March 2008
38 posts
Royal Pingdom has collected a series of photographs of geeky graffiti: PHP scripts, computer references, binary, etc. Like everything, some are funnier than others. [Veer:TheSkinny]
This photo reminds me of my dad’s hilarious habit of adding “.com” to things he considers “hip” or general slang.
Photographer John Chiara’s exhibition ends tomorrow at NYC’s Von Lintel Gallery. His work — which has fellow photographers calling him “one of photography’s most innovative landscape photographers” — is created “using archaic techniques and hand built cameras.” The colors captured in his photographs are incredible [e.g. “23rd at Starr...
February 2008
74 posts
Photographer Jason Lazarus photographed Spencer Elden, who as a baby was featured on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Now a 17-year old senior in a Los Angeles high school, Elden is one of the first subjects in Lazarus’ “The Nirvana Project.” The project’s goals are to document the context of when people first heard Nirvana. [jimr.ay]
Mother of the Year
It’s almost an Onion story, yet somehow, it’s not. According to The Sun, Russian authorities have found a “bird boy.” The 7-year old boy, who communicates through chirps and frustrated wing flaps, was raised by his mother as though he was another one of her birds. [D.BartholowArchive]
The title “bird boy” is slightly misleading and disappointing as he has...
“The most precious commodity on a momentary basis is attention. Each moment...”
– Seth Godin explains why free is important for modern marketers and why marketing is not advertising.
He plugs the recently announced book FREE by Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail. A 6,000-word article relating to the book is this month’s Wired cover story.
“I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and...”
– In Puncture magazine’s #41 issue, Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum explained the impetus to write much of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
To honor the album’s 10 year anniversary, Slate has a great profile on Mangum, “the Salinger of indie rock.”
T. Rex of the ocean
Subscribing to the National Geographic RSS was one of the smartest decisions I’ve made thus far in 2008. Today’s article is about a fossil of the newly discovered giant “sea monster,” the Plesiosaur. First found in 2006, the fossil discovery shows a creature “longer than a humpback whale” with “teeth the size of cucumbers.”
Calling the latest find...
Today, due to either increased volume or attentiveness, I heard the voices midway through “East Hastings.”
La Blogotheque has been getting big-time recognition and love from very popular acronyms: CNN and R.E.M. As one of indie music’s coolest online projects, it’s about time they get the big time coverage they’re due. [KathrynYu]
Sparked by the Dairy Today redesign previously blogged about, Design Observer takes an in-depth look at agricultural trade magazine redesigns. [Uppercase]
Though it was said jokingly, Sufjan is thinking about a New Jersey musical all about the New Jersey turnpike.
“It’s so perfected and so efficient. It’s like a military endeavor—it was built by postwar military personnel, and they ran the whole enterprise like the army. And it’s an artery from New York, the great metropolis, to the rural countryside, South Jersey. And it’s very expensive. I...
“If they’re not going to provide a safe environment for me and my...”
– After his city, Muncie, Indiana, rejected his request for a crosswalk at a nearby intersection, Whitney Stump took action by painting his own, and soon after, got arrested for doing just that. [SocialNotes]
Stump missed a court date after he was charged the second time, which led to a 10-hour jail...
“I mean, the Betamax adopters at least had a few years to nag their VHS friends...”
– Jason Kottke interviewed Steven Johnson, author/”tech gadget enthusiast,” about his reaction to Toshiba’s video format surrender and, sadly, how that affects his two month-old (and now obsolete) HD DVD player.
Flickr user acejet170 has posted 73 classic Pelican paperback book covers designed by Romek Marber using the Marber grid arrangement. [Murketing]
Also, see ThingsMagazine’s thorough archive of Pelican’s book cover designs.
The image on Marber’s covers occupies just over two-thirds of the space, while the title section at the top is divided into three bands carrying colophon /...
“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? ”
With only 10 days of posts, Garfield Minus Garfield is already one of the best things on the Internet. It’s like the most depressing sitcom spinoff, and equally hilarious....
Photographer David Horvitz recently published If, a list of nineteen things he’s willing to sell and mail to the buyer. Most are documentation from vacations-in-disguise and one is actually his rent. Pretty clever and the “product” descriptions are funny. [DesignObserver]
I wish email addresses would allow exclamation points. It’s really unfair.
Ouch! Cranking Widgets’ Brett Kelly can tell you which single item to keep far far far away from your 2 1/2 year old child: a Macbook. I repeat “Ouch!”
Best Luggage
With last week’s Ray Davies performance, it seems talkin’ Kinks is all the rage. The AV Club wrote up a great Kinks Primer which is chock-full of Kinks YouTubes. [NightTimeInTheBigCity]
And since it relates only by The Kinks, I want to revisit The Darjeeling Limited when it’s released next week. Richard Brody — hopefully unrelated to Adrien — feels the movie was...
Ironic Sans has created a new typographic term: keming. It’s the result of improper kerning, and like all good things on the internet, it already has a t-shirt in its honor. [Anarchaia]
Lifehacker,
Somedays I don’t even think you’re trying. Is one’s life “hacked” by learning how to convert a ball cap into a visor? Is this a sign that all things of significance have already been hacked? I expected more from you.
Garrison
“The court is not in the business of humor”
– The California judge’s reaction to Kristin Sue Lucas’ request to change her name to “Kristin Sue Lucas.” Yes, a change(?) to the exact same name.
New media artist Kristin Lucas has a show at Dallas’ And/Or Gallery for the next couple of weeks.
“Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c)...”
– Programming language designer Paul Graham posted his “Six Principles for Making New Things.” [Anarchaia]
Though the essay is filled with references to programming languages and applications that I know nothing about, it’s fascinating that he titled the essay “Six Principles...
Canadian illustrator Pat Hamou is working on a book, Six For Five, of illustrations of Jewish gangsters from 1900-1941. He posted the “evolution of an illustration” for Bo Weinberg. Hamou has done his homework and the biographical details he presents for the gangsters are incredibly interesting. [Clusterflock]
In this year’s Hollywood Issue of Vanity Fair, photographer Art Streiber recreated iconic Alfred Hitchcock stills using modern actors (Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Robert Downey Jr., Jodie Foster, Emile Hirsch, Scarlett Johansson, Keira Knightley, Gwyneth Paltrow, Seth Rogen, Eva Marie Saint and more.) VF posted a video of the still recreation. Scarlett Johansson as Grace Kelly...
“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again”
– This was the reaction of Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations, upon seeing that 50 times more search requests come from iPhones than any other mobile handset.
Peliculas Ponder has created one of the coolest ads I’ve seen in a while. It’s Madrid, Spain from the perspective of the city’s underground system. The animation looks from below as it passes under museums, streets, buildings and more. Very cool animation and concept. [Kottke]
“Love is in the air and I’ve got to find a way to bottle it because I’d make a...”
– Today’s Creed’s Thoughts is all about Valentine’s Day and how he celebrates. Filled with semi-funny observational jokes, the post ends with this description of his perfect Valentine’s Day: “me, a special lady, a bottle of red wine, a steak dinner, two heart-shaped...
“I’ve pulled out a lot of vehicles,” he said. “But that’s...”
– Dave Kurzejewski of Costy’s Truck and Auto Mart was called to duty when an accident occurred involving one of the six Oscar Meyer Weinermobiles and a patch of ice. [Murketing]
Newspapers have no standards when it comes to bad puns. “Although [the drivers] didn’t relish the...
“Sure, ‘Whole Lotta Love’ seemed like a good idea at the time, but...”
– Sleater-Kinney/NPR’s Carrie Brownstein on safely approaching the music you play/mixtape for Valentine’s Day.
Marcia Lausen, a graphic designer and professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published a book last fall called Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design. The book proposes the work of graphic designers could fix failed ballots (e.g., hanging chads of 2000) and other polling flaws.
The Herald Tribune profiles Lausen, her book and the work she’s doing...
Last night I watched the film Helvetica. The variety of opinion on the typeface, the subtle complexity of the soundtrack (Four Tet, Sam Prekop, Album Leaf…), the cinematography and editing were all very impressive. It was an amazing film in content and presentation.
Looking around the web for details on the film and hunting for cool font-focused posters, I came across this Typographic...
The best thing I learned today offers yet another very informative post.
Did you know there’s a word ‘graphicacy’? Neither did Anita Lillie nor myself. Like Anita says, according to Wikipedia, the word relates to “the capacities people require in order to interpret and generate information in the form of graphics.” The full article is very thorough for a word I...
I think it’s fun to think about terroristic websites. Not like alqaeda.org but websites that actually attack other sites.
the best thing i learned today’s Anita Lillie shares videos of her tea’s surface cracking and breaking in strange patterns. It’s mesmerizing but also makes me want to make some tea.
Looking for ideas for your blog? Zen Habits offers five “inspiration hacks” for creative people. It might be obvious to say, but your output can only be as good as your input. While looking through magazines at Barnes & Noble last summer, I noticed myself with floods of ideas about all sorts of creative, artistic things. And I wasn’t looking through Communication Arts or...
“It’s not part of my faith, if that is what you are driving at.”
– Replied former Daily Show producer Ben Karlin when asked if he observed Valentine’s Day. The New York Times interview with Karlin, author of the recently release “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me,” is very funny. He sarcastically dodges the problems with love, his preoccupation...
"...either a concert or a bonfire."
New York sound artist Ranjit Bhatnagar is working with Thing-a-day.com to build an instrument-a-day for the month of February. He photographs these homemade instruments and posts a sound clip of the instrument in action. When the month ends, Ranjit says he will “have to have either a concert or a bonfire. ” [KathrynYu]
Photoblogger terrorkitten has recently posted a couple excellent photos taken of a flooded meadow near his home in Bath, UK. Taken with a Holga and Kodak Portra 400VC, The Current Flows Above Our Heads. Floods, Batheason, Bath. is “almost devoid of colour,” and since it was triple exposed, the reflections of trees on the flooded area create a mysterious sense of depth — like...
