Water is probably one of the most precious resources and vital for everyone’s everyday life. Despite this obvious fact, people use large amounts of water: drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, and almost every other physical product.

One of the most important research papers in this field is Chapagain, A.K. and Hoekstra, A.Y. (2004), »Water footprints of nations«, Value of Water Research Report Series No. 16, UNESCO-IHE, Delft, the Netherlands. Designer Timm Kekeritz created a set of infographics, visualizing parts of their research data, to make the issue of virtual water and the water footprint perceptible.

The water footprint of a person, company or nation is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the commodities, goods and services consumed by the person, company or nation.

The idea of the water footprint is quite similar to the ecological footprint, but focussing on the use of water.

To learn more visit the Web site

Tired of selling your products on someone else’s platform and your visitors leaving your site? Have you been toying with the idea of adding a shop to your website but then never got around to do it as the endeavour seems too daunting? Yup? Same here.

Well, I have come across a fantastic new service called Vendr which lets you add a “store” button to your blog or website, and your store will simply pop-up over your content — no more sending your customers elsewhere to make a purchase. Vendr functions as a part of your existing site. An elegant overlay will dim the background and light up the store to allow for a compatible look with your existing site design.

With Vendr you can sell hard goods and digital products. You can sell pictures, designs or music. You can even define different digital downloads for different product options. e.g. Hi Res, Low Res.

If you need to track inventory you can with Vendr’s simple and straight forward inventory management options. They can also alert you when you are getting low on certain products.

They really thought of everything as you can also create coupons for store wide, category or specific product use. Set expiration dates or limit number of uses. Its your call.

Vendr is integrated with Paypal and Google Checkout the two most widely used payment platforms for accepting credit cards and online payment for stores and ecommerce platforms.

Ready to try it out?
Vendr is currently in private beta. Use “BVF8KHC4QN” and it will allow you to sign up to any of the packages offered online during the closed beta.

Creative agency Jess3 has developed a Firefox plugin that aims to black out all mentions of BP (British Petroleum) across the web. As one popular tweet espouses, “Want BP to [blank] up your browser like they’ve [blank] up the Gulf? Install the Oil Spill Firefox plugin from @jess3.”

Also more at Jess3 Blog.

Some of the coolest new surfboards aren’t being made in Hawaii or even California, they’re being built in London, yes, good ol’ cold and foggy London. Swami’s Surf Co. is set to become the Saville Row tailor of Surfing with their extremely limited bespoke surfboards crafted by some of the greatest shapers who will build the boards (from $1,200) to your specifications. They’ve also teamed up with luxury boardshort outfitter, Orlebar Brown, on a limited edition boardshort collection.

If anyone is going to properly show off the true potential of next generation media consumption, its going to be none other than Conde Nast’s technology and culture mag, Wired. Wired is launching with the June issue ($5) which is chock full of multimedia-rich content and articles on the making Toy Story 3, a behind the scenes session with Trent Reznor, and more. Download app here.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to introduce to you a fine selection of work from Studio 2br (or simply 2br) an independent design consultancy working with clients in the UK, Europe and the US. They provide large organisations with clear thinking, plain speaking and graphic design craft.

I hope you enjoy this post and have a great weekend. Thank you once again to Dave @2br for helping me end this week on such a high note.

Deutsche Bank agreed that it’s new brand and visual identity guidelines should exist physically as well as digitally. Having developed the new system over 12+ months, Studio 2br designed the new Deutsche Bank Brand Portal and produced an 80-page A3 guidelines book.

Printed in 8-colours on Fenner Paper Marazion 90gsm, with a silkscreened plastic wallet to protect it, the book is intended to set the bar and act as constant inspiration for Deutsche’s creative agencies.

“The Nation Magazine Cover Archive (NMCA) is a non-commercial ‘hobbysite’ devoted to helping keep inspirational magazine design alive. These are strange days for editorial designers with homogenisation and closure of many well known (and loved) titles and independent publishers emerging to fill the gaps. Just don’t forget to vote with your feet! Support quality magazines. Don’t let them die.” — The Management