A recent article from Malcolm Gladwell examines what happens when an underdog breaks the rules. In identifying your weaknesses versus a larger, better equipped opponent, and changing your strategy to work with your strengths, you greatly improve your chances of winning.
Month: May 2009
Cornell goes public domain
Cornell has opened up their archive of public domain works, removing restrictions on reproduction and use of the works. On top of that, they have released more than seventy thousand works to the internet archive.
3D Geometry
Scanned images of 3D geometry diagrams from Richard at Ace Jet 170. Now I just need to find a pair of glasses so I can see them properly.
Beck and Paris
Ken Garland’s lectures at Reading were some of my favourites during the time I spent there, particularly his passion for Harry Beck and the London Underground. I don’t really remember him mentioning Beck’s connection to the Paris Metro, probably because there was only limited class time.
Ad archive
The Duke Library has a great collection of advertisements spanning from 1911 to 1955. It’s where I found a good chunk of the material used in the last design of the site.
Happy ninth
Time to celebrate! The weblog is nine years old. It actually started on an old ISP with a tilde address, and migrated to eightface a few months later. Kind of hard to believe that it’s been around for about a third of my lifetime. I never had any sort of long-term plan — at the time it just seemed really cool that you could use blogger to update your site from any browser, rather than having to rely on FTP.
In other news, I’ll be starting a live redesign in the near future, it’s been awhile since I’ve done one. I liked the collage graphics in the most recent layout, but it bothers me that one of the main elements was the Morton Salt girl. Being Canadian, I had no idea that she was part of an iconic American brand. At the time, I was going for an early 1950s vibe, and it was just one image among many. Another reason for a redesign is that the overall look just doesn’t suit what I’m posting, the typography is a bit too serious. Nine years of posting has also produced a lot of legacy issues. I need to start going through my old posts to clean things up (tag the old entries, add titles and whatnot), before things get really out of hand.
Influencing web design
Jason Santa Maria’s lecture about The Influence of Print Design on the web. This is kind of where I was headed with my master’s thesis about the changing online newspaper, but I felt the time crunch and didn’t really do it properly.
By beard weight alone
Poets ranked by their beard weight. The gravity of a poet’s beard was determined using the lost art of pogonomancy, or divination by beard. I don’t have to explain how awesome this is.
Wu-Tang covers redesigned
Logan Walters has reimagined Wu-Tang’s album covers in the style of Blue Note Records. All of the covers are available in his flickr stream.
Rare books online
The Rare Book Room allows you to read old manuscripts in their original form, including works by Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin and Galileo.