Business Cards: Page I

For many years I collected business cards. After trips near and far, close friends*, family, and dysfunctional relatives would pass them along to me. I collected the ones that struck my fancy in a binder with sleeves that were designed for trading cards.

What strikes my fancy? Font use, color choice, kitschy clip art, poor design, etc. I do not think business cards will ever go away from the landscape of America, but it certainly is a dying breed of communication.

My partner in life scanned these in for me a while back, and I’m glad they were not lost in RGBisMe’s Great Self-Created Blog Disaster.

Of note, middle card, third column: Rick Williams was the District Justice that married us in December 1984. The magenta cow above it just makes me smile. Click on the image for a larger view of the cards.

*P.S. I try not to use the “F” word nowadays, it leads to far too many tangled issues with complications beyond belief.

The Adventures of the Muddle-headed Wombat

via BibliOdyssey

“[S]ome delightful scratchy illustrations from the 1962 book by Ruth Park, The Adventures of the Muddle-headed Wombat. The illustrator for this book was Noela Young.”

See more of illustrations from the book here. Nothing beats wombat illustrations from 1962. Nothing.

All The World’s A Page

via ministry of type

“Once upon a time we asked ourselves a peculiar question: could you fit an entire literary work onto a single poster? Would it still be legible? What would it reveal about the hidden structures and rhythms of the text? . . .”

Visit the site, here, to see all four posters in the series so far. Image is Homer’s The Iliad two-color offset print (thunderous black / Aegean blue), printed on 120g Alster Werkdruck, typeset in 3.25pt Malaga.

Geometric Pattern

via the ephemera society item of the month

“Sheet of paper with hand-painted blue edge and crisp embossed border by Dobbs, London. Circa 1820s. This page shows how a complex shape can be created from simpler shapes working only with a compass. A companion piece on the same paper bears the watermark ‘J Budgen 1821.’ ”

Visit the site here to explore more ephemera.

100 Tips #46: Invert Your Mac’s Display Colors

via cult of mac

“Here’s a fun one. Whatever you’re doing on your Mac, from any application or any document, try hitting all these buttons together: Control+Option+Command+8. Bam! Your screen colors are inverted. Don’t worry, you haven’t broken anything, and this isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. To switch things back, hit the same key combination again: Control+Option+Command+8. The same command toggles this feature on and off. The inverted colors feature is one of the accessibility tools that are built into OS X (to see more of them, go to System Preferences and click on Universal Access).”

Read the rest here.

Word On The Street: Photos Of People With Words

via npr

“Photographer Richard Nagler writes in his new book, Word On The Street, that in the late '70s, he was wandering the streets of Oakland, Calif., working on another project:

‘I came across an old building ... that had the single word TIME bolted to it in large letters. ... As I looked up, an elderly woman gazed out a window near TIME, but she quickly closed the curtain when, I thought, she saw me across the street with my camera. I was struck by the power of the scene I had just witnessed, and frustrated at not having been able to record it on film.’

Nagler went back to that very spot several times over the next few weeks trying to capture the moment. "The scene evoked in me thoughts of mortality and the relentless passages of time and life. The juxtaposition of the person and the word held a quiet poetic beauty in its pathos and sadness."

Read the rest here, see more on Nagler's website.