My Dad, the Facebook Addict

Laughing Squid: Filmmaker Dylan LeVine hilariously documented his birthday candle-phobic father Vincent‘s obsession with Facebook and in particular, his overwhelming need to build an arsenal of memes, just in case. The elder LeVine shared how he researched and alphabetized every meme to ensure a full state of readiness should an argument ensue, until it became all he could think about. His family expressed repeated concern about the amount of time Vincent was spending online, but it was only after he was put on a three-day Facebook ban that he realized how much time and energy he was wasting in front of the computer.

See also: What is Facebook doing to our politics?

Facebook celebrates Star Trek’s 50th anniversary

…with a lovely cardboard Enterprise model and some custom ‘reaction’ emoticons.
(I’m not sure about the logic behind using the Vulcan salute for ‘love’ or Spock for ‘wow’.)

Lindsey Shepard: Our internal design team built the USS Enterprise image by cutting and piecing together paper by hand. Then they photographed it using a high quality camera so that it could appear in our greeting.

(via The Verge)

See also

• USS Enterprise goes back on display at the Smithsonian after a faithful restoration — The studio model of the Star Trek starship Enterprise is now on exhibit in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall.
• Faceboook design — In his time working for Facebook (2008–2014), Ben Barry did a lot of really nice design work for the company. Luckily for us, he has posted it on his website.
• Gorgeous wooden USS Enterprise model — This 36 inch wooden model of the old school Starship Enterprise is made of maple, black walnut, padauk, osage orange, ebony, and yellow heart.

What is Facebook doing to our politics?

Essential reading. This is probably the future of news, for the Right at least: Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine

Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way.

[Facebook’s] algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed. These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some of these pages have millions of followers; many have hundreds of thousands.

Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people.

Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine, by John Herrman, New York Times.

Facebook’s Little Red Book

In his time working for Facebook (2008–2014), Ben Barry did a lot of really nice design work for the company. Luckily for us, he has posted it on his website. Below I’ve selected just some of my favourite examples.

“As the company of Facebook grew, we faced a lot of challenges. One of them was explaining our company’s mission, history, and culture to new employees. We wanted to try to package a lot of those stories and ideas in one place to give to all employees.”

The Next Web: Here’s our first peek inside the little red book Facebook gives to employees

Barry and Everett Katigbak co-founded Facebook’s Analog Research Lab , a print studio that is near Facebook’s original Menlo Park building. In his time at Facebook, Barry was famous for his focus on the company’s brand, even to the point that he was dubbed the company’s “propaganda minister” internally.

Facebook Visual Identity

This page features a wealth of design concepts, including this revision to the famous wordmark which Facebook approved but have not (yet) implemented.

“Facebook as a product and organization evolves very fast, and it was a challenge trying to design a system that was flexible across many mediums and contexts. Separate from the visual design work, there was the incredible task of creating awareness, gaining support, and ultimately creating a cross-functional team to approve and implement these changes.”

Facebook Analog Research Laboratory

The Facebook Analog Research Laboratory is a printing studio and workshop. Its primary mission is to produce work that reinforces the values of Facebook.

Facebook Posters & Ephemera

Finally, there are these posters and other miscellaneous designs produced by Barry, usually for internal hackathons.

Lovely, lovely work, all of it.

See also: A Facebook board game!

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A Facebook board game devised by design student Pat C. Klein.

Pat says:

As a young person living in the digital age, I feel as though the internet is affecting our ability to communicate with one another.

Research done by Stanford University has indicated that social networking sites like Facebook can increase loneliness, depression and insecurity.

Facebook: The Board Game was created as a response to this. The idea is that instead of engaging with Facebook on your computer or phone, you can arrange to meet up with friends, have a few drinks and play in real life.