Feuilles Font Friday
Oratorical Type, An Alphabet Made out of Carved Books From Laughing Squid by EDW Lynch
Flying Font Friday 1
Also see my post Flying Font Friday 2, about typeforms found in butterfly wings. Why the Same Three Typefaces Are Used In Almost Every Airport From Gizmodo by Alissa Walker Wayfinding signage is an invisible network draped upon our public places. And that network has to work especially hard in airports when we’re lost, hungry, […]
Fish Food Font Friday
Dion Star’s Marine Debris Typeface is made from sea debris that has washed up on the shore in England. One day while walking along the beach in England, Dion Star stumbled across a little green clothespin. Being a graphic designer, Star immediate realized that this pin was more than just a bit of litter that […]
How to shelter from fallout after a nuclear attack on your city
From io9.com: Terrorists have detonated a low-yield nuclear warhead in your city. How long should you hide, and where, to avoid the worst effects of radioactive fallout? We talked to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory atmospheric scientist Michael Dillon to find out. Yesterday Dillon published a paper on this topic in the Proceedings of the Royal […]
Letter written by ten-year-old Hellen Keller
By Susan Martin, Collection Services, from the Massachusetts Historical Society: Those of us who process manuscript collections are always stumbling on interesting and unexpected finds. I was recently working with the MHS’s George E. Ellis papers to improve the arrangement and description of the collection, and one letter immediately caught my eye. It was written […]
High-Res Scan of Poe’s “Raven,” Illustrated by Doré
By Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.com: The Library of Congress’s website hosts a high-resolution scan of a rare edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” illustrated by Gustave Doré. The title-page is at page 11, the list of illustrations is on page 14. The illustrations are amazing, like no other illustrated Poe I’ve seen. I’ve collected my […]
Mayonnaise Hatred: A Brief History of Mayo and Disgust
By David Merritt Johns from Slate.com: Near where I work there is a deli with a basket on the counter piled high with mayonnaise packets. They’re complimentary: If you buy a sandwich, you can take as many as you want. I know that decent folks nab just one or two, but I have a hard […]
Federal Font Friday
By Tom Vanderbilt from a February 2004 article on Slate.com: Courier, Dispatched: How the Federal Government—more specifically, U.S. State Department—put the kibosh on the typewriter font. In late January [2004], an announcement from the U.S. State Department generated certain chatter along the generally indiscernible diplomatic-typographic axis. This was the news that as of February 1, […]
The Roaring ‘Twenties: an interactive exploration of the historical soundscape of New York City
An interactive website by historian Emily Thompson exploring the aural atmosphere of New York City in the 1920s. [See also my post “Peddlers, jackhammers, whistles: Historian Emily Thompson lets you hear the sounds of life in 1920s New York City.”] Website Editor’s Introduction A visitor to my home in Los Angeles recently commented on the […]
Peddlers, jackhammers, whistles: Historian Emily Thompson lets you hear the sounds of life in 1920s New York City
By Brett Tomlinson from the December 4, 2013, issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly Peter Murphy In her freshman seminar, Emily Thompson (Princeton Graduate School ’92) plays records on old phonographs to provide an authentic sound. The streets of New York City in the late 1920s featured a cacophony of sounds — some old, many new. […]
Botanical Typography Made With Flowers Frozen In Ice
By Kelly Koo from DesignTaxi: “You can create typography from anything,” says Petra Blahova, a graphic designer based in Kendal, UK. Blahova’s beautiful typographical series, “My Garden”, was made by freezing colorful flowers and fruits in alphabetical ice cubes. Each bit of botany was carefully arranged according to the contours of the alphabets.
Do you have vertigo? Do you want some?
It’s one of San Francisco’s favorite photo subjects, and today we bring you a selection of our favorite leaning house photos to illustrate just how steep some of the city’s sidewalks can be, courtesy of photographer Leighton Wallis. [From sfist.com]
Photos From an Arctic Outpost Where Landscapes Are Alien and Dying Is Forbidden
From wired.com: The imposing entrance to the Global Seed Vault. Aurora Borealis lights the sky above the Adventdalen valley. This eight-minute exposure reveals the nearly parallel motion of the stars, due to Svalbard’s proximity to the North Pole. The vehicles Wu and his compatriots used to get around. “Probably the closest I’ll ever get to […]
Czech scientist Jan Evangelista Purkinje’s drawings of the shapes made from pushing on his closed eye
Czech scientist Jan Evangelista Purknye‘s (1787-1869) made drawings of the shapes “seen” from pushing on his closed eye. He was a proponent of self-experimentation who tested over fifty dangerous drugs on himself, and took to his eye pushing research with abandon: “When I close my eyes, they begin to shine, just like the dots and […]
A Recent Sampling of Letters to the Editor of the London Review of Books
Letters Vol. 35 No. 22 · 21 November 2013 The Reviewer’s Song Andrew O’Hagan writes: ‘Joan Didion gave me her hand and she was so thin it felt like I was holding a butterfly’ (LRB, 7 November). A beautiful sentence, but I wondered about the simile’s plausibility. It’s been reported that Didion weighs less than […]
Lady Gaga Is About to Fly in a Dress Called VOLANTIS
From complex.com: Image via Complex Art+Design/VOLANTIS In anticipation of her new album, ARTPOP, Lady Gaga plans to reach new heights, literally. As part of ArtRave, Gaga’s fashion, music, art, and tech mash-up party tonight in a Brooklyn warehouse, Gaga will soar above her audiences in a flying dress called VOLANTIS. VOLANTIS was conceived […]
Roentgenium has no uses whatsoever
Element of the week: roentgenium What do unununium and the first ever Nobel Prize in Physics share in common? Image: Cheezburger. This week’s element is roentgenium, which has the atomic symbol, Rg, and atomic number, 111. Originally known by its temporary name, unununium (Uuu), this element was named in honour of German physicist Wilhelm Conrad […]
Artist Makes Pixelated Photos by Stitching ‘Pixels’ on Them
From laughingsquid.com: Artist Diane Meyer adds pixelated sections to her photographs by embroidering pixel-like squares directly on to the photos with a needle and thread. The embroidered areas obscure the underlying photo, much like digital pixelation is used to obscure portions of a photo or video. She has used the technique on photos from her […]
Here’s How Memes Went Viral — In the 1800s
From wired.com: Thicker lines indicate more content-sharing between 19th century newspapers. Image: Ryan Cordell / Infectious texts project The story had everything — exotic locale, breathtaking engineering, Napoleon Bonaparte. No wonder the account of a lamplit flat-bottom boat journey through the Paris sewer went viral after it was published — on May 23, 1860. At […]
Babybel Cheese Wax Is The Ultimate Artistic Medium
If you didn’t make stuff out of that alluring red wax during elementary school lunch, you must have been a monster. instagram.com SO. MUCH. MORE. With it, you can make… Poodles. gramfeed.com Flowers. instagram.com Teddy bears. instagram.com The cast of Bambi. instagram.com A manicure. instagram.com Don’t pretend you never did this. A super impressive horse. […]
Delightful Papercraft Food and Grocery Sculptures
From laughingsquid.com: These delightful papercraft foods and groceries were created by artist Maria Laura Benavente Sovieri for advertising and editorial clients. For more of her photography and visual art, check out her Behance portfolio. via Ian Brooks
The Craziest Multi-Tool Ever Made Kills in 100 Different Ways
From wired.com: This multi-bladed folding knife was made in Germany around 1880. Image: Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History The F.W. Holler Company manufactured it to be a demonstration piece to show off its products. Image: Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History The tool has 100 different functions, including some very vicious-looking blades. Image: Smithsonian’s […]
Brilliant Map Shows When Most of the Homes in Your Area Were Built
By Seth Kadish from Vizual Statistix: This blog is a product of my passion for data visualization. The data shown here are sourced from other websites, but all statistical operations on these data and the resulting graphics are original. I take requests and am available for freelance work. If you have a suggestion for a […]
Overlapping Disasters: Ground Zero Photos Damaged by Sandy
By Lisa Larson-Walker from slate.com: Photo by Michael Redpath Hours after the collapse of the Twin Towers, Michael Redpath, a New York City firefighter from Far Rockaway, Queens, was dispatched to Ground Zero. Over the next six months, he worked on the monumental recovery effort, all the while using his Canon AE-1 to document the […]
Haunting Photos Show Aftermath of 19th-Century Train Wrecks
From slate.com: These photos, all of which depict train wrecks on the New York Ontario & Western Railway in New York State in the 1870s, are part of a larger group of images of railroad life assembled by De Forest Douglas Diver, a railroad engineer and photographer. This collection is currently held at Cornell University, […]
NanoLeaf Bulbs Provide Unusually Bright, Energy-Efficient LED Lighting
From lifehacker.com: We’re all for energy-efficiency, and NanoLeaf managed to pack quite a bit of it into one of the weirdest looking lightbulbs we’ve ever seen. With their LED bulb you get 30,000 hours of brightness equivalent to a standard 100W unit. NanoLeaf’s bulbs operate at a lower temperature thanks to using LEDs, but they […]
Mountain mirrors to bring light to dark Norwegian town
World’s smartest emergency robots have been crowned
From dvice.com: Credit: Fraunhofer Over the last week Berchtesgaden, Germany has played host to some of the smartest emergency response robots in the world. There, nestled in the shadow of one of Germany’s highest peaks, the euRathlon was held. Multiple real-world emergency scenarios were enacted, giving the 14 teams present a chance to show the world […]
Baby Cthulhu sculpture will drive the world to adorable madness
From io9.com: Baby Cthulhu doesn’t wait dreaming. He’s bright-eyed, curly-tentacled, and ready for your squeeing worship. Cassia Harries of Monster Mind Sculpts made this little guy. She cast the original sculpture and will soon have an army of Cutethulhus available for sale. In the meantime, you can check out her artwork on her Facebook page, […]
“Aqua Regia, Hell’s Beverage of Choice”: New Merchandise from Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim books
Now available! New merchandise featuring Aqua Regia, Hell’s Beverage of Choice according to Richard Kadrey‘s Sandman Slim series of books. Stick the labels to your favorite containers to instantly transform the contents into Hell’s beverage of choice. Mugs perform the same magical change, and t-shirts proclaim your love—scroll down to the bottom to see pictures. […]
The Intricate Makeshift Money Germans Relied On Between World Wars
From gizmodo.com: State-issued currency is the scaffolding upon which capitalism was built, but it’s always been prone to mayhem. For instance in 1920s Germany, extreme inflation forced German businesses to actually print millions of their own customized paper bills. Now largely forgotten, this notgeld, or “emergency money,” was once ubiquitous—amounting to an ornately-decorated I.O.U. in […]
Glitch Textiles: Blankets with Abstract Designs Based on Glitched Digital Files
From laughingsquid.com: Glitch Textiles is a purveyor of blankets with abstract designs that are based on glitched digital files. Artist Phillip Stearns creates some of the designs with modified digital cameras, others he makes out of data visualizations and glitched computer files. The designs are then woven or knit into custom blankets by American manufacturers. […]
Optical illusion that causes natural “hallucination”
From memolition.com: This video has been carefully designed to create a strong natural “hallucination” — actually a visual effect rather than a brain effect. Use full screen and HD for better results.
Pop art zombie makeup
From boingboing.net: Sssamanthaa created this wonderful “Pop Art Zombie” makeup job. Pop Art Zombie (via Wil Wheaton)
What the World Would Look Like If Countries Were As Big As Their Online Populations, and Other Great Charts
Helloooooo China! The Internet we each see every day is an infinitesimally tiny sliver of the whole—the parts we have curated for ourselves, the parts our network of friends and family sends to us, and the sites that we have made parts of our routines. But beyond this micro-level editing, there are also macro forces […]
11 Colors You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
From mentalfloss.com: 1. Sarcoline Wearing sarcoline—literally “flesh-colored”—high heels makes your legs look longer. Wearing a sarcoline leather jacket reminds everyone of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. 2. Coquelicot Originally another word for poppy, coquelicot is the flower’s orange-tinted red color. (It also sounds like a celebrity baby name.) 3. Smaragdine Smaragdine sounds […]
Surreal Photos of People Swimming Underwater in Olek’s Crocheted Bodysuits
From laughingsquid.com: During a recent visit to Seville, Spain, yarn artist Olek captured these surreal photos of people swimming underwater in her colorful crocheted bodysuits. The photos were taken at the Silken Al-Andalus Palace hotel. There are more photos on Olek’s Facebook page. Here are some previous posts our tentacles have dug up that you […]
Make Your Own Red Pepper Sculpture
Make this beautiful sculptural piece with only a red pepper and a sharp knife. Put the pepper on its side on the cutting board and cut off the sides one by one, turning a quarter-turn between each cut. Seriously, that’s it! Remember to eat the parts you cut off.
All the American Flags On the Moon Are Now White
From gizmodo.com: NASA has finally answered a long-standing question: all but one of the six American flags on the Moon are still standing up. Everyone is now proudly talking about it. The only problem is that they aren’t American flags anymore. They are all white. The debate on the Moon flags has been going on […]
What Color is Elephant’s Breath?
By Kristin Hohenadel from Slate.com: Elephant’s Breath paint from Farrow & Ball. You can tell a lot about parents by the names they bestow upon their children, whether they’re classic choices, family names or trendy monikers that have nothing to do with their own heritage or culture. (One curious French phenomenon: boys named “Steeve.”) Browse […]
Here’s the Beautiful New $100 Bill That’s Going Into Circulation Today
This post originally appeared in Business Insider. The new hundred-dollar bill goes into circulation today after being delayed well beyond its original 2011 debut date due to printing issues. “Over a decade of research and development went into its new security features,” write the folks at NewMoney.gov. Here are some cool features as described by […]
From 1890: The First Text Messages
I’m trying something new today. Sometimes in my research I find an interesting old article that I wouldn’t normally post because it’s not from the Sunday Magazine section, or it’s from further than 100 years ago so I’ll never get to it. Instead of letting these go unused, I figure I’ll occasionally post them midweek […]
Movie Monsters, Tallest Buildings in 1896, Solar System Planets and of Course Spaceships: Size Comparison Charts
Size matters. Especially when it comes to starships, giant monsters, buildings, and . . . well, pretty much anything else that you can obsessively categorize using common measurement systems. Here are some of the most outrageously detailed size comparison charts you’ll ever see. Spaceship Comparison Chart by Dirk Loechel Check the chart in full size […]
5-kilowatt industrial laser with a pistol grip
By Kelsey D. Atherton from popularscience.com: Sometimes, a fancy new cutting tool just needs that special human touch. TWI, a British company with a long history of welding innovation, recently added a pistol grip to a 5-kilowatt industrial cutting tool. Scary as the idea of a handheld laser cutting tool is, the machine was originally attached to […]
Stamp of Approval: A Paper Snippet and the Spanish Inquisition
By Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel) from medievalfragments: This blog entry focuses on a book fragment I encountered in Leiden University Library earlier this week while studying twelfth-century material with my research team. As discussed in an earlier blog, after the invention of printing many handwritten books from the medieval period were cut up to be recycled […]
Deadly lake turns animals into statues
(Images: Nick Brandt) According to Dante, the Styx is not just a river but a vast, deathly swamp filling the entire fifth circle of hell. Perhaps the staff of New Scientist will see it when our time comes but, until then, Lake Natron in northern Tanzania does a pretty good job of illustrating Dante’s vision. […]
‘Made in space!’ Astronaut sews dinosaur toy from space station scraps
There is a dinosaur on board the International Space Station where there wasn’t one before. NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, who since May has been working as a flight engineer as a member of the orbiting outpost’s resident crew, revealed the toy dinosaur floating on the space station on September 26. “Made in space!” Nyberg, an […]
Waffling: How FEMA determines how bad a disaster is
From nowiknow.com: When disaster strikes, swift and decisive actions are typically required. Waffling — as in equivocating – is probably not a good idea. But waffles, the food? In the United States, they are a leading indicator as to how bad a disaster is. Just ask Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) head W. Craig Fugate. On May […]