A mildly peeved-looking rabbit known as The Stanford Bunny (pictured above, in various incarnations) is a widely used test model for graphics research. Other popular test images include those of a monkey face, a grizzly bear sunning himself on a rock, a teapot, and 1973 Playboy Playmate Lena Sjooblom. The lot of them have long fascinated New York artist Kevin Zucker and are the subject of his recent guest essay on Paddy Johnson's blog, Art Fag City. Zucker focuses on 20 archetypal images that he describes as "representative highlights that I think epitomize the inscrutability, banality, anachronism, and the straightforwardly artless presentation that characterize most of the collection. Those qualities, contrasted with the weird aura possessed by these analog 'originals' of digital representation, make for the unsteady balance of gravity and absurdity that first got me interested in collecting them." This is an unsettling coffee table waiting to happen. As for that iconic rabbit, Zucker reveals its origins. "Greg Turk, who 3D-scanned the Stanford Bunny in 1994, bought it from a local Palo Alto home and garden supply store because the terra cotta material was 'red and diffuse' and its geometry was not particularly complex."

It's hard to believe, but the Layer Tennis season has come to an end, just as abruptly as it began. We look back upon the last few months now with a disturbing level of nostalgia. We worked behind the scenes, we cheered from the sidelines, we even sweated through a match doing play-by-play (easily the most stressful, frightening and ultimately rewarding afternoon of our lives).

To celebrate the Layer Tennis finals, two simultaneous matches will be going this afternoon:

Chris Glass vs Shaun Inman
with John Gruber doing play-by-play

Jason Koxvold vs James Hutchinson
with Rosecrans Baldwin in the booth

And maybe at the end the winners will have some kind of sudden death emboss-off or something. Catch all the action at 2pm CST (that's 3pm EST and noon PST) right here on the Coudal Sports Network.

Via Boing Boing we have what is pretty much the best way possible to end your first week back in the crushingly depressive no-end-in-sight skull-aching monotony that's your job (whoa, did we just type that?). Photoshop lessons from Donnie Hoyle.

More reaction to things and stuff to talk about, this time all coming from a post Adobe's John Nack put up recently talking about the need to redesign the user interface within Photoshop, to make it more configurable and manageable. Cnet's blog, Exposed, has a good overview of the whole developing discussion, paraphrasing down most of Nack's post into a couple of quick paragraphs, then getting a good lay of the land with interviews and such, to get a sense of the consensus about all of this. It's an interesting topic and one that's surely going to be passed around and talked about for the next couple of days, so get to preparing your own opinions before you're asked. Here's a little of the paraphrased Nack:

"We must make Photoshop dramatically more configurable," Nack said. "Presenting the same user experience to a photographer as we do to a radiologist, as to a Web designer, as to a prepress guy, is kind of absurd...With the power of customizability, we can present solutions via task-oriented workspaces," Nack said.

In comparison, Photoshop today is unwelcoming and unhelpful. "Today, if a user walks up to Photoshop and says, 'What do I do?' the app kind of shrugs, stubs out a cigarette, and says, 'I dunno--you tell me.' That's not real cool, and we can do better," Nack said.

There's no asterisk affixed to her name just yet (denoting a win), but from a quick swing through the forums, it appears as though the victor in this week's historic inter-Speak Up league Battle of the Sexes Layer Tennis match is one Marian Bantjes. Playing exclusively in Illustrator (an obvious advantage for the vectorous one) Bantjes paddled Armin Vit's behind through a series of imagery evoking tennis balls, butterflies and Britney Spears.

You can scroll through each artful volley and read play-by-play by Heather Armstrong to see proof that this match was definitely one for the ladies. Actually, we didn't see much of a contest at all; Bantjes kicked major layer ass.

The Photoshop Blog has the full story on a big news yesterday: Pantone unveiling the Goe System, the company's first major color spec release and major overhaul in forty-five years. It's pretty cool. Somehow they managed to pluck out and specify 2,058 new colors from the spectrum and they're all there in a fancy box set that isn't intended to be used so much as a replacement for all those chips and books you've got now, but to work alongside it. Or, to decipher the marketing talk: "buy this too!"

The Pantone Goe System is based on a set of 10 Pantone Mixing Bases, plus Pantone Clear, that are readily available anywhere in the world. The new ink mixing bases were created with Pantone's deep understanding of color science to deliver technically sound color standards that are compatible with aqueous and UV coatings. The colors have also been designed for printing uniform ink film thicknesses to allow for equal drying times and more control when matching color on press. This enables press operators to run jobs at the same ink settings, providing significant production efficiencies.

The Pantone Goe System includes the Pantone GoeGuide, Pantone GoeSticks and an advanced, intuitive software toolset for palette creation called myPantone Palettes.

Another bit of video for the day and a thing that's getting a lot of heavy buzz all over the design sites, a presentation on a process called "Content Aware Image Resizing" by Mitsubishi's Shai Avidan and The Interdisciplinary Center and MERL's Ariel Shamir. It's a process that changes the content of the image based on the size of the space it's placed in. But not just an "Image Resize" in Photoshop or the like, rather it changes the very properties of the image itself. It's pretty weird and/or off-putting and/or really cool. We really can't decide which.

As an aside, don't the names of the two guys behind this thing look like an anagram? Just take Shai Avidan, mix up the letters and you get Ariel Shamir. Well, okay, it's not perfect, what with those extra v's and d's laying around, but it seems like it should work.

There was one thing we were promised when we learned of our upcoming merger, and that, friends, was more webinars. Well, here we are a week later and voila, webinars have been delivered. Tune in to the Dynamic Graphics webcast series for some interesting snippets of information about design and your business.

Archived segments include "Designing for the Mobile User," "Open Up to Open Type" and "Don't Pimp My Brand." Coming up August 14, Shel Perkins gives the skinny on "Project Management Basics for Designers." Register now, and you'll be reminded to tune in live.

When Adobe launched Kuler, its palette creation tool where you can rate, tag and share palettes, the whole thing felt a little too shady for one Darius A. Monsef. Monsef is the founder of COLOURlovers, an extremely similar color & community site founded in 2004 and in this piece on the COLOURlovers blog, Monsef compares the two right down to the grayscale site design and the fact that color is spelled with a "u"...but he says Adobe disagrees:

I'm a huge fan of Adobe. As a designer I've used Photoshop & Dreamweaver since I started in this business. I contacted Adobe's legal team to let them know they had duplicated my efforts, and that I was hoping to find a working relationship and partnership rather than to proceed with any sort of legal actions...The Adobe legal response was "Other than the abstract idea of allowing users to create and discuss individualized colors and color combinations, the CL and kuler sites are entirely distinctive from each other."

Publisher Daniel Schutzsmith reminds us that the second issue of Graphic Define Magazine just went live, meaning there's a dozen or so new articles to help you run your graphic, web, or interactive studio. This issue is peppered with plenty of UnBeige faves like Ilise Benun, Eric Karjaluoto and Errol Gerson, and we especially like the piece "On Staying Creative," in which creativity is something that's "practiced" like a hobby. And here we were thinking we were born creative.