I was driving home last night when I heard the story on NPR about how New York’s Museum of Modern Art had “acquired” the @ symbol into its Department of Architecture and Design collection. Besides being a clever little PR stunt—yes, I know that wasn’t really the objective, but it did generate some nice press for MoMA—it was an interesting reminder how the mundane can be catapulted to ubiquity by what must have seemed at the time a fairly insignificant decision.

According to MoMA, some linguists believe the @ symbol dates back to the sixth or seventh century, when it began life as a ligature fusing the Latin preposition ad, or “at,” into a unique pen stroke. It later served to represent a unit of measure in 16th-century Venetian trade, and first appeared in its initial modern commercial guise on the keyboard of the American Underwood typewriter in 1885. It has variously been defined as an abbreviation for the word “at” and the phrase “at the rate of.”

American engineer Ray Tomlinson rescued the symbol from the minor leagues in 1971 when he appropriated it for use in the first e-mail. As Senior Curator Paola Antonelli describes it in her explanation of the acquisition, “… Tomlinson had rediscovered and appropriated it, imbuing it with new meaning and elevating it to defining symbol of the computer age. He chose the @ for his first e-mail because of its strong locative sense—an individual, identified by a unsername, is @this institution/computer/server, and also because… it was already there, on the keyboard, and nobody ever used it.”

So take heart, <, ^ and >. Who knows? Maybe someday someone will anoint you as the symbol of technological innovation or a sign of the next zeitgeist.

Go to ad agency BooneOakley’s web site and you’ll end up on YouTube. In fact their entire site is a series of YouTube videos, accessible through links embedded in every video.

I can’t begin to tell you how brilliant this is. It’s innovative and engaging in ways that most agency sites aren’t. It does a great job of reflecting the personality and culture of BooneOakley and its work. And it’s hilarious. After watching a few of these videos, you really want to work with these guys.

(Full disclosure: partner Dave Oakley was a neighbor of mine when I lived in Charlotte for several years. I have had beers in the man’s kitchen. I’ve played ping pong in his garage. And I’ve trick-or-treated with his lovely wife Claire and their two kids. It’s still brilliant work.)

Why aren’t more web sites this creative? I don’t mean ad agency or graphic design firm sites, I mean the rest of us. Why can’t a law firm or accountant or nonprofit or neighborhood liquor store tell its story in such a fun, engaging fashion?

The short answer: They can. If an organization has the guts to do it.

I love great design, and an integral element is great art. I strongly recommend cultivating an eye and appreciation for visually striking illustration and photography. Look beyond the obvious and mundane. Break the “grip and grin” mentality that drags down so many newsletters. The stock shots that make your brochures deadly dull. The generic website photos that fail to distinguish you from anyone else. Shake it up.

In addition to the innumerable writing, marketing, business and news sites I prowl every day, I make sure I get a healthy dose of art in my browsing diet. It truly inspires. In my next life I’m coming back as an illustrator (if I can just overcome that “inability to draw worth a damn” thing).

One of my favorite sites toward that end is Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog. Spend some time there and you’ll see some amazing artists at work in a variety of media. If your own creativity and brainstorming require outside stimuli (and whose doesn’t), this will seem like plugging into a solar flare. Don’t forget your shades.

In the meantime, here’s a little taste from the site courtesy of Chris Ware.

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

photo by ir0ko

All organizations rely on graphic design to get out their message and stand apart from the crowd, whether they realize it or not. Unfortunately, most small nonprofits and businesses lack the resources to have a professional designer on staff, or even to hire an outside firm. And design acumen isn’t part of the skill set among most managers.

That’s why Christine Hershey and Andy Goodman created Design Eye-Q, an excellent tool that educates non-designers on the basics of graphic design and provides 10 questions to ask when evaluating professionally designed communication materials. Subjects covered include use of color, typography, what a reader’s eye likes (and doesn’t), etc.

Check out the one-hour Design Eye-Q webinar here; it’s well worth the time.

photo by karen horton

Here are some excellent tips from Before and After magazine for the non-designer forced to play graphic designer due to a lack of budget or personnel. It’s a short post, but in a nutshell:

• Type, image and space are the three basic elements of design.
• Before you design anything, know what you’re trying to communicate.
• All design elements have a purpose and should related to one another.
• Consistency strengthens brand.
• Many designers don’t know their typography.
• Overuse of decorative type, gimmicky embellishments and an overall “sameness” to the page are sure signs of an amateur.

There’s more, so be sure to check it out. Before & After is a great resource for practical design tips, tutorials and templates that can help you learn to fake being a designer when your options are limited. You can subscribe either to the print or PDF edition, or even purchase individual articles.

I recently tweaked a newsletter template I got from B&A to produce my nonprofit’s annual report. Other than the photography and reprographic costs, my budget going this route was minimal since I wrote and produced it. In today’s tight times, this kind of resource is essential.