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.
Designing the Montreal Olympic logo
Scans of an article from Design magazine on the creation of the 1976 Olympic logo for Montreal. I knew that the logo’s symbolism was multi-faceted, but never realized quite how structured and grid-based the design was.
Luxury and socialism in Europe
Two articles by Americans who are finding that European socialism isn’t all that bad. In Going Dutch, Russell Shorto is initially perplexed by an odd dichotomy of welfare state and one of the world’s first free market economies, but has come to appreciate it. Trevor Corson examines the Finnish luxury of time and solace over that of material objects.
Arial is everywhere
Sander Baumann documents the ubiquity of Arial in real-world practice. Most of his photos come from Amsterdam, the heart of a culture known from its design prowess.
International Design Workers Federation
The latest episode of Layer Tennis between James Draplin and Chris Glass was one of the best I’ve seen in awhile, it borders on a conceptual exercise in the evolutionary developement of a brand. I now await the rise of the IDWF, so I may obtain my membership card and ironic t-shirt.
Update: The domain has been registered, but it just links to the match for now.
Improving your web typography
Antonio Carusone offers eight simple steps for improving your typography. It’s fairly standard for the most part, but he provides some good CSS examples for web developers.
Photos from NASA
Pretty much all of the media produced by NASA is public domain. That means you can do almost anything you want with the wealth of images available at NASA Images. In other news, efforts are being made to recover high-resolution images from the Lunar Orbiter program that was tasked with mapping the lunar surface before the Apollo missions. The ongoing recovery program is based out of an abandoned McDonald’s.