After countless edits, I give you my — loosely ranked in order of preference, liable to change at any second — top 20 albums of 2011:

1. Destroyer – Kaputt
2. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
3. Childish Gambino – Camp
4. Beirut – The Rip Tide
5. Tune Yards – WHOKILL
6. Braids – Native Speaker
7. Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for My Halo
8. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
9. Toro y Moi – Underneath the Pine
10. Little Dragon – Ritual Union
11. Timber Timbre – Creep On Creepin’ On
12. Feist – Metals
13. Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes
14. Noah Gundersen – Family EP
15. Bon Iver - Bon Iver
16. Panda Bear – Tomboy
17. Real Estate – Days
18. Cave Singers – No Witch
19. Atlas Sound – Parallax
20. YACHT – Shangi-La

Bonus! A few choice tracks from said albums, some of them with excellent videos:

Toronto art school OCAD University has an innovative new visual identity, courtesy of Bruce Mau Design. The simple black and white logo includes a “window” that will house variable content, including student artwork that is selected each year. Take a look here.

MIT Media Lab came up with an equally impressive dynamic identity earlier this year. The algorithmically generated logo has 40,000 (!) unique permutations based off a few simple shapes and colours. I’ve never seen anything like this before and was instantly impressed.

Both techniques are wonderfully clever ways to keep a logo fresh and lively. It’s also great to see dynamic design like this applied to traditionally static content. Welcome to the 21st century, logo design. It’s nice to have you here.

(via Torontoist and FastCompany)

I love my city and I’m quickly developing a love of typography. Ork Posters makes wonderful typographic renditions of cities and their neighbourhoods, including Toronto (pictured above).

Check them out here.

Are you intrigued yet? Click it.

I recently finished reading both Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig and The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac (which is far superior to On the Road, by the way).

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance completely blew my mind. Without giving too much away, it’s a great travel story (including some time in the mountains) with a crash course in philosophy expertly woven in. A lot of it is philosophy of science, and although it was written in 1974, the reflections on technology’s place in society are still very relevant.

The book’s central philosophical dilemma is the conflict between the “Classical” and “Romantic” (think logic vs. emotion, science vs. art) schools of thought. Like the narrator, I’ve wondered why the two can’t be reconciled, as I can’t easily place myself in one category or the other. One of the reasons I love web dev and design is that it allows me to be both logical and creative. And this is just one of many things I personally identified with.

I had a similar experience with Dharma Bums, and the more Kerouac I read, the more I dig his worldview. Again, the book seeks reconciliation between disparate lifestyles, but this time it’s Beat culture and Buddhism. Most of the Buddhism was new to me, but the characters are approaching it from their western background, so it’s quite accessible. Like Zen and much of Kerouac’s other works, there’s lots of traveling, and my favourite parts of Dharma Bums are Ray’s journeys into the mountains and the insights he has there.

Which brings me to what got me thinking about writing this in the first place. All this reading about climbing mountains sort of makes me want to go do it myself. Add it to my to do list…

(photo: tiny me and mountains just waiting to be climbed, somewhere in BC, west coast roadie in summer 2009)

Full details via Nature.

I’ve been enamoured with jazz label Blue Note’s album artwork for quite some time now, so I decided to bring the Blue Note motif into my latest site design [ed. this was posted on the previous version of my site, pictured above]. I love the simple but bright colour schemes and clean geometric elements.

A great collection of Blue Note cover art can be found at Birka Jazz.

Many thanks to The Font Feed for helping track down some of Blue Note’s favourite fonts.