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.
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).
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:
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.
I did have a close working relationship with Mike Myers, who basically wrote his own sketches and would come down to our art department to talk to me about the graphics. He wanted to approve everything himself. He was very specific in what he wanted, and I truly enjoyed working with him.
I clicked with him on where he was coming from creatively. I loved establishing the Euro-style SPROCKETS graphics for him, and creating all his Simon drawings for that series of his sketches, which was really fun. As someone with a similar passion for UK ’60s pop culture, I also loved drawing and creating the title sequence for his “1960s Movie” sketch, which I have a hunch was the seed of the idea for his Austin Powers movies!
A site called Chromeography collects chrome logos and typography from vintage cars & electric appliances. As I was looking through these, I wondered: “What the hell is chrome anyway?” So I looked it up:
Chrome plating (less commonly chromium plating) is a technique of electroplating a thin layer of chromium onto a metal object. A chrome plated part is called chrome, or is said to have been chromed. The chromium layer can be decorative, provide corrosion resistance, facilitate cleaning, and increase surface hardness. Sometimes, a less expensive substitute for chrome, such as nickel may be used for aesthetic purposes.
This exhibition will be the first time museum visitors have the opportunity to delve into the art of his complete filmography, examining his inspirations, homages, and the meticulous craftsmanship that define his work.
Through a curated collection of original props, costumes, and behind-the-scenes insights, including from his personal collection, this exhibition offers an unprecedented look into the world of Wes Anderson, celebrating his enduring influence on contemporary cinema.
I am such a sucker for a pixel fonts and Departure Mono is no exception.
Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font inspired by the constraints of early command-line and graphical user interfaces, the tiny pixel fonts of the late 90s/early 00s, and sci-fi concepts from film and television.
Oh and there’s a playable Breakout game at the bottom of the page if you scroll all the way down.
Occlupanids are generally found as parasitoids on bagged pastries in supermarkets, hardware stores, and other large commercial establishments. Their fascinating and complex life cycle is unfortunately severely under-researched. What is known is that they take nourishment from the plastic sacs that surround the bagged product, not the product itself, as was previously thought. Notable exceptions to this habit are those living off rubber bands and on analog watch hands.
In most species, they often situate themselves toward the center of the plastic bag, holding in the contents. This leads to speculation that the relationship may be more symbiotic than purely parasitic.
I admire the commitment to the bit, but HORG appears not to have studied the one actual bit of bread tag taxonomy that could actually be useful: whether the color of the bread tag indicates when the bread was baked. (via kelli anderson)
I read a lot of comments about political logos… Having helped shape the logo of every Democratic president in the twenty-first century (hflr.io/biden, hflr.io/obama), let me say from experience that campaign typography is *completely* unlike graphic design: it’s a strange and fascinating agility sport, marked by limited information, a ticking clock, unimaginable pressures, and serious consequences. It’s Iron Chef, but in Adobe Illustrator.
Imagine a client asking for a logo in 24 hours, but not telling you the name of the company! That’s what it’s like to participate in the veepstakes. Nobody who commented on the Biden/Harris logo realized that Robyn Kanner and I were busy developing *dozens* of possible identities in parallel, completely firewalled from the political side of things, awaiting the news until 40 minutes before press time.
The designer, known for his powerful and positive messaging, has created exclusive artworks in partnership with drumming legends, including Paul McCartney’s drummer Abe Laboriel Jnr, Arctic Monkeys’ Matt Helders, Simple Minds’ Cherisse Osei, Slayer’s Dave Lombardo, and Porcupine Tree’s Gavin Harrison.
It would be fun to see a working visualizer that used Burrill’s style to visualize any song’s drum beats. (via daniel benneworth–gray)
Maripedia is an online database of hundreds of print patterns that Marimekko has used in their products since the 1940s. You can browse by decade, designer, or style…or you can search by image. That’s right, just upload an image of the pattern on your pillowcase or dress and it’ll tell you who designed it and when.
Reproduced from a rare original copy, the book features over 165 highly-detailed scans of the legendary art by José Luis García-López, with an introduction by Paul Levitz, former president of DC Comics.
First issued in 1982, the Style Guide aimed to assist licensees in delivering a consistent look for DC’s Super Heroes. The reissue is based on the original copy held by Standards Manual, containing an amalgam of pages added by the owners of the original from ‘82 to ‘85.
Hosted by the New York Academy of Medicine, #ColorOurCollections is a yearly assemblage of coloring books sourced from the collections of museums and libraries. You can download this year’s coloring books (as well as those from past years) for free from the website. (via open culture)
The Hydrant Directory is a collection of colorful fire hydrants where “each hydrant has been processed into color palettes for free use by artists and designers”. I love stuff like this. (via @presentandcorrect)
The word “text” originated from the Latin word “textus,” which means “a weaving” or “a fabric.” In ancient times, textus referred specifically to the process of weaving fabric. Over time, the meaning of the word expanded to include written or printed material, reflecting the idea of words being woven together to create a coherent written work. This metaphorical extension continues today with words and phrases such as seamless, threadbare, unraveled, looming, frayed, tangled, and spinning a yarn, highlighting the connection between the physical act of weaving fabric and the intellectual act of composing written language, both of which involve the interlacing of individual elements to create a unified whole. In this installment of For Your Reference, we revisit the Archive’s stacks for books and other items that build a tangible connection between threads and letterforms.
According to the analysis, just 20 4-digit numbers account for 27% of all PINs: 1234, 0000, 7777, 2000, 2222, 9999, 5555, 1122, 8888, 2001, 1111, 1212, 1004, 4444, 6969 (nice), 3333, 6666, 1313, 4321, 1010. The diagonal line is people using repeated pairs of digits (e.g. 2727 or 8888) while the horizontal line near the bottom is people who are presumably using their (19xx) birth year as a PIN. (You can see the beginning of a 20xx line on the left side.)
The best causally unguessable PINs would seem to be unrepeated pairs of numbers greater than 50 — so 8957, 7064, 9653, etc. Choose wisely.
San Francisco’s Arion Press still uses decades-old machines to make beautiful books by hand. They’re one of the few remaining presses in the world that do everything from start to finish — they even cast their own type.
Arion dwells in an almost extinct corner of the book world: Call it Slow Publishing. It produces only three books a year, each a unique art object reproduced in editions of less than 300. Art is so important, in fact, that the illustrators-art-world luminaries-drive the title selection process.
“We learned that the projects went a lot more smoothly when we said to the artist, ‘What do you want to do?’” Blythe said.
Anthony Bourdain visited Arion in 2015 for a online series called Raw Craft — it’s a great look at how and why they produce books this way:
Business Insider’s Still Standing series recently profiled Arion as well:
This is such a wild story. Two men, Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson & Emery Walker, founded the Doves Press in London in 1900. They made a typeface called Doves Roman:
During its short life early last century, the Doves Press printed and bound some of the finest books ever produced in England and its approach to typography and printing subsequently exerted a major influence over book design in Europe and the United States. Many of Cobden-Sanderson’s ideas would, decades later, find expression or adaptation in both Traditionalist and Modernist circles respectively.
The partnership busted up and Cobden-Sanderson eventually took all of the lead type and dumped it in the Thames River. No more typeface.
The thought of ‘his’ typeface being used by anyone else, and in a manner beyond his control, prompted Cobden-Sanderson’s now infamous course of action. Only the Doves Press, run exclusively by him, could be bestowed the honour of printing his type. And so the mission to destroy it, beginning with the punches and matrices on Good Friday 1913, began. On an almost nightly basis from August 1916 the ailing septuagenarian dumped the type into the Thames, wrapped in paper parcels and tied with string; “bequeathed to the river” as he put it in his personal diary. Every piece of this beautiful typeface, more than a ton of metal, was destroyed in a prolonged ritual sacrifice.
Type designer Robert Green, working from printed materials, made a digital facsimile font of Doves Roman. In a bid to improve the font, he set out to find the lead type dumped in the river, aided by Cobden-Sanderson’s diary entries of the type-destroying mission. He found a few of the metal sorts (i.e. pieces of lead type) and with assistance from the Port of London Authority’s diving team, ended up retrieving 151 metal sorts in all, “out of a possible 500,000”.
Here’s a short film about the recovery of the type:
Ronny Flanagan took pride in his record as a police officer in Plano, Texas. He had an incident-free career. He took safety training regularly. He was known at the range as a very good shot.
Yet he killed a man when he was simply trying to press a flashlight switch mounted beneath the trigger on his pistol.
In a deposition, Flanagan expressed his remorse and made a prediction.
“I don’t want anyone to ever sit in a chair I’m in right now,” he said. “Think about the officers that aren’t as well trained, officers that don’t take it as seriously, and you put them in a pressure situation, another accident will happen. Not if, but will.”
Jeeeeesus Christ this is the most American shit ever. First of all: guns, guns, guns!! We love ‘em! Don’t forget the complete militarization of the police (they’ve got tanks!), which happens in tinpot countries where leaders fear the citizenry. Those gun flashlights were initially developed for the Navy SEALs and now city cops wield them around students.
And then. And then! There’s the completely genius idea of PUTTING A SECOND TRIGGER ON A GUN — I wish I had letters more uppercase than uppercase for this next part — RIGHT BELOW THE FIRST TRIGGER!!!!!!! 1
You know, the one that propels a projectile out of the weapon at deadly speeds!?
You’re familiar with those doors where the handle makes it seem like a pull but you actually have to push it? They’re called Norman doors, the canonical example of bad design. These flashlight guns are like Norman doors that kill people. W T Actual Fuck. (via @ygalanter.bsky.social)
I know I’m gonna get email about this so I’ll stop you right there Johnny Gmail: I am sure “not all guns” 🥴 with flashlights are designed like this. I am positive that putting yet another switch on a firearm that’s designed to be used when the gun is pointed at something or someone is a Bad Idea. And anyway, this whole thing about being an “accident” is BS anyway…there is nothing accidental about where that officer was with the gear that he had, doing what he was doing. It is all perfectly predictable that guns are fired by militarized police in Gun Land USA.↩
Ryan Gosling was on Saturday Night Live this weekend and they did a sequel to one of my favorite SNL sketches (which is completely dorky in a design nerd sort of way) ever: Papyrus. Behold, Papyrus 2:
Avatar spawned worlds, right? Every little leaf of every little flower, every little eyelash of every little creature: thoroughly thought out. But the logo: it’s Papyrus, in bold. Nobody cares. Does James Cameron care? I don’t think so.
I love a good movie poster and Dawn Baillie designed one of the best ones ever: the iconic poster for The Silence of the Lambs. Her other work includes posters for Dirty Dancing, Little Miss Sunshine, Zoolander, The Truman Show, and The Royal Tenenbaums. A show of her work opens soon at Poster House in NYC. Some of Baillie’s original posters are for sale at Posteritati.
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