Business Cards: Page XXIV

[Middle Row] The middle card in this row uses the maximum numbers of typefaces and point styles; it is so bad you can't stop looking at it. The card next to it, The Bird Net, harkens back to the early days of the internet and modems.

New York Public Library’s ‘Find The Future’

via the morning news
“As some Christians prepared for the Apocalypse, Elizabeth Kiem and 499 questers spent Friday night locked inside the New York Public Library with game designer Jane McGonigal…”
Read the rest here.

Textify

Ampersand Rapture Looting

via imprint
“A lovely little experimental web application, Textify, re-renders any image you feed it as a text version of itself. The app uses the typeface, colors, and scale that you specify to generate the image. Your result: a gorgeous little piece of generative art with historical ties to old ASCII art of the Usenet period.”
Works with Firefox, visit the site here to play.

Image of the Day: Rite Way Demolition

A Visual History of Famous Mac Icons

via maclife
“Mac OS 10 has given Mac users a slick GUI full of fancy visual goodies, and with the release of Lion right around the corner, it's only going to get slicker. However, we must not forget that Apple's attention to detail hasn't just been limited to their most recent releases -- they've always been pioneers on the interface front. This gallery features Apple's most humble beginnings -- their most famous icons you're sure to remember with fondness, and a few current updates as well...”
See them here.

TypeFacebook

via creativepro and make
“TypeFacebook was a booth at the 2011 Bay Area Maker Faire that was organized by the People's Republic of Paper, a loose collective of designers, type casters, paper makers, printers, and book binders. The TypeFacebook concept was simple: Using moveable lead type, people were asked to respond to the prompt Facebook uses: "What's on your mind?" Each character of your answer was a piece of metal type, which you carefully picked from a job case. You set the characters in a job stick (also called a composing stick), making sure they faced the right way. The press owner and operator, Pam DeLuco, set three people's answers into one forme and mounted the forme on a small platen press. Each participant then laid paper that would become the book cover on the press, pulled and released the press's handle, and the printing process was done. If you made typos (as I did), you either had to live with them or go through the entire process again…”
Read the rest here, and see some wonderful photos there as well.

The golden age of comics color palette

via wizzywigcomics
“Once upon a time before Adobe Photoshop, the color palette of comic books was very limited. Instead of the millions of colors that you can blend and gradiate and add filters to, there was a time where you were limited to 64 colors on average (that number is liquid if you’re a nerd about the printing process. Ed Piskor located an ‘antique’ chart of the exact mixtures for the 64 colors which were used in comics and newspaper strips for decades and then created a PSD file to share so that people can use these hues digitally."
Find out more here; there is even a link to download a ZIP file of the old comics 64 color guide PSD.

Cheryl Sorg’s Thumbprint Portraits

via liquidtreat
“Meet Cheryl Sorg. The Cincinnati-born, San Diego-based artist specializes in work inspired by and made from books. In addition to elaborate sculptures and breathtaking text collages, she has carved out an artistic niche in thumbprint portraits. Sorg enlarges her subject's thumbprint and then recreates its unique pattern. The whorls, loops, and archs are made from text and imagery that have special meaning for the subject, such as snippets of favorite books, songs, films, or, say, weekly e-mail newsletters…”
Learn more about these, here.

The Octothorpe, Pt. 1

‘lb’ as an abbreviation for libra, or ‘pound in weight’. On the left, a handwritten ‘lb’ from the pen of Isaac Newton, and on the right, a printed ‘lb’ crossed by a bar denoting its status as an abbreviation.

via Shady Characters: The secret life of punctuation
“The ‘#’ symbol is something of a problem child. It seems at first to be quite innocuous, a jack-of-all-trades whose names and uses correspond in a pleasingly systematic manner: ‘#5’ is read ‘number five’, leading to the name ‘number sign’; in North America, ‘5#’ means ‘five pounds in weight’, giving ‘pound sign’, while the cross-hatching suggested by its shape leads to the commonly used British name of ‘hash sign’. Dig a little deeper, though, and this glyph reveals itself to be a frustratingly multifaceted beast…”
Read the rest here.