Saturday, January 29, 2011
Image of the Day: Pterodactyl Ice
In our travels today we came across several of these ice-covered grape vines; they reminded me of mini-pterodactyls in flight.
First Editions of Peter Rabbit
via The Cataloguer's Desk“One of the most popular children’s books of all time, The Tale of Peter Rabbit has sold more than 45 million copies over the past century. As well as being a beloved children’s story, the book’s publication history is very interesting, with two private printings appearing before the first commercial edition. ”
Read the rest, and see more images from the private printings, here. Perhaps it is just the angled view of the pictured spread, but the expressions on the rabbits faces reminds me very much of Rosemary Wells’ series of books featuring Max the rabbit.
BBC’s Dimensions
via veryshortlist“According to its creators at the London-based BERG firm, Dimensions is a Google Map–based ‘experimental prototype’ designed for the BBC’s always-expanding, ever-impressive website. ‘We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history,’ the designers write. ‘How far would the Titanic stretch down your street?’ You can pick dozens of structures, or other space-based things or phenomena, which are split into nine categories—Space, Ancient Worlds, Cities in History, WWII, and so forth—and lay them over your own address, or any other. Some, like the area affected by the Chernobyl cloud, are unfathomably large—much bigger than we imagined them to be before plugging our hometowns into BERG’s prototype.”
Visit the Very Short List here; the BBC’s Dimensions site here.
Topps Nutty Initial Stickers, 1967
via we love typographyNorman Saunders’ original paintings for the stickers, high resolution version here.
I remember having a few of these stickers as a child. I think that they were only like about an inch tall, came on a sheet with several others, and were in a pack of trading cards.
Cire Trudon Stink Bombs
via notcotRead all about Cire Trudon, the oldest candle company in the world, and their stink bombs here; lovely photography at the site.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Business Cards: Page I
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
“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
“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.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Xavier Antin’s Just in Time, or A Short History of Production
via printerestingI’m pretty sure that this was one of the last posts in my previous blog, but I wanted to include it in the new version as well.
“Like a waterfall of printing technologies, Xavier Antin’s Just in Time, or a Short History of Production is an installation that was used to produce a book about production. Each of the four printers is from a different era and each is set to print one of the CMYK colors. The stencil duplicator does magenta, the spirit duplicator does cyan, the laser printer does black, and the inkjet does yellow. The resulting book is like a misprinted dream (or nightmare depending on how compulsive you are about registration).”
Find out more about it here.
George VI: The Reluctant King
“The last king of England (so far), George VI was an unlikely monarch, ascending to the most high-profile throne in the world when his elder brother, Edward VIII, abdicated in December 1936. The tale of his kingship -- and of his struggle to overcome a lifelong stammer while inspiring Britons during the bleak early years of World War II -- is told in the Oscar-nominated 2010 film, The King’s Speech. . . ”
Visit Life here to read and see more about George VI. Official site of The King’s Speech, a movie I highly recommend.
Typefaces of the World
via swissmiss“Typefaces of the World is a poster Shelby White created to show the typefaces that are most commonly used in a lot of today’s design. The poster includes information for each typefaces such as the year it was made, the location and the typographer. These 50 typefaces were chosen based on popularity and usefulness in present design.”
Read more here.
Sleeping Protects Memories From Corruption
via wired“Replaying memories while people are awake leaves their memories subject to tinkering. But reactivating memories during sleep protects them from interference.”
Read the rest here.
Jake Shimabukuro: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ On The Ukulele
via npr“Bohemian Rhapsody is high on the list of songs least likely to be covered by a solo ukuleleist. Yet when Jake Shimabukuro delicately yet assertively plucks out the opening notes of the quasi-operatic, hard-rocking power ballad, the 34-year-old Hawaiian is clearly out to show that there are no limits in the world of covers, and that even a seeming stunt can sound both musical and emotive.”
Read more about Shimabukuro, and listen to his version here.
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