May 2008
87 posts
A Practical Medium
Creative Review interviewed Matt Dent, the 26 year-old London graphic designer, who recently won the design competition for the new UK coinage. Based on the Royal Arms, the “unifying” design will be in circulation in late 2008. [Quipsologies]
You’ve mentioned that the playful idea behind the set is something that appeals to you? Can you explain a bit more about this? My initial...
I’m sure this is probably the most obvious thing ever written, but one of the most incredible things about the internet is how seemingly endless it is. How each day you can find something mindblowingly interesting and come to find that it’s been out there waiting for you to find it for years.
Early last year, Current.tv posted a series of filmmakers, authors, screenwriters talking...
April 2008
47 posts
“It’s not an opera, it’s a proper record. And it’s all in Mandarin I can...”
– BBC 6 Music reported yesterday that Damon Albarn has an album planned for a July 2008 release. [TheTripwire]
As a fan of Blur, Gorillaz, Democrazy and the seriously under-appreciated Mali Music album, this is certainly great news. But.. I mean how serious can you take a news report with the artist...
Today Jim Ray posed the most crutial question of this campaign season: “Can you really vote for a man who tucks his shirt in while playing basketball?”
On display at The Hague’s Museum for Communication, this beautiful series of stamps were designed in 1970 by William Pars Graatsma & Jan Slothouber. More proof that keeping it simple makes great graphic design. [ISO50]
The pied piper of preparation
Celtics gaurd Ray Allen thinks he probably had a mild case of OCD as a child. Only 460 3-pointers shy of the NBA record set by Reggie Miller, Allen’s current OCD-esque habits are serving him well. [UweBlog]
As the Celtics kick off their campaign for an NBA championship tonight in the opening round of the playoffs against the Atlanta Hawks, Allen will leave nothing to chance. He will...
GrainEdit linked to an amazing Saul Bass museum collection including a series of matchbooks. [Delicious/Glass]
Originally photographed at the London Design Museum in 2004, it’s estimated the matchbooks were designed shortly after Bass’ 1964 logo for Hunt-Wesson.
Mad Decent Field Recordings
As part of his mad recent trip to India, DJ Paul Devro of Mad Decent (home of Diplo, Blaqstarr, South Rakkas Crew) recorded and posted a series of field recordings from Dharavi, Asia’s second largest slum.
Devro used the Urban Typhoon festival as an opportunity “to archive some of the neighborhoods traditional music.” The recordings are excellent and amazingly document the...
Fun with Lexicon
Since the release of Facebook’s Lexicon in the past few weeks, it seems everyone is more or less “following language trends across Facebook.” And by that I mean, they’re out there finding evidence we’re all the booze-fueled, sex-crazed menaces we’ve denied being. Fimoculous posted his two favorite graphs. His commenters added a slew of their own.
Iran, Iraq,...
Parents and their acronyms
Me: Where's the other cell phone?
Mom: TLOK
Me: tlok?
Mom: The Lord only knows.
Mom: just made that up
New rule: If you fake an “after the jump,” you get your feed unsubscribed. Even if it’s a joke, your motives are obviously not in providing me information.
UPDATE: It’s not at all shocking, but lameness pays. Over $5m per year to be exact. [Fimoculous]
As part of my neverending political design coverage, the NYT 2008 campaign blog Campaign Stops talked with a handful of designers and illustrators about Optima, the official font choice of the John McCain campaign. [Quipsologies]
Pentagram’s Michael Bierut:“Yet judging a candidate by his or her choice of typeface isn’t much more than a parlor game in the end. For one thing, it assumes...
This week’s This American Life episode focuses on people’s mistakes. After a long piece on cryonics enthusiast Bob Nelson and his early failed attempts, the episode’s Act Two focused on the William Carlos Williams poem, “This is Just to Say.”
The combo of Marketplace reporter Sean Cole and Ira Glass talking about the 12-line poem, its pseudo-sincerity and the...
“People change, but records don’t, and that’s part of what makes them...”
– Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson reviewed the reissues of The Replacements’ first four records: Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, Stink EP, Hootenanny and Let It Be. Nearly 24 years after its original release, Let It Be continues to draw critical acclaim with this reissue receiving a...
In honor of Record Store Day, NYT posted a pretty sad, but fascinating infographic showing the 35 remaining record stores in the City. [Fimoculous]
The Washingtonian talked with bloggers and bands about their favorite record stores. [InformationLeafblower]
‘I can’t remember the first record I ever bought, but there are many records that I vividly remember buying. I don’t have the same fond...
Back in the 1910s, Russian composer Alexander Scriabin was developing multimedia art that incorporated a series of colored light bulbs corresponding to particular organ tones. Though it’s debated that Scriabin actually had synaesthesia, his works strongly tied sound to color, a common tendecy of synesthetes. [Veer]
Scriabin had previously premiered the use of a ‘tastiera per...
B3TA has an interview with Wes Cherry, the developer of Windows’ Solitaire. [Anarchaia]
Q: If you consider how many millions of potential hours of constructive international office time your game has turned into mindless skiving, do you think you’ve done a good thing or a bad thing? (I think good, so don’t feel like I’m putting you on the spot) A: The thing about time is...
London graphic designer Ben Terrett has been playing with Connect, a classic pattern card game. Upon noticing the six column photo layout of Flickr, he decided to use his Flickr to create Connect patterns.
"Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?"
mental_floss recently examined the evolution of Billy Bragg’s “A New England.” It’s one of the few songs that, even if looped for hours, would never wear thin.
Bragg’s original rendition had him singing solo, backed only by an electric guitar — a pretty unusual arrangement in any era, but decidedly odd in the musical climate of the early 80’s. The studio version was...
Architect Louis Kahn’s stunning 1959 Esherick House goes on auction next month and is expected to collect in the ballpark of 2-3 million dollars. In the source post, Michael Bierut described the house as “superb” and that’s about as accurate of a word as could be used. [Design Observer]
"For 41 hours."
This week’s New Yorker includes an excellent feature on elevators. It includes the story of Nicholas White whose elevator experience in 1999 eventually lead to a media circus, an eight week trip to Anguilla, his dismissal from BusinessWeek and, somehow, to his current unemployment. It’s hard to believe, but somehow understandable. [YourMonkeyCalled]
In 1999, BusinessWeek production...
WatchIn 2006, Jason Smith took a script he had written in 1993 when he was a 15-year old home movie producer and presented it at the The Mortified Theatre in LA. The guest actors included Elijah Wood, Busy Phillips, James Denton and Kevin McDonald. [Waxy]
Also: Waxy suggests the “I Hate Drake” monologue.
“Not only can’t pitchers control it, but hitters can’t hit it, catchers can’t...”
– Former AL umpire Ron Luciano on the knuckleball. TheLoveOfSports has a great essay on the erratic pitch. [UweBlog]
Two weeks into baseball season means sports analysis and brief fashion reviews from UweBlog.
Really rooting for the Kansas City Royals. They have a likable young team. Brian Bannister...
Growing up in an NPR family makes me interested excited about a bunch of pretty geeky stuff. And no program on NPR has probably made my parents laugh outloud more than Car Talk.
Which might explain why this morning I was rushed with excitement to discover that Car Talk’s Click and Clack Tappet Brothers (Tom and Ray Magliozzi) will have their own cartoon series on PBS primetime.
“I went to a restaurant that serves “breakfast at any time”. So I...”
– Steven Wright [Rex Sorgatz’s notstevenwright]
“I told him, ‘You want to try something, try it on me,’ … Only...”
– Slate Magazine has a great story about Ron Tolkin, a 61-year-old Brooklyn stenographer, who, before wrestling with a convicted drug felon, used some pretty harsh language in the courtroom. Trying subdue “the crazed” Victor Wright, Tolkin encouraged the assailant to turn his attack from...
I wish I could be part of something that the media would refer to as “the Hillbilly Express.”
Sweet-Juniper photographed the beautiful decayed remains of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository. They also blogged about it. [ThingsMagazine]
“Detroit, with its thousands of abandoned structures, is something of a mecca for kids and adults who still do this sort of thing. There’s a whole community of them here, and people come from all over the country to ‘explore’...
Heading East’s Raul Gutierrez recently published a list of lies he’s told his three-year old son. [WaxyLinks] “If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.”
“Make your vision of where you want to be a reality. Nothing is impossible.”
– Advertising creative director Paul Arden, author of the amazing books It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be and Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite, died yesterday after a long illness. [DesignObserver]
Fears
Jan Pettit listed the “Heirarchy of Fears,” the chronological sequence of fears one has in his/her lifetime. It’s interesting to see the multiple occurrences of certain fears. [Kottke]
Just throwing this out there: I have a sinking suspicion that TXDOT is in cahoots with razor blade manufacturers.
“Good afternoon,
I attached this camera to the bench so you could take pictures....”
– The Plug tied a disposable camera to a bench with the sign above. “Stranger Photos Have Happened” documents what strangers do with a camera that’s not theirs. [happynotes]
April Fool’s makes the Internet stupid. Merlin agrees.
