May 2008
87 posts
4 tags
Life Without Buildings has an article about the “apocryphal” urban architecture in Frank Miller’s upcoming film adaptation of The Spirit. [C-Monster]
The classic comic series created by Will Eisner is set in Central City, a city “similar to DC’s other fictional cities such as Gotham City and Metropolis.”
In just that one minute of footage, we get an...
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Filming of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has just wrapped and NYT offers us a great preview. [GvsB]
To be released in November, the film has an amazing cast including Viggo Mortensen as the lead as well as Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce in supporting roles. Michael K. Williams (Omar Little of The Wire) will also appear in the film as a thief.
The producers chose Pennsylvania, one...
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What I Learned Today posted some intriguing (and totally depressing) information about the Burmese government profiting from foreign aid sent to assist those affected by the cyclone.
The cyclone is estimated to have killed 130,000 (78,000 dead and 56,000 missing) and left 2.5 million refugees. Many countries have attempted to provide aid, but the junta initially denied it. They have slowly been...
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Ransom Note Typography’s Jon Deal posted a hilarious list of “Lies I Am Not Sorry I’ve Told.”
• I only had a very small bowl of ice cream. • Yes, please send me a copy of your band’s demo CD.
Also: Deal and John Moltz just posted the debut episode of their new tech comedy podcast, Technology! Whiskey! Sexy! [JimRay]
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Since reissuing some of their early albums, it seems The Replacements have been everywhere over the last few months.
Almost done with his whirlwind tour through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee writing about the remaining Delta Blues juke joints, Aquarium Drunkard took a break to offer some comments on the recent Replacements reissues. AqD’s Justin Gage explains how the...
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Sad trombone. Once again, Dwell is the bearer of bad news.
Last week, it was news that the amazing Esherick House designed by Louis Kahn failed to sell at its auction May 18.
And now this week, Dwell shares the unfortunate news that the winning auction bidder of Neutra’s Kaufmann Desert House has “already failed to meet the terms of the transaction.” The house, build in 1946,...
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"The Walt Disney of the digital generation"
Sunday’s New York Times had a great profile on Shigeru Miyamoto, the lead game designer for Nintendo. [Fimoculous]
Miyamoto’s incredible vision seems as present in the current and future Wii releases as it was with games like Mario and Donkey Kong in Nintendo’s infancy.
“I see the Miis as the most recent character creation from Nintendo,” Mr. Miyamoto said. “What’s interesting...
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Illustrator Brian Taylor, who goes by the pseudonym “Candy Killer,” has posted some incredible sample pages from his Moleskine sketchbooks. It’s best to view them large. [Moleskinerie]
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"It's more like baseball."
The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell reports on the sudden drop in the number of home runs over the past two seasons as compared to the seasons of the late ’90s and early ’00s. [UweBlog]
Suddenly, a sport that produced 5,386 home runs in 2006 is on pace for 4,442 this year — a 17.5 percent drop, or a loss of almost 1,000 home runs in just two seasons.
Boswell connects...
Watch[JimRay]
This week’s episode of You Look Nice Today, titled “Sacks-Minnelli Disease,” is even more hilarious than other episodes in their already super funny podcast.
Not far into the episode, Merlin, Scott and Adam discuss the current state of dance moves. The trio encourage listeners to do “The Fishstick,” a dance, which resembles simply standing in place. Boing...
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Biggest Drawing in the World
Erik Nordenankar has created the “Biggest Drawing in the World”: a self-portrait spanning the entire globe. [WaxyLinks]
With the help of a GPS device and DHL, I have drawn a self portrait on our planet, my pen was a briefcase containing the GPS device, being sent around the world. The paths the briefcase took around the globe became the strokes of the drawing. Update: Turns out it was...
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Last week on ISO50, graphic designer Scott Hansen mentioned he had accepted a request to design a Barack Obama poster for the campaign’s Artists for Obama series.
The final design was released yesterday and looks amazing. It’s will soon be available at the Barack Obama online store.
On a related note, I just “learned” Safari the proper spelling for ‘Barack’...
Flickr user jl.incrowd posted a beautiful photo set of vintage album covers designed by “pioneering graphic designer” Alex Steinweiss. [GoodMagazine]
In 1939, Steinweiss was hired as Columbia Records’ first art director. In the years shortly after, it’s believed Steinweiss invented the concept of album cover art. He would go on to design roughly 2,500 covers over the next...
More Buckminster Fuller. This time it’s a limited release portfolio containing 13 patent screenprints. [Print]
The 60 portfolios, which each cost $50,000, are hand-numbered and signed by Fuller. Each of the portfolios contain patent drawings to some of his more famous inventions, including the Dymaxion Car, Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, Geodesic Dome and Tensegrity.
Each of the thirteen...
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Brand Timeline Portrait
Advertising blogger “Jane Sample” has created “a visual representation of [her] Typical Friday” through the brands she uses. [RandomWalks]
News to her and me, this type of chronological brand loyalty timeline is defined as a “brand timeline portrait.”
Someone commented to her post that this should be a mandatory project in the beginning of all Intro to...
Animal shapes created by London Underground routes. [KatyDid]
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Dwell Blog reports Kahn’s The Esherick House that I mentioned a few weeks back has failed to sell at last week’s auction.
In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, auctioneer Richard Wright said he believed the slumping housing market had no effect, but the economy “may have had something to do with it.”
Also: Dwell goes on to note that Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House...
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When Twitter is down, “find more productive ways to ignore your family.” [Delicious/Glass]
Add it to the list.
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“i’m willing to let go so long as you show me / which road not to go down /...”
– Lyrics to the second verse of Seattle songwriter Damien Jurado’s new demo, “Vivian Kane.”
Also: Jurado’s new album Caught In the Trees is due out Sept. 9 on Secretly Canadian.
Tricks of the Trade
After a birthday party clown explained the same old “booger” fails to get the laugh it once did, TMN contributing writer Matthew Baldwin asked readers what other adjustments are required in their particular profession.
“Tricks of the Trade” is a compiled list showing the various adaptations done to make one’s job easier. [Shmobal]
Graphic Designer If you have a...
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Argentinian bloggers La Luna and Javier posted visual/mathematical equations that result in recognized logos on their aptly titled blog Logos Logos. [BrandNew]
They’ve described their blog as “a waste of creativity based on the creativity of others.”
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The Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC will have an exhibition throughout the summer on Buckminster Fuller. [DesignInfo]
Entitled “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,” the exhibition will be “the first major American exhibition in decades devoted to the visionary mind and work of Buckminster Fuller, and the most inclusive show to date of Fuller’s work.” The...
Sunday night I attended what might be the best concert of my life thus far.
Going in, I’d never seen Radiohead and had only heard fish tales about how life-changing it is seeing them live. Leaving creatively inspired by their jaw-dropping performance, calling the show life-changing might not be all that far off. It certainly made me appreciate the tremendous effort of this band and...
Today Fimoculous linked to Boinkology’s compilation video of many of The Office’s “That’s what she said” clips. This is brilliant, and I’m shocked I hadn’t seen it posted before now.
My question is why don’t networks do more stuff like this on their own? If this was posted on NBC or Hulu, people would embed/repost it all over the place. Fans...
This weekend’s Splendid Table episode included an interview with Raghavan Iyer about his personal “curry quest,” the super vague definition of a ‘curry’ and the process of developing his new crazy-ambitious-but-probably-mouthwatering book, 660 Curries.
On the book’s website, Iyer’s editor, Suzanne Rafer, explains the initial plan for the book.
When...
WatchArtist Drew Burrows’ “In Bed” is an installation piece that on the surface “involves previously recorded footage of a woman sleeping in various positions on a bed, filmed from above.” [WaxyLinks]
At the exhibit, an “infrared camera is mounted next to the projector and reads the position of a real live person who climbs into the bed.” As the video above...
“An idle mind is………………The best way to relax”
– “A first grade teacher collected well known proverbs. She gave each child in her class the first half of a proverb and asked them to come up with the remainder of the proverb.” Some of the results are pretty hilarious. [Delicious/Glass]
To celebrate French composer Erik Satie’s would-be 148th birthday, Wired’s Listening Post blog posted a great primer of Satie’s life and notable works.
Satie’s spare, sometimes hilariously titled pieces employed repetition as a means of finding new spaces for melody and exposition, which set the stage for everything from later developments like ambient, drone, shoegaze and...
After reading Wednesday’s Kottke post on unconventional NYC travel tips, I went browsing through his “nyc” archives, which are substantial to say the least. Jason has provided so many truly awesome links about that city.
Some of my favorites are the time-lapse of NYC subway development and the paper plane graffiti done by Bloke.
Also: NY Mag has an interesting article on...
In Monday’s New York Times, Allison Arieff wrote about nature’s declined state of influence in American school construction. [DesignInfo]
Some new schools, including LA’s private The Country School, are finding sustainable and modern solutions to the nation’s school design problem.
What amounts really to a sort of cubicle culture for kids is contributing to what author...
Representing three days in March 2005, Aaron Koblin took United States FAA air traffic data and developed a series of beautiful animations. [Neatorama]
This work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the project “Celestial Mechanics” by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames...
Waxy/Andy Baio posted the first installment in a three part series on The Whitburn Project. Baio will continue his fascinating analysis over the upcoming days.
Named after Joel Whitburn of Record Research, The Whitburn Project is a massive database of exhaustive details pertaining to every popular song released in the last 120 years. It’s discussed and distributed through Usenet.
To...
The best thing currently on the internet.
Taper “travelinbeat” posted the entire set from Radiohead’s Washington D.C. show. [InformationLeafblower]
In addition to hearing this amazing band perform, those in attendance Sunday night were treated to “three to six inches of rain, which will rank very high in local spring storm history” for D.C.
Here’s hoping that Dallas is dry.
Thor Christensen of the Dallas Morning News explores the artist reaction to escalating cell phone usage at concerts. The article, “Are cellphones ruining the concert experience?,” gets input from musicians Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Carrie Brownstein, Feist and more. [Seagull]
“Everyone has this strange archiving addiction now. It’s like they’re trying to pin a...
The Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum shares some research that explains how home court might be an even greater advantage in basketball than other sports. [Clusterflock]
Alan Nevill of the Research Institute for Sport and Exercise Sciences at Liverpool’s John Moores University found:
A number of studies provide strong evidence that home advantage increases with crowd size, until the...
LogoBlink posted all the American presidential election logos/bumper stickers since 1960. [Quipsologies]
The older ones are some of my favorites. Specifically, the 1964 LBJ USA designs are great.
ESPN has compiled a list of the 10 best major league ballparks (and minor league too) as part of their Sports Travel coverage. [UweBlog]
7. Coors Field, Mile High Seats Long before they started soaking baseballs in a humidor to minimize the effects of the Rocky Mountain air on the flight of the old horsehide, the Rockies were more than happy to embrace their status as baseball’s most...
Starting off her week guestblogging at Design*Sponge, illustrator Julia Rothman walks us through designing an elaborate repeat pattern. [AustinKleon]
Cassette from my Ex is a new project that does pretty much what you’d expect from its name. It shares the mixtapes that artists, writers and musicians have received from their to-be exes during the relationship. In addition to the mixtape’s music, the site includes write ups that offer some background of the relationship and break-up.
Three tapes have been posted to-date with some...
