The Subjectivity of Color Perception

via brain pickings
“How do ‘normal’ people see ‘normal’ color? Turns out, the answer isn’t as black and white. From the fine folks behind BBC’s excellent Horizon series — who have also pondered the nature of reality, the age-old tension between science and religion, how music works, what time is, and how money came to dominate the world — comes Do You See What I See, a fascinating look at the subjectivity and divergence of how we each see the world and the surprising power colors can have on our mood, cognition, emotion, and entire lives…”
Read the rest here.

Image of the Day: Rooftop Sunset

Emerald Green or Paris Green, the Deadly Regency Pigment

via jane austin's world
“Once upon a time green paint literally killed people. In 1814 in Schweinfurt, Germany, two men named Russ and Sattler tried to improve on Scheele’s green, a paint made with copper arsenite. The result was a highly toxic pigment called emerald green. Made with arsenic and verdigris, the bright green color became an instant favorite with painters, cloth makers, wall paper designers, and dyers…”
Read the rest here.

Deconstructing the Color Wheel

via neatorama
The colors we use today have fascinating origins based in treachery, lust, and mythology. Find out more as Mental Floss (via Neatorama) deconstructs the color wheel. Next time you use green, remember that pigment maker Carl Wilhem Scheele died of arsenic poisoning.
Read the rest here.

Images of the Day: Trompe l'oeil

A& A showed us this mural at the corner of 83rd and York

Note the sewing machine  in “the window”

Stairs flanked by friendly creatures.

You’ve Got a Friend T-Shirt

via jamestaylor

I love the retro-feel design of the “You’ve Got a Friend T-Shirt” supporting James Taylor’s recent tour.

Images of the Day: Green Man

Thsnks to trueindigo for capturing these images!

Wallpapered Dumpsters

via Pippa's Cabinet
Take a look at artist Christine Finley's wallpapered dumpsters. “Wallpapered Dumpsters transform environmental activism into unexpected beauty. This project is an inquiry into urban waste, free art, and notions of femininity, beauty and domesticity. Inspired by free and accessible art the artist states, ‘If we see dumpsters as works of art, we have raised consciousness...’
Read the rest here. Visit the Wallpapered Dumpster site here.

Image of the Day: Clothing Tag

The three-legged crow on a clothing tag.
Note the repeating background pattern is also the crow.

Pantone 100 Postcards

via Pippa's Cabinet
“Legendary color authority PANTONE and Bridget Watson Payne have teamed up to create this box of 100 postcards. Every card is a different brilliant PANTONE color. And the postcard box is also being published in Spanish, French, and German…”
Read the rest here.

Business Cards of the Day

South Side Tattoo and Body Piercing: Sometime, no matter how much you like a script font, you just shouldn’t use it.

Apple: Clean, classy, and a silver foil Apple logo. It just works. I have an older card from the early 80s at work that I’ll have to post again [lost when I deleted my old blog] as a comparison.

Houck & Gingrich: Simple, clean, Lewistown typesetting. At least it is all in the same font, though the letter spacing is a bit tight for all caps.

Pantone VISA®

Unbelievable.

Bodega Cats

via internets celebrities
For a smile, watch Bodega Cats by Internets Celebrities.

And while you have a few minutes to spare, also watch A Fare Slice? “In 1980, New Yorker Eric Bram noticed that for twenty years the price of a subway token had tended to match the price of a slice of pizza. Thirty years later, his hypothesis still holds true.”
Bodega Cats can be seen here; A Fare Slice? can be seen here.

Business Cards of the Day

Espresso Yourself Cafe: Simple two color design, the typography choices are hard to read, but they do have excellent vegetarian food options!

Going Local: A lot of information packed onto this card, in fact too much information and too tiny. A better solution would have been to go to a two sided card.

Hotel State College & Company: Great ampersand, though it is a bit forced and crowded intertwining with the “S” and “C” and the gradient, well. . . it just doesn’t stand up to the test of time forcing the balance. Using thin display type for small text isn’t a good idea either, no matter how nice the font.

Rocket Science: Overall, a nice card. I like the tagline they use as well, especially since I am not mechanically inclined. Easy to read font choice too

Otto’s: Swoosh! Double swoosh! Not a fan of flush right text, and the flipping back to flush left. I miss the cat design. Perhaps just  one swoosh and a different type treatment...

Ochre Mills

via Juniata’s River Valleys By Jeffrey Adams
My in-laws loaned us a copy of the book this past weekend. Lots of interesting photos and snippets of tales. I love the name “Ochre Mills” which is near Juniata [note the typo on the old photo]. I wonder if remnants of the area still around, or if it is now silently resting under a development.
You can see more of Adams’ book here.

Fluid type font

via designboom
“Designed by Hussain Almossawi of Bahraini studio Skyrill Design, ‘fluid type’ is conceptualized as a dynamic typeface, in which each character in addition to being usable as a static letter has its own exploding animation…”
Read the rest here. I was so wishing that this included an ampersand...

30 Years of the IBM PC

via what's new now
“The IBM PC was launched 30 years ago today…”
Read the rest here.

The Old Man of the Lake

pointed out by my son
“About 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, a volcano named Mount Mazama, located in present-day Oregon, erupted, leaving behind a big crater.  Over time, water from rain and snowfall filled the hole, and Crater Lake was born.  And Crater Lake is not like most other lakes.  As seen here from above, it is a deep, undisturbed blue, having no natural rivers leading in or out of it, no fish indigenous to it (although it has since been artificially stocked), etc.  Over the course of 250 years, its water -- cold, due to the elevation (at 6,148 feet, Crater Lake is over a mile above sea level) -- is replaced via an ongoing cycle of evaporation and precipitation. But what makes Crater Lake truly unique is a solitary piece of wood, pictured right, nicknamed the Old Man of the Lake…’
Read the rest here.

The @-symbol

via shady characters
“Like the ampersand, the ‘@’ symbol is not strictly a mark of punctuation; rather, it is a logogram or grammalogue, a shorthand for the word ‘at’. Even so, it is as much a staple of modern communication as the semicolon or exclamation mark, punctuating email addresses and announcing Twitter usernames. Unlike the ampersand, though, whose journey to the top took two millennia of steady perseverance, the at symbol’s current fame is quite accidental. It can, in fact, be traced to the single stroke of a key made almost exactly four decades ago…”
Read the rest here, and a bit more here. Part 2 of the series can be found here.

Image of the Day: Pantone Flash Drive

A gift from X-Rite after filling out an online survey.
Squee!