A running collection of things I’ve found interesting, well-made, or worth spreading—mostly from art, design, tech, photography, and film, with the occasional thought or two of my own.
The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovski, 1986)
John Boardley of I Love Typography has collected his favourite typefaces from 2020 and not only are there some sweet typefaces to feast your eyes on, the page itself is all candy as well. Pictured here are some details of Signifier from Klim Type.
Dina Litovsky's photo series of the Amish on vacation.
It Comes At Night (Trey Edward Shults, 2017)
“My Fares” — what NYC cab driver Joseph Rodriguez saw through his windshield in the 70's & 80's.
“See a City: Todd Webb’s New York”. Todd Webb’s photos of New York in the 1940s and 1950s.
Glenn Fleishman in a fascinating story for Wired that involves the Prime minister of Pakistan, Justin Timberlake, a rabbi and typography.
The prime minister’s daughter, Maryam Sharif, provided an exculpatory document that had been typeset in Calibri—a Microsoft font that was only released for general distribution nearly a year after the document had allegedly been signed and dated. While Sharif’s supporters waged a Wikipedia war over the Calibri entry, type designer Thomas Phinney quietly dropped some history lessons about the typeface on Quora, and found himself caught in a maelstrom of global reporting. Phinney said that because Calibri has been in use for several years, people have forgotten that it’s a relatively new font.
Greg Girard’s photos from inside the infamous (since demolished) Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong.
Greg Miller photographs Country Fairs.
Super nice Tokyo storefront illustrations by Mateusz Urbanowicz.
Punk portraits of New York by William Coupon.
Hiroji Kubota’s photos from North Korea in 1980′s.
Huge, 3×1m pen and ink drawing by Manabu Ikeda, titled Rebirth, finished after almost 3.5 years.
via This is Colossal
The New York Times special about the supertall buildings of NYC, the people who live in them, the people who build them and what happens in, on, and around them. Oh, and some spectacular views.
For Retrace Our Steps French photographers Carlos Ayesta and Guillaume Bressio took residents of Namie, now a ghost town like many others in the region, back to their old settings as if the 2011 Tohoku earthquake never happened.
This is zaku zaku, japanese for the crunching sound that stepping on ice might make. It’s one of a set of chocolates designed to represent japanese words for certain textures, by studio Nendo for the Maison et Objet design show in Paris. Go see the rest of them on Nendo’s site because they’re all fantastic.
Rodeny Mullen invented the flatground ollie in 1982 based on Alan “Ollie” Gelfands no-handed airs on vert. For the uninitiated it looks like magic, the board seemingly glued to the skaters' feet. For the initiated, it feels like magic — successfully popping your first ollie is an endorphin cocktail rivaling the best.
Aathis Batia goes all sciency for Wired and shows the forces at work while popping an ollie.
Peter Merholz writing about how the conversation around (digital) design has increasingly become about the superficial, often neglecting the deeper underlying layers that make up a product:
It plays into the still-prevailing attitude among business and technical types that designers don’t grok the deeper concerns in these complicated systems, and are best to bring in when it’s time to make something look good. Still, we must be vigilant in maintaining similar attention to those deeper layers, precisely because their abstraction makes them more challenging to discuss.
I could try and write a description of what this Adam Magyar guy is doing, but it’s just too awesome and you should do yourself a favor and read the whole story on Medium, then go and marvel at the rest of his work on his website.
Jon Geeting’s photos of snowy Philadelphia very clearly illustrate where to reclaim some of the street space for the public by showing where cars actually don’t drive or drive very little.
via The Verge
An Excerpt from "Some Instructions to the New Guy Concerning the Preparation and Presentation of My French Toast", by Stanley Kubrick.
Chestnut brown crust marks are an indication that great care has gone into preparing the French toast, and above all, this is what concerns me the most: that you care. You must care about the French toast. If you don’t care about the French toast, then perhaps you don’t care about anything is my train of thought on the matter, and if you don’t care about anything, then working for me doesn’t seem feasible, as I have an insatiable desire to be surrounded by people who care as much as I do.
via Jason Kottke
Great article by Kathy Sierra on how limited our cognitive resources are:
Spend hours at work on a tricky design problem? You’re more likely to stop at Burger King on the drive home. Hold back from saying what you really think during one of those long-ass, painful meetings? You’ll struggle with the code you write later that day. Since both willpower/self-control and cognitive tasks drain the same tank, deplete it over here, pay the price over there. One pool. One pool of scarce, precious, easily-depleted resources. If you spend the day exercising self-control (angry customers, clueless co-workers), by the time you get home your cog resource tank is flashing E.
Buckets of iron ore are transported to a major steelworks in Hunedoara, Romania, November1975. Photograph by Winfield Parks, National Geographic.
Hard to believe this is an actual photograph.
via natgeofound
The Guardian, a newspaper, has bravely published an article on how news is actually bad for us. Not investigative journalism, but the fast, sensationalist media bombarding us with “bite-sized” bullets of news that’s designed to interrupt and mislead and in the end leave us desensitized and in a chronic state of stress.
From the article:
News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb): A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That’s the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person (non-abstract), and it’s news that’s cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads.
Now go read a book or take a walk, nothing bad will happen to you because you missed the news, something good might instead.