Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Today’s Fortune: 10/26

Funny how little things like fortunes, horoscopes, and other
ephemera can ring the truth that we need to take in.

Today’s fortune from Yogi Tea [Chai Black].


Monday, October 24, 2011

Ghost Sign: Idwall Parry Printing

I wasn’t entirely sure of the name of the printer on this ghost sign, so I Googled “Idwall Parry + Scranton” and had it confirmed by this blog post by Frank H. Jump.
A couple of other images I captured can be found here and here. Frank H. Jump’s Fading Ad blog can be found here. More of his Scranton images here, and this interesting post on Scranton’s Capitol Pressing Plant.





Image of the Day: Paradise Wall


Sitting on a paper moon


via retronaut
More images here.  Listen to a recorded version of “It’s Only A Paper Moon” sung by Abbie Gardner and see more images here.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Photoseed.com



via art of the photogravure
“PhotoSeed is a labor of love by David Spencer, a passionate and leading collector of vintage fine-art photography. The site, comprised of his personal collection, was populated in his free time and includes his detailed backgrounds for many of the works. Defined by the depth of the collection and content, it’s a tool for new users and the curious, as well as scholarly researchers.”
Explore Photoseed here.


Music Typewriter


via Ministry of Type
“I’ve never seen one of these before, and I’ve never even heard of such a thing. A typewriter for music! I must admit it does seem like an obvious idea, but I’d had in mind the scene of a composer in some drafty garret, gripped by an urgent muse, scratching out notes on parchment with a tattered quill by feeble candlelight. Or is that just poets?…”
More on it here.

Image of the Day: Moss and Lichen


Saturday, October 22, 2011

Friday, October 21, 2011

Words of Wisdom by Seymour Chwast


via imprint
An inspirational message for today, #10.
Read more inspirational messages from Seymour Chwast.

The Rapture: Part II Oct 21st

Dan Piraro writes on his blog about Harold Camping and the end of the world today, October, 21st. More on the Rapture prediction here on NPR. And finally, a music video by R.E.M. performing It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).

Bizarro: Comedy in the Computer Age


via Bizarro Blog!
More great Apple related comics by Dan Piraro can be found here.

Throwable panoramic ball camera


via designboom
“Containing 36 image sensor modules, the descriptively named prototype camera takes a single wide angle aerial panorama image when launched into the air...”
Read more here and here.

Jack Layton's Words by Stuart Thursby


via How About Orange
“Early on the morning of Monday, August 22, 2011, Jack Layton – the charismatic leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party – succumbed to his battle with cancer. Here are some of his words. They’re sized to be printable at 11x17.”
Download them here.

Image of the Day: The Three Pools

At Fisherman’s Paradise

Thursday, October 20, 2011

10 line Gothic Condensed Octagon Shade


via letterpress daily
This just makes me smile.


Type-O-Matic


via letterology
“Tired of that same old forgettable e-mail message in Arial? Nostalgic for old technology and real postage stamps? Want to make a unique impression with your correspondence? Now you can with the new Type-O-Matic monospaced typewriter service. Just feed your text and mailing information into the official Type-O-Matic order form, and your lovingly hand-typed letter will arrive in your recipient's mailbox within days. For just £9.50 (approximately $15 US) your letter will be typewritten (up to 200 words) on white watermarked heavyweight writing paper with matching envelope and can be mailed anywhere (with appropriate Air Mail postage if necessary) to your recipient...”
Read the rest here, visit the Typo-O-Matic site here.

Lytro Light Field Camera


via cult of mac
“This is the Lytro, a bizarre and radical new concept in digital photography that lets you snap an image now, and worry about focusing it later. Pre-orders just opened today, and you can grab one for as little as $399. But before you click the order button, make sure you have a Mac – because Lytro doesn’t work with Windows computers yet.

How does the Lytro work? The official description sounds like something from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy: The light field fully defines how a scene appears. It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space. Conventional cameras cannot record the light field…”

Read the rest here, and more on the Lytro here, here, and here.

Take a line for a walk


via communication arts
“Cengage Learning promotes exercise for the creative muscles with Take a line for a walk. Authored by Robin Landa and designed by Seattle’s Modern Dog Design Co., the journal is comprised of mostly blank pages coupled with varied prompts that cue people to respond to whatever creative action—sketch, design, conceive, write—is called for. The author collaborated with designers, artists, architects, and experts in a variety of disciplines to vary the exercises in order to address numerous ways of thinking and creating and to entice all types of students, visual arts (and non-art majors) to think creatively.”
Details can be found here.








Image of the Day: Circular Pool

At Fisherman’s Paradise

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Jae Rhim Lee: The Infinity Burial Project


via TED Talks
“Here's a powerful provocation from artist Jae Rhim Lee. Can we commit our bodies to a cleaner, greener Earth, even after death? Naturally—using a special burial suit seeded with pollution-gobbling mushrooms…”
Watch her talk here.  
The Infinity Burial Project can be found here, and the blog here.

Image of the Day: Rusted Gate


Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Psychologists Chase Down Sleep Demons


The Nightmare by John Henry Fuseli

via Penn State Daily Newswire
“What do Moby Dick, the Salem witch trials and alien abductions all have in common? They all circle back to sleep paralysis. Less than 8 percent of the general population experiences sleep paralysis, but it is more frequent in two groups -- students and psychiatric patients -- according to a new study by psychologists at Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania. Sleep paralysis is defined as "a discrete period of time during which voluntary muscle movement is inhibited, yet ocular and respiratory movements are intact," the researchers state in the current issue of Sleep Medicine Reviews. Hallucinations may also be present in these transitions to or from sleep...”
Read the full story on Live.

Image of the Day: Autumnal Pool


Monday, October 17, 2011

Image of the Day: Do Not Block

I found it humorous that this sign was blocked by another gate.

Wait. What Was the Question? A Series of Questions for Christopher Simmons


via neenahpaperblog
“The time I take to answer this question I'll never get back . . . Everything we do — create, love, mourn, worry, work, play, and so on — draws from a pool of nanoseconds into which no tributary flows. We can give away our time however we choose — just remember that you're not going to get any of it back.”
— Christopher Simmons


For the next 12 weeks Stefan G. Bucher  chooses questions
from his new book, 344 Questions: The Creative Person's Do-It-Yourself-Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment and asks some seriously smart and capable men and women for their answers.

Read the interview here, find 344 Questions here.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

John Hilgart: 4 Color Process


Word Processor

via how
“John Hilgart is obsessed with vintage comic books and has several interesting image collections including 4CP, which features close-ups of vintage printing, Comic Book Cartography, a collection of maps and diagrams, and Super Type!, which features comic book mastheads with amazing typography…”
Visit 4CP here.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Irony & Sarcasm Marks, Part 3


via shady characters
“Ironics notwithstanding, the irony mark lay dormant for much of the latter part of the 20th century. As had been the case with many other previously obscure marks of punctuation, however, the click-to-publish ease of the web well and truly rescusitated its fortunes: more new irony marks appeared in the decade from 2001 to 2010 than in any period before. Ironically enough, the first digital irony mark was not intended to punctuate irony in a general sense but instead its laser-guided offspring, sarcasm…”
Read the rest here.

Julian Bialowas: Visual Thinking


via how
“Looking for some visual and mental inspiration? Check out 365Q from Canadian photographer and designer Julian Bialowas, who paired an inspirational quote with one of her images every day for a year...”

Friday, October 14, 2011

Ganesh: A Holy Holiday Leaves a Mess


via npr
“Ganesh is a Hindu festival that takes place at the end of each summer, particularly in Mumbai. Traditionally, clay statues of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of beginnings and remover of obstacles, are placed in homes and worshiped for the duration of the 10-day festival. At the end, the statues are immersed in water (such as a river) and left to float away. The festival has modest origins. First organized in the 1890s, the idea was to invoke Hindu symbolism to foster a sense of nationalism in India's struggle for independence from Britain…”
Read the rest, and see more images, here.

Image of the Day: The Greek

Spotted in State College, PA

Bookbinding Cigarette Trade Cards


via letterology
From a set of British cigarette trade cards (circa 1922-1939) on mending old books from the George Arents collection at the New York Public Library.
See others in the series here.



Thursday, October 13, 2011

Touchscreen Braille Writer Lets the Blind Type on a Tablet


via wired
“One group of people has traditionally been left out of our modern tablet revolution: the visually impaired. Our slick, button-less touchscreens are essentially useless to those who rely on touch to navigate around a computer interface, unless voice-control features are built in to the device and its OS. But a Stanford team of three has helped change that. Tasked to create a character-recognition program that would turn pages of Braille into readable text on an Android tablet, student Adam Duran, with the help of two mentor-professors, ended up creating something even more useful than his original assignment: a touchscreen-based Braille writer…”
Read the rest here.

Image of the Day: No Dumping

Taken near Baltimore’s Riverside Park

PA Pixelworkers


via United Pixelworkers
Great shirts from Full Stop, a web design shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Here’s Pennsylvania’s!

Atomix


via liquid treat
“Atomix is an artful plaything designed in 1966 by Francois Dallegret and recently reintroduced to the market by New York-based Areaware. Sandwiched between five-inch squares of clear acrylic are 6,000 stainless steel balls that form an infinite number of fractal patterns when shaken, tilted or rotated. Originally created to help physics students visualize atomic structures, Atomix is just the thing to smarten up your desk…”
Visit Areaware here.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Confusing (and Frequently Misused) Type Terminology, Part 1


via fonts.com
“In the world of type and design, several typographic terms are either commonly confused with other terms, or are simply misunderstood in their own right. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we will shed light on three pairs of words that are widely misused. The words in each pair are related, but they refer to different things - and they are not interchangeable…”

Font vs. Typeface
Character vs. Glyph
Legibility vs. Readability

Read the rest here.

Richard Nicholson: The Last Of London’s Darkrooms


via npr
“Richard Nicholson recalls that in the ’90s, darkrooms were busy, exciting places for commercial photographers in London: ‘There was a real buzz in these places,’ he writes,‘a sense of competition, but also communality.’

About a decade later, he was struck by how much had changed. ‘I came up with idea for this project when printing in one of these hire darkrooms. The buzz had gone. No one else was there. It seemed like a desolate, abandoned place. I was struck by the bulky, lumpen beauty of the photographic enlargers.’

And so began his project, Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light, a documentation of London’s remaining professional darkrooms. A mere five years after starting the project, more than half of the darkrooms in the series are no longer operational.

‘I wanted to capture the darkroom before it disappeared,’ Nicholson says. ‘I choose to photograph the darkrooms of professional printers as these represent the essence of the craft.’ ”
Visit his site here.



Adobe and the 50" Hi-Def Drafting Table


via nytimes
“When I entered the office of Kevin Lynch, Adobe Systems’s chief technology officer, on Friday in San Francisco, I was immediately caught off guard by a large high-definition television hiding in the corner of the room. It was at least 50-inches wide and propped up at a 45 degree angle on a drafting table.

“What is that!” I asked.

Mr. Lynch paused and looked at me as if I had just seen a Christmas present before it was wrapped and placed under the tree. “Ummm, that’s the future,” he said. “It’s a drafting table running Photoshop Touch where you can essentially draw and create on a screen.”

The future, for Adobe, it turns out, is in the past…”

Read the rest here.

Image of the Day: Sugar Maples

The sugar maples are on Penn State campus are turning brilliant!

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Cats and Headbutting


via cat vs human
See the rest of the comic here. It is so true...

My Water’s On Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song)



via propublica.org
“My Water’s On Fire Tonight” is a product of Studio 20 NYU (http://bit.ly/hzGRYP) in collaboration with ProPublica.org (http://bit.ly/5tJN). The song is based on ProPublica’s investigation on hydraulic fractured gas drilling (read the full investigation here: http://bit.ly/15sib6).

Music by David Holmes and Andrew Bean
Vocals and Lyrics by David Holmes and Niel Bekker
Animation by Adam Sakellarides and Lisa Rucker

Image of the Day: Domino Sugar

Taken near Baltimore’s Riverside Park and Inner Harbor

Monday, October 10, 2011

Time Shutter New York

0
via cultofmac
“Time Shutter New York, a new iPhone app, transports you to the streets of Manhattan at the dawn of the 20th century, allowing users to see and experience the city exactly as real New Yorkers did a hundred years ago. Time Shutter New York contains 170 photographs of Manhattan landmarks, skylines and street scenes taken between 1900 and 1925. The app guides users to exact locations where the shots were taken, and with an opacity adjustment slider, allows you to seamlessly overlay what it looked like then with what it looks like now...”
Visit Time Shuttter here.



Sunday, October 9, 2011