How many of our readers are Super Bowl fans? Honestly, I’m not. I enjoy hockey and baseball much more than I will ever enjoy football. Nonetheless, I found this article in the New York Times about the art of the Super Bowl to be very interesting.

John Branch details the evolution of the Super Bowl logo and how it has reflected cultural changes as well as changes in the sport and competition itself. The one thing about the Super Bowl I have enjoyed since I was small (other than the Super Bowl parties we went to at Beamerz laser tag) was the funny commercials and the logo artwork — especially when they became animated and with noisy sound effects.

But the 43 Super Bowl logos illustrate more than an annual championship. They draw a line through the league’s growth, the trends of graphic design, even the vagaries of one nation’s popular culture.

“Sports are such a mirror for the American psyche,” said Todd Radom, who designed the logo for Super Bowl XXXVIII.

And the Super Bowl logos may represent the closest things we have to a series of self-portraits.

Or maybe they are just logos.

CommentsArticles baseball, football, graphic design, hockey, logo, new york times, super bowl

Tech-On has photos of, and the New York Times discusses, the latest OLED screen Samsung demoed at FPDI. What makes this screen so special? The fact that it’s 40 inches. 40. FREAKING. INCHES. The largest demoed to date has been 31 inches. This is ridiculous progress. Standing in at only 8.9 milimeters thick, this screen could become a very nice harbinger of things to come for home theater. With screen sizes increasing at this pace, prices for producing these screens falling, my home theater set up is going to become a lot more interesting. The drawback to these panels? They won’t be coming until 2010 at the earliest, and even then will still probably cost upwards of $5000. A man can dream…

Other specs on the set include a 1 million to 1 constrast ratio (hugely important), full 1080p, a color gamut of 107% NTSC and a luminance of 200cd/m² . If I actually knew what any of that meant, it would be impressive. All in all, it’s all pretty impressive stuff.

CommentsArticles FPDI, new york times, nyt, oled, samsung