Last year I wrote about the funny things monks drew in the margins of their manuscripts. In that same vain here is a whole blog dedicated to some of the weird illustrations that show up in these old hand written books. Check out Little Red laying eggs and Ugly Skeleton.
This delightful little chart popped up on Boingboing a few weeks ago. It was one of the first things I remember learning about chickens when my mother decided to start raising them. The illustrator got the self-satisfaction of the hen just right. Click to make it a little bigger.
As of now Alyx and I should have landed in Paris and will be making our way across the city to our first stop, a great looking, shared apartment in the 19th arrondissement of Paris.
A friendly visual match between two cities told by a lover of Paris wandering through NewYork. Details, clichés, contradictions: This way, please.
My roommate Bannack and I have been throwing a sheet over his little table and chairs to make forts in the early morning. He likes being inside the tiny space we make and I like that I get to lay down for a few minutes more, even if it’s on the floor. So I was delighted to read my friend Marissa’s fort-centric how-to post on her new blog.
…Finally, you will want to photograph your fort when complete. If you’re feeling real-estatey, create a walk-thru video of your own, OR hire a third party production company that can create a 360 virtual tour of your fort. This is all good to share using social media. Your friends and family will enjoy seeing something you built, but scaled to fit a small person. You will get comments like, “ummm, that’s amazing and beautiful/luxurious!” and “Nice moat!.” These are all great things to hear, but you know that once you’ve finished this fort, it must be destroyed and replaced by a better one.
The subject immediately reminded me of the delightful architectural criticism parody: Couch Cushion Architecture; A Critical Analysis Part One and Part Two
At first glance the composition appears unintentional and the construction shoddy. But further investigation reveals a clear delineation between indoor/outdoor space with a design focus on protection through the use of barrier. Planes are shifted off the orthogonal to accommodate function; as a side effect it relieves inhabitants from a harsh Euclidian geometry. Grade B
If you’d like to know more, here is a very expensive book: Ottoman Forts
Maybe you’ve seen this before. It looks like it’s from 2006. But the images below are made up of 500 responses from a survey that asked people to draw where an how they experienced five broad emotions. From left to right, anger, joy, fear, sadness and love. A beautiful kind of map is formed when all the images are superimposed. Check out more of the project here.
Can people describe their visceral feelings of emotion visually, and if so, would any patterns arise? In order to answer this, I had to develop some way of asking people to reflect on and describe their private feelings in a simple, repeatable manner, the results of which could be correlated visually and demographically.
I must have been twelve or so. I was rummaging around in the storage space formed by the roof and the hip wall, behind the chimney in our old house on Billings Avenue.
Maybe I was going through an old suitcase, but I came across a threadbare black athletic shirt. Was it made out of jersey netting? On its front was a big graphic in white ink: a wicked looking dagger, impossibly jabbed through a pair of over-sized dice. Their may or may not have been a mean looking snake on there, and in a big arc over the graphic, the initials P. I. T. A. in big block letters.
This strange piece of clothing was my dad’s. I asked him about it and got a great batch of stories of his high school days. As I remember it, he and a group of dudes that made mischief together dubbed themselves the Pain In The Asses. (Or Pains in the Ass?) I really wanted him to have stories of rumbles with rival gangs or at least a drag race or something. I think he told me all they did was organize tag football games. I really wanted that jersey to be a gang shirt.
Anyway, I got to thinking about all this because I came across this great site full of old greaser gang names and compliments cards. A real treasure trove.
These guys were the closest to where I’m living now:
COAL YARD GANG:
The Coal Yard Gang was at Lakewood and Wolfram, near Southport and Lincoln Avenue. Just a local white gang originating in the early 60′s. Mostly just taking care of local business. Our colors were Black and White. I was mostly a partier. I was too small, and often found myself in over my head way too many times. I remember Lennies across from Lane Tech. I can still taste that greasy bag of fries, ten cent pin-ball games. It was neat place. Everyone was safe there. Even girlfriends could meet you there. (Via Reddit)
Digging a little more, I found this little documentary on the Gaylords. Finding out that my dad wasn’t really a gangster was bad, but it’s even more disappointing to find out how hung up on race these dudes are.
P.I.T.A. well…. NOT a group of ‘gangbangers’ ! More like neighborhood guys in desperate need of a name for their floor hockey team. We used to all hang at da park. Every group (grade level) or age had a bench to sit on and to ease the tensions between us older, younger, really older (High School) kids. The Phs Ed. Instructor for the Park District created a hockey league for us to beat the shit out of each other in a organized way. It was fantastic! It had rules, and penalties, just like the BlackHawk games we loved to listen to on the radio. Because none of us could afford a game ticket or play on REAL ice cuz we were city kids. Middle class families living from paycheck to paycheck….and yah they were a real pain in the ass!
This is from my old classmate Andy Lunday’s new blog and tumblr account. He and I were in art classes together all through high school. By coincidence we reconnected at a highway bagel/coffee shop in the middle of Oregon.
Were you on a bike Andy? I can’t remember.
Anyway, maybe you recognize Andy’s work already, that’s because he sent me a hand inked card a hundred years ago that’s been in my unanswered mail pile that whole time.
A tour of the level of detail that goes into Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ fonts.
In the middle of Gotham, our family of 66 sans serifs, there is a hushed but surprising moment: a fraction whose numerator has a serif. So important was this detail that we decided to offer it as an option for all the other fractions, a decision that ultimately required more than 400 new drawings. Why?
As you’ll read below, it’s something that we added because we felt it mattered. Even if it helped only a small number of designers solve a subtle and esoteric problem, we couldn’t rest knowing that an unsettling typographic moment might otherwise lie in wait. We’ve always believed that a good typeface is the product of thousands of decisions like these, so we invite you to join us on a behind-the-scenes look at some of the invisible details that go into every font from H&FJ.
Aspirational.
