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...”

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

Hollowed-Out Books

via Green Chair Press
Always inspiring, Green Chair Press’ post creating a hollowed-out book is the latest how-to shared.

Guilloché

via imprint
“A guillocheur is sort of a machine operator, sort of a craftsperson, sort of an artist, who creates the beautiful rosettes we’ve all seen engraved into the backs of antique pocketwatches. (The noun form of the art form is ‘Guilloché,’ and a single engraving is called a ‘Guilloche’ with no accent over the e.) Guilloché, in (rudely) simplified terms, essentially a precursor to the Spirograph. Watching the video, you see how much artistry goes into the programming of the machine to make a pattern, how much care goes into turning the design, with careful and consistent hands, into a piece of repeatable art.
Watch the video here, and read the rest here on digital guilloche and template coding.

When Colors Clash

sent to me by a friend, not sure of the original source


Perfect graphic design humor on a Friday afternoon!

Fine Dining Sign Language

seen on boingboing
“Here’s a guide to the specialized sign language used by the Maitre D’ and staff at NYC’s Eleven Madison Park restaurant; there’s also a set of traffic rules to keep things moving smoothly…”
See more of the signs here.