The Beauty of Typography: Writing Systems and Calligraphy of the World. An extensive introduction to a number of non-Western writing systems.
Category: links
Pentagon brownie recipe
How to make brownies, Pentagon style. The 26 page specification, also known as MIL-C-44072C, is available for your perusal.
Big bang
The Big Bang was an explosion of space, not in space.
The Big Bang wasn’t an explosion of stuff like atoms or molecules, it was an explosion of a place and instance, it was the creation of when and where. Before the Big Bang there was simply nothing, there was no ‘where’ nor was there a ‘when’. It doesn’t even make sense to say ‘before the Big Bang’.
Facebook privacy
A bewildering tangle of options. To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. The site has gone from walled garden to glass box on a busy street corner.
Gopher archive
John Goerzen has archived Gopherspace (all 40gb) and made it available as a 15gb compressed torrent. Gopher was around in the 1990s before the World Wide Web, it was similar, but not hyperlinked. I remember using Gopher in high-school, it was the first time I ever came across the
xkcd Colour Survey
Results from a colour survey by xkcd. The male gender needs some help. Well, at least the type of male that reads xkcd.
Sushi at home
For sushi at home, skip the fish. Sushi really isn’t that hard to make, as long as you don’t mind the odd fail piece. Chicken teriyaki and breaded prawns are also good to throw into the mix.
Pacific theatre photos
A collection of World War II photographs from the Pacific theatre. The scope and scale in some of the shots is mind-boggling.
Awesome things
A recent interview with Neil Pasricha, author of 1000 Awesome Things, celebrating the release of The Book of Awesome.
His blog — some entries are nostalgic, reflective, but always positive — now gets about 40,000 visits a day, more than 11 million hits in total. His email box is regularly packed with readers’ messages, spilling out their woes and thanking him for lifting their spirits.
Neil was one of my editors at Golden Words years ago. He’s incredibly funny and well-deserving of the attention that the site has garnered. I hope the book sells really well, I’ll be picking up a copy when it makes it to this side of the pond, or next time I’m back in Canada. Congratulations Neil!
OpenType basics
A beginner’s guide to OpenType, a good overview if you’re not familiar. Being a late-comer to the world of print design, I have to admit that I’m a fan of OpenType and what you can do with it in InDesign.