As reported by Engadget, it appears that the Sony e-reader and Amazon’s Kindle are both essentially the same product.

The Kindle, if the FCC photo is to be believed, is ugly as hell. It looks like something out of NASA in the 1980s.

The Sony reader is a bit better, but as you can see in this photo by Rick Wilking from Reuters, it still comes off as a super-sized Palm Pilot. Has no one been paying attention to Apple’s success?

Over at Design Observer, founding contributor and designer of some note, Jessica Helfand has written a succinct piece on some of the factors at play when a designer chooses type.

“About a year ago, I participated in a student portfolio review involving nearly a dozen American schools, many (most?) exhibiting the classic projects that characterize all undergraduate design programs – the color studies, the poster problems, the typographic exercises – all of which teach the student about that most essential design conceit: letterforms, and how to use them.

And here, I quickly discovered that something had gone horribly wrong. One after another, bright-faced young hopefuls displayed the products of their long hours in the studio. Book after book spilled forth with content ranging from how to cook a frittata to how to understand Freud. There were personal books, commercial books, literary and poetic books, serious and silly books, childrens books, how-to books, and everything in between.

And there they were – virtually all of them – typeset in Futura.”

I recommend it for designers and non-designers alike. It’s well worth the few minutes it takes to read it. As someone who went to school for design, I sympathize with her perspective and agree with her sentiments.

For those unfamiliar, this is Futura.

By way of my friend Steve, a Washington Post story that says it just about as clearly and forcefully as anything:

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.

I’m a big fan of Halloween, and now that we own a house in a neighborhood full of kids, I can fully indulge in my love of the holiday. This year, our treats on offer were: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (full size), Snickers, Milky Ways, Nerds, Laffy Taffy, Bottle Caps, Runts, gummy body parts, and skull and spider rings. I like to think we make a good showing, particularly by allowing two selections. No need to be stingy.

My sister-in-law, who helped us hand out candy to all of the trick-or-treaters this year, made an interesting observation at the end of the night. Whenever someone sees Nerds, they will, seemingly without fail and not even necessarily with any overt emotion, say “Nerds.”