Written and directed by Chris Milk, The Wilderness Downtown is an stunning interactive collaboration between Google Maps, Chrome, HTML 5 and Arcade Fire. It’s the best example of a viral campaign I’ve ever seen. So, so stinking gorgeous. Crank up your speakers and prepare to be wowed as the internet does things you’ve never seen before.

Perfect way to start the week, which also coincidentally marks my 2yr freelance anniversary too.

See similar write-ups at Design Work Life, It’s Nice That, and ML4U.

Huge, huge crush on design blog, 1983. I’ve never seen a blog like it. It’s also anonymous and has no RSS, which I find intriguing. Anybody know the kids behind this mysterious endeavor?

Everyone loves a good thunderstorm, and we’ve had several goodies in Chicago lately. Here’s a some footage of a recent boomer.

• Best packaging I’ve seen in ages via Designworklife.

• Ebay Models. So bad it’s good again! Some of these are just baffling and totally hysterical.

• A useful tutorial on upgrading to the new fancy Wordpress 3.0 will save you some headaches.

• Catalog Living, a hilarious tumblr narrated by the fictional couple Gary and Elaine pokes fun at Pottery Barn style catalogs. (Thanks for that link, Dad!)

So I re-found this dreamy set of vintage Olivetti graphic design (so many new images!), on Veerle Pieters’ a blog which is worth a post on its own. Stunning content, but the site is meticulously detailed and completely coded by hand, her hand. Female developers with such extensive skill with both front & back-end development are few and far between. Veerle is a real inspiration.

Alex Fuller’s conceptual take on social media, Onamountaintop might be one of the smartest projects I’ve seen recently. He explains it better than I could:

“I do not enjoy most social media platforms. They seem more like popularity contests than anything else. I only say that because I have less than 200 friends on Faceplace. That’s why I developed onamountaintop.com with developer, Noah Bernsohn. At it’s most basic form, I believe social media is a dialogue. Onamountaintop.com allows users to say whatever it is they want to say with no accounts, no friends and no poking. Once the user’s entry fades to white, their words are gone forever. Just as one’s voice echoes into the valley from a mountain top. Pure poetry.”

Very elegant design, delightfully anonymous, and inspiring coding too. Nice work guys.

Via French Exit & Alex Fuller.

Simply gorgeous styling, product photography & website from furniture-maker Matthew Hilton. I want the entire collection, but that goes without saying.