kottke.org posts about design
Watch video on YouTube.
From NY Times reporter Anna Kodé (whose “intersection of culture and real estate” reporting I’ve been enjoying lately), a short video on the increasingly hostile architecture of NYC.
The spread of the leaning bench and the lack of seating at places like Moynihan or around the city signals to homeless individuals that they are not welcome in these places. It signals to all New Yorkers that these are not social places. These are places to simply pass through.
Here’s a video Vox did on the subject seven years ago.
Being in Japan is offering me such a contrast to so many things in the US. There are benches in public places here and they don’t have spikes all over them. Japan has the world’s lowest rate of homelessness, probably because they take care of people.
In America, we don’t provide housing or much of anything else for people (including a living wage or affordable health care) and the result is that no one can sit down in Penn Station or in a subway station and oh by the way, lots of people have nowhere to live. Why do we do this to ourselves? We could live better lives but we choose not to….for reasons?
Good luck losing less than an hour to this: a huge archive of logos for government, non-profit, private, military, and even fictional space agencies and companies. There is also a book, but it looks like it was only available on Kickstarter — hopefully it’ll be republished? (via sidebar)
Since launching in 2005, YouTube has changed the progress/volume/tool bar on their video player several times. Here’s what it’s looked like through the years:1
I don’t remember the first two or three at all, but that 2008-2010 version is a nostalgia bomb, albeit a deceptive one. You might be fooled into remembering that it used to be very simple, but the whole progress/tool bar is cut off in the graphic above; here’s the full version.
I’d love to see versions of this for iTunes/Apple Music, Spotify, and other players.
Giorgia Lupi and her team at Pentagram have created a data-driven animation for the MTA called A Data Love Letter to the Subway.
More from Lupi (who calls this an “absolute dream project”):
The project, “A Data Love Letter to the Subway,” visualizes each train line as a character whose unique qualities are extracted from MTA data. Data like length, location, and transfers were abstracted into train behaviors and attributes. Imaginatively animating each train line’s age, length, and path, we wrote a poetic story that explores the trains’ interwoven encounters with commuters and one another.
Our “Love Letter” draws on the elemental nature of picture books to unpack the visual system of the subway with curiosity and wonder. Drawing from the MTA’s Open Data Program, with my team we translated train data into a narrative made of attributes and behaviors, providing a rich view of the interactions, roles, differences, and the connections made and sometimes missed within the subway ecosystem.
Maps, NYC, the subway, data visualization…I am not sure how much more in my wheelhouse a thing could be.
Designer Rüdiger Schlömer has created a new typeface for beginning knitters called Knit Hello.
Knit Hello is a typeface for hand knitting. It was made for beginners: knitters and typographers who love type.
You may remember Schlömer from his Futura-based Knit Grotesk. And of course, the earliest bitmap letters weren’t found on a computer screen; blocky letters have been used in cross stitch and knitting for hundreds of years. (via colossal)
Gooood lord, just look at this exquisite handmade bike, a collaboration between British design collective Tomato1 and Shinichi Konno of Cherubim.
I had a lot of fun playing around with this collection of generative design tools, especially the textual ones. I wore out the “randomize” button on each of these. (via sidebar)
Enigmatriz uses ASCII art to punch up and blow out public domain photos and illustrations — I love their style. From It’s Nice That:
Using the Image to ASCII tool available online, Enigmatriz found a new way to play with digital assets. “Everyday, I sit on my computer and browse through hundreds of images in the public domain to find things that catch my attention and feel are worth shining a new light on them,” says Enigmatriz. “When working with ASCII, what I like and find particularly interesting is the blend between hundred old paintings, photographs etc. and modern technologies.” Enigmatriz creates unique contrasts between images — historical paintings are overlaid with spatterings of text, ASCII renders are layered on top of playing cards or archival imagery.
You can find more of their work on Instagram.
Remember the collection of classic airline logos I linked to a few years ago? The folks at 08 Left have taken some of those old logos and put them on hats, t-shirts, and hoodies.
Dan Sinker recently visited an arcade full of old school vintage arcade games and documented some of the wonderful typography and design of the game cabinet marquees.
After a while though, I became captivated not by the games themselves but by the incredible art on the cabinets and specifically the marquee, the sign set above the screen, tempting a kid from 1983 to spend their hard-earned quarters. The marquee back then had to do a lot of work, because the games themselves were all low resolution and blocky affairs. The marquee had to sell the idea of the game, the excitement around the concept and the story because the on-screen graphics alone weren’t going to do it. So you made sure that your marquees did the job, filling it with exquisite hand-lettered logos, art borrowed from the pages of fantasy novels, sci-fi, and comics, and vivid color palettes that would shine out into the dark arcade.
I’ve been to Funspot in New Hampshire a few times and it’s so fun to walk around and marvel at all of the 70s, 80s, and 90s graphic design — to see what the past thought the future was going to look like.
Ron Miller is one of the most prolific sign painters in Detroit. Photographer Andrew Anderson has collected dozens of images of Miller’s signs from Google Street View.
Ron Miller has been painting signs since 1978. He loves adding color to the neighborhood with his work. He has no website, no email and works all by word of mouth in Detroit.
Anderson also made a map of the locations of Miller’s signs. And here’s the man himself:
(thx, jordan)
The latest post from The Pudding starts off about as good as possible to attract the likes of me: “This is a project about onions and math.” I mean, yes. I’m in. And I enjoyed the interactive article, Dicing an Onion the Mathematically Optimal Way, but the design was absolutely delightful and onion-y:
They even used an onion gradient for the border of the page. This must have been so fun to work on! Initially, I thought they’d designed the onion font, but a quick search turned up Handmadefont’s OnioType Font:
From the description, it sounds like the letterforms are made from real onions:
Each letter is lovingly crafted from a perfectly sliced red onion, where nature’s concentric rings do most of the design heavy-lifting. Vivid purples, tender whites, and sudden flashes of yellow form shapes so unexpectedly elegant, you’ll never look at a salad the same way again.
But I dunno…Photoshop might be a better guess. Still! I love this font and kudos to The Pudding for putting it to good use.
An article about The Quintessential Urban Design of ‘Sesame Street’ with a bunch of photos? This is extremely up my alley. One of the show’s big influences when it began was Jane Jacobs’ landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which informed the set design:
“Even if you hadn’t read Jane Jacobs, that book was so huge that it was in the air,” said Benjamin Looker, who is the author of “A Nation of Neighborhoods” and an associate professor of American studies at Saint Louis University.
The show’s creators, he said, were “assimilating some of the popular notions that she put into play about the value of the sidewalk and street life.”
On Sesame Street, the stoop, the outdoor-dining space in front of Hooper’s convenience store, and Elmo’s wide-open window blur the boundaries between public and private space, fostering neighborly interactions between characters.
Street noises in the background and neighbors hollering through windows signal to viewers that this block is not a wealthy one. The streetscape, Mr. Looker said, “is an extension of people’s homes.”
A friend shared that they recently visited the Sesame Street set and that is something I would very much like to do someday.
Na Kim is one of the best book cover designers out there, and I love her set of covers for four of Vladimir Nabokov’s books being released in advance of the 70th anniversary of Lolita. Pictured above are her covers for Pale Fire (Bookshop, Amazon) and The Defense (Bookshop, Amazon).
I don’t think anything could be more up my alley, in my wheelhouse, in my lane, my cup of tea, my speed than this upcoming retrospective of Wes Anderson’s work at London’s Design Museum.
The Design Museum has been granted unprecedented access to Wes Anderson’s personal archives, which the filmmaker has built up over three decades. This is the first time most of these objects will be displayed in Britain.
This landmark exhibition will chart the evolution of Wes Anderson’s films from early experiments in the 1990s to recent productions as well as collaborations with key long-standing creative partners. Explore the design stories behind award-winning and iconic films such as ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’, ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ and ‘Isle of Dogs’.
The exhibition starts on Nov 21, 2025 and runs through Jul 26, 2026.
If you want to sit in this chair, you have to be able to solve a Rubik’s Cube because the chair is a Rubik’s Cube. (Ok, technically it looks like you only need to place the four leg corners of the chair correctly, but we’re not going to pick nits on this because it is fun and loooorrrrrrrd do we all need some fun right now.)
Oh and I like how the unsolved chair in the last photo looks like it’s striking a break dancing pose. Fresh! (via moss & fog)
Graphic artist Chris Ware has created a set of 20 stamps for the US Postal Service’s 250th anniversary in his iconic style.
The pane of 20 interconnected stamps show a bird’s-eye view of a mail carrier’s route through a bustling town. Laid out in 4 rows of 5, the stamps depict the story through the 4 seasons from top-left to bottom-right. The artwork also contains numerous icons representing the Postal Service.
The stamps will be available in July but you can pre-order them now from the USPS Store. (thx, caroline)
Watch video on YouTube.
I love this interactive video at Design Ah! Exhibition Neo at Tokyo Node. The display introduces the audience to a series of simple hand gestures, followed by some outcomes of their performance, e.g. a squeezing motion leading to soapy spray on a window or toothpaste on a toothbrush. This looks like it would be super fun in person.
The exhibition is a real-life version of Design Ah!, a Japanese show about design for kids.
Set to catchy music, Japanese Hiragana characters danced across the screen for a few minutes. Then came a line animation wordlessly designing and redesigning a parking lot. Next was stop motion. Electronic devices came apart. As the camera zoomed out, the individual parts lined up into a grid.
We didn’t know what we were watching, but we were transfixed. Everyone from the adults to the one-year-old had their eyes glued to the TV.
Whoa, look at the interior of this new Japanese restaurant in NYC called Shirokuro — all of the surfaces (floors, chairs, walls, counters, etc.) are painted to look like a 2-dimensional drawing. From Colossal:
“Shirokuro” translates to “white-black.” The New York Times shares that proprietor James Lim was inspired by an immersive, 2D restaurant he visited ten years ago in Korea, and he envisioned one of his own, now open in the East Village. To make the interior pop, he invited his friend, real estate agent and artist Mirim Yoo, to transform the space into an all-encompassing environment.
Here’s what it looks like with people and other non-b&w objects:
This reminds me of Alexa Meade’s work — it would be amazing to see a collab where Meade does up the servers (or guests) for a performance piece.
P.S. I want these 2-D Nikes. (via colossal)
There are so many reasons these days to covet a Swiss passport but let me give you one more: the design kicks ass. First issued in 2022, the document was designed by creative agency RETINAA.
Drawing on cartographic tradition yet modern in its use of 3D modeled landscapes, the design depicts an imaginary journey along watercourses, from the Alpine peaks down to the valleys, through the 26 cantons and to the world beyond. This journey starts on the first page of the document, which features the Pizzo Rotondo, a summit in the Saint-Gotthard Massif at the crossroads of linguistic regions. Under ultraviolet light, contour lines reveal the landscapes’ topography, enhanced with architectural landmarks that showcase the country’s rich cultural heritage and history.
There are all kinds of beautiful security features that show up only under UV light:
What I love most about the Swiss passport is the idea that things can be official & beautiful, secure & beautiful, utilitarian & beautiful, meaningful & beautiful. From an interview with one of the designers:
With the design, we wanted to redefine what a Swiss document looks like in the 21st century. The design of passports often looks outdated, even though the technologies used to produce these documents are extremely innovative.
Instead, we wanted to create a contemporary design around a visual narrative. It allowed us to incorporate security features that are not only difficult to counterfeit, but also play a role in the narrative. Ultimately, the passport should be a document that holders can trust, identify with and be proud of over the next 15 years!
I love the international cover for Omar El Akkad’s new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Bookshop, Amazon). It uses the original text of El Akkad’s tweet about the war in Gaza:
One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.
The US cover, like many American things, is somewhat less subtle & elegant.
Designed by Kazuya Ishikawa, the clever Salaryman Eraser features a Japanese businessman who goes bald as you use the eraser. The same company also makes an eraser that turns into Mt Fuji through repeated use.
The Public Domain Review (a true gem of the web) has launched The Public Domain Image Archive, “a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse”.
While The Public Domain Review primarily takes the form of an “arts journal”, it has also quietly served as a digital art gallery, albeit one fractured across essays and collections posts. The PDIA sets out to emphasise this visual nature of the PDR, freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation. Our aim is to offer a platform that will serve both as a practical resource and a place to simply wander — an ever-growing portal to discover more than 2000 years of visual culture.
The “infinite view” is particularly fun…you can just pan & scroll and let the whole collection wash over your visual cortex. (via colossal)
While designing a one-off t-shirt for a holiday gift, I stumbled across this amazing page on the Doctor Who Wiki about the design of the show’s title cards. It’s a pretty thorough resource and includes the typefaces used for the titles — like Grotesque, Eurostile, Futura, Della Robbia, and OPTI Formula One.
I put together a few representative samples from episodes featuring the first four Doctors, after which the designs get less interesting IMO. Enjoy.
See also a video of All Doctor Who Title Sequences: 1963-2023.
Watch video on YouTube.
Several years ago, Brandon Silverman become obsessed with the lettering and typography on the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Sanborn maps were designed to help insurance companies assess the fire risk of individual properties. They were highly detailed, showing the size, shape, and construction of buildings, as well as the materials used in their construction. This information was used by insurance companies to calculate the premium that a property owner would have to pay for fire insurance.
He even used the ornate, intricately designed covers as a model for his wedding invitation. Silverman recently launched a site dedicated to the design of these fire maps, collecting high-res digital scans of the art found on almost every cover and index page, over 3500 images in all. The cover pages are particularly beautiful. Oh, and you can order prints of all the images as well.
Fun fact: Silverman first learned about the fire insurance maps from a 2011 post on kottke.org.
This person posted a bunch of images of their dad’s old VHS tapes with lovingly hand-drawn labels indicating their contents. Kids, this is what people did before the internet.
Also, it’s weird/interesting that CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, LaserDisc, cassettes, MiniDisc, and 8-tracks are all played on devices named for the media (e.g. CD player) but VHS tapes are played on VCRs. We could have easily started calling them “VCR tapes” or “VHS players” en masse, but we mostly collectively stuck to the “correct” terminology. (thx, david)
I loved this article about NeonWorks which seems to be the last neon artisan in the Bay Area. The owner, Jim Rizzo is a character, and the article is full of nuggets like:
“I think the love of neon is still there, but because budgets are tight, people are going to LED fake neon. Have you seen that stuff? It’s trying to look like neon, but it’s plastic with little diodes embedded in it. … Nobody makes it in America.”
Rizzo handles the installations, which means he often finds himself hanging 16 stories up in a bosun chair tinkering with hotel signs. He can handle the dizzying elevation: “I love heights.” What he can’t stand are the pigeons. “I will kill a pigeon in a heartbeat, I hate them,” he jokes. “The Avenue Theatre sign (in San Francisco) was so dilapidated and filled with pigeons that every day we pulled up to it, we were just like, ‘Uhhhhhgh.’”
“Tube bending” is the term for heating and shaping neon tubes with almost medieval-like flame torches – the trade is full of such wonderful terms, including “slumping” (when a tube sinks down from gravity), “blockout paint” (black pigment used to create the illusion of letter breaks) and “bombarding” (electrifying a tube to clean out impurities).
(via @notacquiescing.bsky.social)
The NY Times has had a difficult time covering the 2024 election in a clear, responsible manner. But I wanted to highlight this short opinion piece from the paper’s editorial board, which I’m reproducing here in its entirety:
You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.
What makes this piece so effective is its plain language and its information density. This density is a real strength of hypertext that is often overlooked and taken for granted. Only 110 words in that paragraph but it contains 27 links to other NYT opinion pieces published over the last several months that expand on each linked statement or argument. If you were inclined to follow these links, you could spend hours reading about how unfit Trump is for office.
A simple list of headlines would have done the same basic job, but by presenting it this way, the Times editorial board is simultaneously able to deliver a strong opinion; each of those links is like a fist pounding on the desk for emphasis. Lies, threat, corruption, cruel, autocrats — bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! Here! Are! The! Fucking! Receipts!
How the links are deployed is an integral part of how the piece is read; it’s a style of writing that is native to the web, pioneered by sites like Suck in the mid-90s. It looks so simple, but IMO, this is top-notch, subtle information design.
Kostya Petrenko makes 80s versions of tech/media company logos as if they’ve been screencapped from CRT displays. I think my favorite of his might be the retro OpenAI logo, which you can see in this reel.
See also Medieval Versions of Contemporary Corporate Logos.
An illustrated and hand-lettered guide to the system of international maritime signal flags that are used to communicate when speaking is difficult (“because of language barriers, distance, etc….”)
See also hand flag semaphore and day shapes from the same creator.
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