Swedishness is a site featuring the awesomeness that is Swedish Design. The best part: You can own some of it. Go. Visit. Smile. Buy. Rejoice.

Man, I love Scandinavia.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

I remember discovering We Feel Fine back in 2005, and it blew my mind. Very creative and inspiring project. I am posting it here today because it has just as much—if not more—value today than it did 5 years ago. And really, to some people this site may be old hat, but it’s still important enough to give a shout-out to. You never know who might discover it today and become inspired to build the next great project tomorrow.

It’s funny how sometimes you have what appears to be an original thought or a new take on a subject, only to find out that someone else shares the same thoughts as you. Yesterday I ran across this clip of Talib Kweli on Def Poetry and felt like this was something straight out of my mind, of course written and performed with much more skill than I have. But it was striking to me how similar our thoughts were on the subject of religion. Finding this was a real treasure for me.

I have a new favorite typeface. Florian is the work of 110/design, which is based in Moscow. Beautiful legibility, large apertures, asymmetric wedge serifs, Opentype support. Fantastic. I can’t wait to buy it.

A perfect gift for my friends. Lei Xue, have you been reading my diary?

Beautiful carved brick project by Pei-ze Chen & Rock Wang. According to Yii Design,

“Brick is one of the symbols of Taiwanese culture and was influenced by the Dutch during their 17th-century colonization of the country. The organic form of the tray is created by carving out of a block of this industrial building material by hand. The vases, plates and bowls are also made of brick but by using an industrial technique.” Magnificent!

Via designboom. Images by Yii Design.

Jack Alexander is a new graphic design studio based in Manchester, UK. I love the stunning, elegant and sophisticated work that they produce. Their work can be listed as Public Exhibit A on the importance of typography. Below are some beautiful examples of their work for Enclosure.

Images by Jack Alexander Studio