Maybe because it’s so fresh in our mind, but non-designer Michael Wolff‘s Dr. Evil impression sure does stick out as our favorite design memory of the year (Wolff photo courtesy of Jessica Perilla). Not this time, Mr. Glaser!

Here’s to many more non-banal moments in 2008. You can see our ten favorite 2007 stories here.

Have an extra-bubbly New Year’s Day for us.

Just when we thought it couldn’t get any better than the 2006 Nussbaum-Bierut battle royale over INside Innovation‘s spec-ish design (wait, are they still making that thing?), America’s Favorite Blogger Bruce Nussbaum gave us a year’s worth of entertainment.

In March he came forward with an eloquent love letter to the design industry, “DESIGNERS SUCK,” which earned him eternal admiration from design professionals everywhere. But that wasn’t enough for Nussbaum. He went on to win over the New York judicial system, violent lesbians everywhere, and all legitimate gang members currently operating on Eighth Avenue between Avenues C and D.

But as even as the King of Blubber himself acknowledges, he still can’t spell.

UnBeige is counting down our biggest stories of 2007, all day, right here.

Bless that Liz Danzico for live-blogging this blogging panel while we were talking about blogging.

The panel, moderated and concepted by Steve Heller, no stranger to blogs as editor of AIGA Voice, writer for a daily design column in PRINT online, writer for Design Observer and A Brief Message and countless others, was to talk about blogs–their journalism aspect, their memoir form, and other forms they might take.

The all-star panel are luminaries in the design blog world:

BusinessWeek has posted the winners of the 2007 IDEA Awards, the awards they co-sponsor with IDSA (who, by the way, are still looking for an executive director who can inhale strategic innovation). The winners are cut all different ways on the website, so you can see Responsible Style vs Great Enablers, and all the winners through the years. It’s an impressive list, according to Bruce “Menace II 8th Street” Nussbaum, who has dubbed this year’s awards “amazing.”

This year’s big winner was…The plane! The plane! The Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet won the most awards, including the coveted We Are Giving This Product Top Honors Simply Because It Was Designed By IDEO award. Also notable is the fact that IDEA has changed its name from Industrial Design Excellence Awards to International Design Excellence Awards. Which would be revolutionary if it wasn’t the exact same change another magazine made a few years back.

Thanks to this photo illustration by Felix Sockwell we can fully envision Bruce Nussbaum‘s current fate had he not disclosed his membership in the bloodthirsty Blubber’s Gang that once roamed Eighth Street between Avenues C and D.

Nussbaum, responding to a Gawker post about his situation, is still trying to bring it into the realm of design, filing his post under “innovation,” calling the situation “crowd-mobbing” and saying we can all learn a valuable lesson here about user-generated content and social media.

Social media? We don’t care about that, Nussbaum. What we want to know is this: How many business writer asses did you have to pop a cap in to get where you are today?

Champion of innovation and sucking expert Bruce Nussbaum has been punished by a judge for comments made as a juror in a trial involving four lesbians on charges of gang assault.

We’ll repeat that, in case you missed it.

Just after being sworn in during a trial involving four lesbians on charges of gang assault, Nussbaum asked the judge if he should take necessary steps to protect his wife, if in fact this was a dangerous gang with a network that could harm jurors and their families. The judge took that as Nussbaum’s attempt to evade jury duty, and although he removed him from the jury, he ordered him to sit in the courtroom for the remainder of the trial.

It gets better:

Mr. Nussbaum, 60, said in an interview yesterday that he belonged to “a local street gang” known as Blubber’s Gang, after the leader, nicknamed Blubber, when he was growing up on Eighth Street, between Avenues C and D. “We only sort of got together defensively because other gangs were coming into our neighborhood,” he said.

Nussbaum hired a lawyer (above right, watching Nussbaum demonstrate his mad Blubber skillz) to appeal his confinement. But we’re pretty sure what the next post at his BusinessWeek blog will be: JUDGES SUCK.

Woohoo! There’s nothing like a design bombshell to distract us from our Monday mourning. It all started when Bruce Nussbaum, champion of spelling and punctuation innovation, lashed out at designers in a speech he gave at Parsons last week:

In the name of provocation, let me start by saying that DESIGNERS SUCK. I’m sorry. It’s true. DESIGNERS SUCK. There’s a big backlash against design going on today and it’s because designers suck.

Well, actually, it didn’t start there. Nussbaum’s arrogant designer bashing actually goes all the way back to last week, when he picked up on something Philippe Starck supposedly said at TED:

“We are almost gods now,” said Starck.

It seems that quote was taken a bit out of context, especially since most TED bloggers claimed that Starck wasn’t as much arrogant as impossible to understand. Nussbaum apologized and leaves it up to the video to decide (it’s not posted yet). Nussbaum also references the wonderful Core77 article about design backlash that was published a few months ago, but doesn’t link to it. Maybe because it’s a lot better than his speech.

In the meantime, for the sucky designers out there who can’t read (probably all of you, you arrogant, delusional bastards with god complexes), David Armano has illustrated Nussbaum’s speech.