The making of Zach Galifianakis from NYT Magazine, it brings the trailers for the new gerbil movie to a new level. Now, I’m confused.
Space monkeys
National Geographic has posted a collection of photos celebrating the 50-year anniversary of monkeys in space.
GOOD Infographics
GOOD Magazine keeps an archive of all the information graphics used in their articles. Seems like a good place to visit when I need a little inspiration.
Mars with pastels
The first television images of Mars were created using pastels. Project engineers were eager to know if their instrumentation was working properly, and didn’t want to wait for the imaging lab. They printed the data out on to small strips of paper and coloured with the appropriate pastel given a certain data range.
On beating Goliath
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.
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.