Modern Brochure Design

Upload multiple photos to your post and Rewrite will wrap them up in a nice gallery with scroll navigations. For the best viewing effect, use images of the same height. However, if you don’t, the gallery will resize automagically to fit your images!

With WordPress 3.3′s new drag and drop image uploading, it’s even easier to add your images and get back to writing!

January 10 / 2012
Author Mike McAlister
Category Design, Packaging
Comments 2 Comments
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A Cask of Fine Wine

A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.

And it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size.

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December 12 / 2011
Author Mike McAlister
Category Literature
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Late 2011 iMac Review

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.

LED-backlit display. Video, photos, and FaceTimes calls look stunning.

The Details
It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.

How It Performed
It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements.

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October 06 / 2011
Author Mike McAlister
Category Packaging, Reviews
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Information Design Video

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster.

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October 05 / 2011
Author Mike McAlister
Category Design, Videos
Comments No Comments

Rebranding the British Pub

Originally the term “stationery” referred to all products sold by a stationer, whose name indicates that his book shop was on a fixed spot, usually near a university, and permanent, while medieval trading was mainly peddlers (including chapmen, who sold books) and others (such as farmers and craftsmen) at non-permanent markets such as fairs. It was a special term used between the 13th and 15th centuries in the manuscript culture. The Stationers’ Company formerly held a monopoly over the publishing industry in England and was responsible for copyright regulations.

In its modern sense of (often personalized) writing materials, stationery has been an important part of good social etiquette, particularly since the Victorian era.

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August 18 / 2011
Author Mike McAlister
Category Design, Packaging
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Houston, We Have Liftoff

These flights have been regarded as tests of the Zond complex involving the firing of the fourth stage of the UR-500 rocket to put the L1 spacecraft into an elliptical trajectory to test high speed re-entry. Considerable disagreements exist as to what happened to these flights. Did they fail, and if so, why?

The picture above shows what these space vehicles would have looked like in earth orbit.

August 18 / 2011
Author Mike McAlister
Category Literature
Comments 4 Comments

Lincoln’s Temperance Address

The list of its friends is daily swelled by the additions of fifties, of hundreds, and of thousands. The cause itself seems suddenly transformed from a cold abstract theory, to a living, breathing, active, and powerful chieftain, going forth “conquering and to conquer.”

For this new and splendid success, we heartily rejoice. That that success is so much greater now than heretofore, is doubtless owing to rational causes; and if we would have it continue, we shall do well to inquire what those causes are.

The warfare heretofore waged against the demon Intemperance, has, somehow or other, been erroneous. Either the champions engaged, or the tactics they adopted have not been the most proper. These champions for the most part have been Preachers, Lawyers, and hired agents.

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August 16 / 2011
Author Mike McAlister
Category Literature
Comments 2 Comments

Electroshock Animated Short

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August 15 / 2011
Author Mike McAlister
Category Design, Videos
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Organic Coffee Packaging

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with.

It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with.

It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

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August 14 / 2011
Author Mike McAlister
Category Packaging, Reviews
Comments No Comments

Parallelostory on Vimeo

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August 13 / 2011
Author Mike McAlister
Category Videos
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