 116.

These painting tricks are an example of signals sent from the Imagineers that are received unaware. It's extremely unlikely that guests consciously notice the artificial shadowing, but very likely that it affects them psychologically, be it ever so slightly. It's an interesting sort of interaction between artist and audience: An expression fully intentional, very carefully thought out, and yet by design much too subtle for the conscious mind to engage. I don't know. Sounds illegal to me.

What Hench does not mention is that a radically different color scheme for the Mansion exterior was being contemplated practically from the moment it was first built. You never hear about it, and were it not for the fact that a mysterious and unique document from those days survived and surfaced, it truly would be long forgotten.

Stroll Around the Grounds Until You Feel at Home, Part One

Over at Tenth Letter of the Alphabet, a fascinating history of the Star Wars logo. Above left, a decal created during the film's pre-production, to be used on film cans and other early materials. "This was how we first pictured Han Solo," production designer and artist Ralph McQuarrie explained in The Star Wars Scrapbook: The Essential Collection. "It could be a sort of Luke character, but I think it’s more like Han. Anyway, George decided that Han Solo should be a more relaxed character, and his costume was changed. But this decal was designed before the change.” Above right, the early corporate letterhead after "The" was dropped. The lettering, based on the Precis font, was by concept artist and SFX tech Joe Johnston. "Anatomy of a Logo: Star Wars"

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Here's a mystery Internet image depicting a vehicle that has been decorated in such a fashion as to inspire equal amounts of fear, awe and admiration. I am delighted.

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Update: Oh, my dear sweet Zoroaster, it's for sale. From the comments, Jana Marie Miller writes,

It is the 1986 Ford WOW Van. Sign in other photo says:

The WOW Bus
25 Thousand Pieces $640 Worth of Glue
2000 added pounds - two years and
600 hours to do!
1986 Ford School Bus GOOP Glue - Buy it at Home Depot
Pieces came from garage sales - the 
Public-dumpsters - garbage cans Why? cause i am a wacko - Thats 
why in Guinness book - insured for $3.5 
million dollars For sale - $130 million

http://www.seriouswheels.com/cars/top-1986-Ford-WOW-Bus.htm

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(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

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If you've been finding it hard to get your head around all the scandals, awfulness and pure shitshowery of Toronto mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford, look no futher: Hilary Sargent has composed a handy reference in infographic form.

The Library Lounge at the B2 Boutique Hotel Zürich is one of those amazing temple-of-books rooms that always make me catch my breath. If I had a teleporter, this is where I'd go every time I felt stressed out. (Except for the wallpaper with the pattern that looks like JPEG artifacts -- that'd have to go).

Library Lounge – B2 Boutique Hotel Zurich (via Attack of the Bonniegrrl)

Screenshots of Despair: a Tumblr that features shots of computers interacting with humans in ways that seem calculated to make them sad and angry. As Bruce Sterling notes, "Somebody could teach a pretty good interaction-design course with this handy resource. Maybe somebody already is."

Screenshots of Despair (via Beyond the Beyond)

The new International Symbol of Accessibility replaces the old, static "disabled" icon, which depicted a rather static, object-like disabled person in a wheelchair -- the new ISA shows a person zooming dynamically in a wheelchair instead. It's been officially adopted in NYC:

After several years of petitioning for change, designers from Gordon College in Massachusetts have come up with an alternative to the traditional stick figure sitting back in a wheelchair.

Their new character is dynamic, leaning forward with its arms at the ready.

"It's such a forward-moving thing," Victor Calise, commissioner of the New York mayor's Office for People With Disabilities, told The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Calise, who himself was paralyzed in a cycling accident at the age of 22, plans to begin putting the new logo in place all over New York City this summer.

Revamped disability icons coming to New York City (Thanks, Matthew!)

The Association for Computing Machinery's annual SIGGRAPH conference is where you will find many of the most incredible, edgiest developments in computer graphics research. Above is the video trailer for this year's "Technical Papers" program. SIGGRAPH 2013 takes place July 21-25 in Anaheim, California.