Friday, May 27, 2011
The Octothorpe, part 2 of 2
via shady characters“Bell Telephone Laboratories, one-time research subsidiary of American telecoms giant AT&T, has produced some of the 20th century’s most influential developments in the worlds of science and technology. It boasts seven Nobel Prizes in Physics awarded for, among other things, a demonstration of the wave nature of matter, the invention of the transistor and the discovery of background cosmic radiation. Other notable products of this storied research centre include the laser, radio astronomy, the first communications satellite and the UNIX operating system, which forms a key component of the internet and of modern computing in general.
Most relevant in terms of punctuation, though, is a small linguistic innovation which emerged in the wake of a much larger technological one. Engaged in the 1960s in reinventing the world’s aging telephone dialing system, one of the many Bell Labs engineers working on this mammoth task was almost certainly responsible for coining the term ‘octothorpe’. And though the octothorpe’s birthplace is well recorded, the question of exactly who created it is somewhat more contentious…”
Read the rest here.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Cinderella Stamps
via letterology“A Cinderella stamp is any non-postage stamp. The oft-neglected stepchild of the postage stamp, a Cinderella may look like a stamp, but it won't carry the mail. The category includes locals, labels, tax stamps, fiscals, poster stamps, charity seals, forgeries, fantasies, phantoms, revenues, etc. Some are more elaborately designed than the postage stamps they imitate. The hard-core philatelist scorns any stamp that didn't carry the mail, but others find these philatelic by-ways fascinating and rewarding. Philatelic Exhibition Seals are a popular sideline among stamp collectors. The heyday for Cinderellas in the U.S. was the 1920's and 1930's, when many beautifully designed engraved examples were produced…”
Read more on Cinderella stamps here and here.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Business Cards: Page XXIV
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
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| 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.
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
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| ‘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.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Mimi and Eunice: “Nina” Font now Free
“Several people have asked if they can use ‘the Mimi & Eunice font’ for translations. It happens I don’t use a font – I actually hand-letter these suckers, trying to be messy. Apparently I haven’t succeeded, because even my messy hand-lettering looks a lot like my cleaner lettering from the late 1990′s, which I do have a font of. It’s called ‘Nina,’ and I made it with Fontographer on my very first Mac – in fact it was my first Mac project ever. At long last I’m sharing it freely with everyone...”Read the rest, and download the font here.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Nina Paley’s 4 Elements Quilt Series: Air/Nude
“My latest quilt is Capital-A Art. Know why?
1. It’s white on white
2. It depicts a nude
3. It is on canvas stretchers
Ladies and gentlemen, I unveil the fourth and final installment of my 4 Elements quilt series: Air/Nude!”
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Mapping the Human Condition
via brainpickings“…There’s something about cartography that lends itself to visualizing much more than land and geography. [Presented] are seven cartographic interpretations of the human condition, using the visual vocabulary of classical maps to interpret various facets of the human psyche — a genre that came of age during the late Renaissance, when it became known as “sentimental cartography.”
Read the rest here.
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