Miniature famous people made of vinyl in the Little Giants collection by Alphine Northcote are produced by the Jailbreak Collective.
See them all here.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Little Giants
Miniature famous people made of vinyl in the Little Giants collection by Alphine Northcote are produced by the Jailbreak Collective.
See them all here.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Weingut Ampersand
via creativepro“While the word ’Weingut’ may not sound particularly lyrical to the ears of English speakers, the Weingut font family is certainly pleasing to the eyes. This decorative display typeface, created by Georg Herold-Wildfellner, blooms with delicate buds, leaves, and tendrils.”
“Weingut Script Flourish is a decorative display font with high contrasts, perfectly drawn to the tiniest details. The font is trimmed to fairly large font sizes and is highly suitable for chapter titles or book jackets as well as Headlines, Invitations and wine labels :), although also impressing with an astounding legibility in small typesettings. Inspired by the hand drawn Blätterschrift from the 19th century Mettenleiter’s Schriftenmagazin, its basic structure is related to the English Script. The creative process started in summer 2009 and after 600 hours of work, over a 2 year period, Weingut now unfolds to reveal all its charms.”
Read more about it here.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Vote for My Wife's Video . . .
My wife writes, “A couple weeks ago, the authors of the book Run Like a Mother boldly asked for short videos about how we run like mothers. A handful of us rallied: big thanks to all you cinematographers out there. There are eight videos on their site — each less than two minutes each. Check them out, then vote on your favorite at the bottom. The top three vote receivers win either a new badass mother runner hats or visor.” She’d really like to win a hat or a visor to keep her hair out of her face while running!Her’s is #3
“Now I'm a Diva!”
Vote early, vote often!
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Trompe L’oeil: Crows in the Hawthorn
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| Crows in the Hawthorn III |
Ron Isaacs painted Trompe L’oeil constructions
See his Crows in the Hawthorn V
acrylic on birch plywood construction
21 1/2” x 19 1/4” x 5 1/4”
Read an interview with Isaacs here.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Business Cards: Page XVIII
[Middle Row] Wood•Mode: a safe but effective type treatmet.
[Bottom Row] SASCO card; Jerry Gay is my mother-in-law’s brother, who I met on one of his visits ‘up North’.
Linoskala
via Blue Pencil“…Linoskala from Linotype GmbH, a two-sided volvelle (wheel chart) used to find out characters per cicero for 25 Linotype typefaces (presumably hot metal rather than Linofilm) at a series of [Didot] point sizes. The sizes vary from typeface to typeface with most being available in 6 pt, 7 pt, 8 pt, 9 pt, 10 pt and 12 pt while a few stop at 10 pt and Excelsior additionally offers 7.5 pt and 8.5 pt. Oddly there is no 11 pt.
There are two parts to the volvelle. One is a bright orange wheel with a handle and a viewing slot that has the list of typefaces and the cicero increments (in black) as well as Linotype’s logo. The other is a larger light gray wheel with the typeface names and point sizes in black arranged around its edge.
The volvelle is not dated but it is most likely from the early 1960s since Optima (1958) is among the typefaces.”
Read the entire post here.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Billboards Converted To Swingsets
“Paris Architect Didier Faustino created this epic swing set out of a converted advertising billboard for the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture. ‘Double Happiness responds to the society of materialism where individual desires seem to be prevailing over all. This nomad piece of urban furniture allows the reactivation of different public spaces and enables inhabitants to reappropriate fragments of their city. They will both escape and dominate public space through a game of equilibrium and desequilibrium. By playing this “risky” game, and testing their own limits, two persons can experience together a new perception of space and recover an awareness of the physical world.’ ”
Business Cards: Page XVII
[Middle Row] Middle card of Richard Waters. You have to hear this instrument to truly appreciate it, and we are lucky enough to have one.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Super Moons and Perigean Tides
pointed out by my father-in-law, via nasa“On March 19th, a full Moon of rare size and beauty will rise in the east at sunset. It’s a super ‘perigee moon’—the biggest in almost 20 years. ‘The last full Moon so big and close to Earth occurred in March of 1993,’ says Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC. ‘I’d say it’s worth a look.’
Full Moons vary in size because of the oval shape of the Moon’s orbit. It is an ellipse with one side (perigee) about 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other (apogee): diagram. Nearby perigee moons are about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser moons that occur on the apogee side of the Moon’s orbit.
‘The full Moon of March 19th occurs less than one hour away from perigee—a near-perfect coincidence that happens only 18 years or so,’ adds Chester. A perigee full Moon brings with it extra-high ‘perigean tides,’ but this is nothing to worry about, according to NOAA. In most places, lunar gravity at perigee pulls tide waters only a few centimeters (an inch or so) higher than usual. Local geography can amplify the effect to about 15 centimeters (six inches)—not exactly a great flood.
Indeed, contrary to some reports circulating the Internet, perigee Moons do not trigger natural disasters. The ‘super moon’ of March 1983, for instance, passed without incident. And an almost-super Moon in Dec. 2008 also proved harmless.”
Read the rest here. Watch a ScienceCast on super moons here. The exact time of the next full moon is: NEW YORK = Saturday * 19th March 2011 * 02:10:06 pm (EST). I just love the sound of the phrase ‘perigean tides.’
Collection of Pop-ups
via Paper Forest“The Allegro Movable Book Collection is Australia’s largest and most comprehensive collection of movable and pop-up books covering over 300 years of published history. Corrie Allegro is releasing books from this collection to the public, collectors and institutions. This book site contains articles, news and related links to the genre of ‘movable’ books.”
Six Degrees of Moby and Oliver Sacks
via wired“On his upcoming effort Destroyed, Moby constructs synthetic symphonies out of sounds coaxed from broken-down gear during dead-of-night sessions in hotel rooms. It’s an insomniac artist’s way of making sense of the world during a time when the music industry, and everything else, seems to be falling into chaos. . . .
Wired.com: You serve on the board of directors of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, which works with Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain author, neurologist Oliver Sacks. What would Sacks think if he heard Destroyed?
Moby: Oliver is an interesting guy, who I hold in the highest regard. But he can be a little cranky. He mainly likes classical music, so my honest answer is I think it depends on if you caught him on a good or bad day or time. If you caught him at a time where he was really relaxed and open-minded, he might take the time to listen to Destroyed’s classical and melodic influences. But I have a feeling Concetta Tomaino, the IMNF’s executive director, might be favorably disposed to it. . . .”
Read the entire article here.
Business Cards: Page XVI
[Bottom Row] Hotel State College; still quite a presence in State College. The Pitman-Moore card—Ethical Sales Representative II? What a job title! A seach online shows that the company ‘produces pharmaceutical and biological products for animals.”
Thursday, March 17, 2011
200-year-old love letter found in chair
“A 200-year-old love letter has been found in the arm of a chair at a furniture upholsterers in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, England. The note, written in French, was in the chair bought in a house clearance in France. ‘When I started to work on the arm’, said Graham Simpson of Theocus Furniture, ‘I could see a small note, tightly folded up, about the size of a penny. When I opened it, to my amazement it was a note written in pencil, in old French.’
The style of language suggests the letter was composed about 200 years ago. It was written from a man to a woman and sent from the town of Mercurol in the Alps. The translated letter:
“My dear small love, do not be worried, do you seriously believe I would tell anything to these people, who don’t understand anything about love?
If someone insists that I say something, it will be anything but the dear love acquired by you, which is the great treasure hidden in my heart.
I didn’t tell you to come yesterday because I didn’t have the opportunity, but do come every Tuesday around 5:30, and Fridays as well; I count/hope on you tomorrow.
At the moment I write this letter, I can hear my aunt yelling, who else annoys us all day long, today and tomorrow.
My dear, I cover you with kisses and caresses until… I need you in this moment of desire. I love you.”
Hecht Sewing Machine & Motor Co.
via imprint“The other day [Steven Heller] was taken by Times Design Director Tom Bodkin to an unassuming, narrow storefront on West 38th street in the bustling Garment Center / Port Authority / New York Times area around 8th Avenue. Hecht is the name and once inside this Sewing Machine & Motor Co., Inc. comes alive with the past. The proprietor Steven Hecht is the proud collector of all things mechanical (his 94 year old father is the skilled repairer of all things machine) and the shop, the high walls and narrow 1920s-era space is filled with everything from mannequins to vintage sewing apparatus, with lights, lamps, buffers and stainless Mack Truck dogs sprinkled all around (and on two floors too). . . ”
Aled Lewis’ Toy Stories
via how“London-based designer and illustrator Aled Lewis decided to challenge himself to make a new image every day in 2011. Part of that project is a series of photo illustrations called Toy Stories where Aled photographs actual toys and adds clever/silly text with hilarious results…”
Read the rest here, visit the Toy Stories gallery here.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The Visual Topography of a Generation Gap
via Things Neatly OrganizedDan Bejar writes, “A copy was made from my original apartment key, then a copy was made from that copy. This process was repeated until the original keys information was destroyed, resulting in the topography of a generation.”6
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Christopher Payne’s Asylum
via utne reader“The state mental hospitals of the 19th and early 20th centuries—originally known as ‘lunatic asylums’—often operated within massive, majestic buildings, most of which are now abandoned or operating at a fraction of their former capacity. Christopher Payne spent several years meticulously photographing 70 of these architectural marvels, and his haunting images are collected in the beautiful new book Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, just out on MIT Press. Neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks, who worked for 25 years at Bronx State Hospital (now Bronx Psychiatric Center), pens the book’s introduction, a lively tour through the history of these asylums’ philosophies, inner workings, and patient populations as they shifted over the years.
Read the rest here. Visit Christopher Payne’s site here to see a slideshow of images, MIT Press page here.
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| Sauerkraut Vats, Danville State Hospital, PA As a child, I remember passing the Selinsgrove State Colony for Epileptics— a rambling state hospital on the way to visit my grandmothers. A few of the residents at that facility would stand or sit on benches by the road and wave to the passing cars traveling by on Route 522 . In later years I discovered that the daughter of one of my maternal grandmother’s sisters was a resident at one of Pennsylvania’s hospitals caring for the mentally retarded. |
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