A recent article from Malcolm Gladwell examines what happens when an underdog breaks the rules. In identifying your weaknesses versus a larger, better equipped opponent, and changing your strategy to work with your strengths, you greatly improve your chances of winning.
Cornell has opened up their archive of public domain works, removing restrictions on reproduction and use of the works. On top of that, they have released more than seventy thousand works to the internet archive.
Scanned images of 3D geometry diagrams from Richard at Ace Jet 170. Now I just need to find a pair of glasses so I can see them properly.
Ken Garland’s lectures at Reading were some of my favourites during the time I spent there, particularly his passion for Harry Beck and the London Underground. I don’t really remember him mentioning Beck’s connection to the Paris Metro, probably because there was only limited class time.
The Duke Library has a great collection of advertisements spanning from 1911 to 1955. It’s where I found a good chunk of the material used in the last design of the site.
Time to celebrate! The weblog is nine years old. It actually started on an old ISP with a tilde address, and migrated to eightface a few months later. Kind of hard to believe that it’s been around for about a third of my lifetime. I never had any sort of long-term plan — at the time it just seemed really cool that you could use blogger to update your site from any browser, rather than having to rely on FTP.
In other news, I’ll be starting a live redesign in the near future, it’s been awhile since I’ve done one. I liked the collage graphics in the most recent layout, but it bothers me that one of the main elements was the Morton Salt girl. Being Canadian, I had no idea that she was part of an iconic American brand. At the time, I was going for an early 1950s vibe, and it was just one image among many. Another reason for a redesign is that the overall look just doesn’t suit what I’m posting, the typography is a bit too serious. Nine years of posting has also produced a lot of legacy issues. I need to start going through my old posts to clean things up (tag the old entries, add titles and whatnot), before things get really out of hand.
Jason Santa Maria’s lecture about The Influence of Print Design on the web. This is kind of where I was headed with my master’s thesis about the changing online newspaper, but I felt the time crunch and didn’t really do it properly.
Poets ranked by their beard weight. The gravity of a poet’s beard was determined using the lost art of pogonomancy, or divination by beard. I don’t have to explain how awesome this is.
Logan Walters has reimagined Wu-Tang’s album covers in the style of Blue Note Records. All of the covers are available in his flickr stream.
The Rare Book Room allows you to read old manuscripts in their original form, including works by Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin and Galileo.
Scans of an article from Design magazine on the creation of the 1976 Olympic logo for Montreal. I knew that the logo’s symbolism was multi-faceted, but never realized quite how structured and grid-based the design was.
Two articles by Americans who are finding that European socialism isn’t all that bad. In Going Dutch, Russell Shorto is initially perplexed by an odd dichotomy of welfare state and one of the world’s first free market economies, but has come to appreciate it. Trevor Corson examines the Finnish luxury of time and solace over that of material objects.
Sander Baumann documents the ubiquity of Arial in real-world practice. Most of his photos come from Amsterdam, the heart of a culture known from its design prowess.
The latest episode of Layer Tennis between James Draplin and Chris Glass was one of the best I’ve seen in awhile, it borders on a conceptual exercise in the evolutionary developement of a brand. I now await the rise of the IDWF, so I may obtain my membership card and ironic t-shirt.
Update: The domain has been registered, but it just links to the match for now.
Antonio Carusone offers eight simple steps for improving your typography. It’s fairly standard for the most part, but he provides some good CSS examples for web developers.
Pretty much all of the media produced by NASA is public domain. That means you can do almost anything you want with the wealth of images available at NASA Images. In other news, efforts are being made to recover high-resolution images from the Lunar Orbiter program that was tasked with mapping the lunar surface before the Apollo missions. The ongoing recovery program is based out of an abandoned McDonald’s.
Here’s a short NYT slideshow about the development of new signage typography for American roadways. Reminds me of a lecture that I attended concerning Jock Kinneir’s Transport typeface and some of the testing that went into its development. Personally, I prefer Transport to Clearview, but any improvement in legibility for drivers is a good thing.
The NPR has an interesting data visualization of the US electrical grid, detailing transmission lines, types of power used by state, and proposed infrastructure.
