June 26, 2020
Type Lore: men and women behind the fonts
"Type Lore" is intended to supply the main facts regarding the development of types. It seeks to aid comprehension and remembrance by an ostensible discussion of the present day's most popular faces of type, which, considered in the order that their ancestors came upon the scene, serve as a background for relating the leading facts of typographical lore. Type lore : popular fonts of today, their origin and use; the history of the art of typography succinctly related for practical men (1925) That dated history of type is focused on famous men (99 Designs). To expand that scope, here's Alphabettes.org, "a showcase for work, commentary, and research on lettering, typography, and type design [...] to support and promote the work of all women in our fields." [more inside]
#whitecrimewhitepicture
Alexandra Bell is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates the complexities of narrative, information consumption, and perception. Utilizing various media, she deconstructs language and imagery to explore the tension between marginal experiences and dominant histories. Through investigative research, she considers the ways media frameworks construct memory and inform discursive practices around race, politics, and culture. In her current series, Counternarratives, Bell edits New York Times articles, altering headlines, changing images, and redacting text to reveal oppressive patterns in news reportage and society at large. (9 min doc).
Full, safe, very loved, accomplished
Poppy Seed Pets (formerly named “Maslow’s Pets”) is a virtual pet site based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Pets have four needs: food, safety, love, and esteem. They will focus on meeting lower-level needs (food) before higher level ones (esteem), and the experience they gain is based on how well their needs are met. [more inside]
Why Fireworks Scare Some Dogs But Not Others
I Take My Hat Off To Thee, Sirrah!
Hat history, hat fashion, hat racism-- strangely human [sarcasm].
Some [western] hat history, some racist hat history (of course), some more history of hats (mostly about Western History), but the world isn't limited to ideas of hats in the west. Great hats of Japan, Chinese Traditional Hats, Luxury Hats from Africa [more inside]
You can't "level up" in the cognitive exhaustion of quarantine
Business coach Alexis Rockley is pushing back against the idea that we must always be doing something productive or improving ourselves. She says it is unrealistic to believe we should all master new skills during quarantine, because quarantine and the current environment are continual stressors that cognitively exhaust us. In an interview with Smart Bitches, Trashy Podcast, she unpacks the things our brains are doing to help us survive and provides actionable advice for how you can make things better for yourself.
A certian fairness is required
Supreme Court of Canada: agreement saying an UberEats driver had to go to arbitration instead of suing in Ontario was so unfair it was invalid. Toronto Star: ruling paves the way for $400M class-action lawsuit by Ontario Uber drivers. [more inside]
How A Filmmaker Got The #1 Movie In America During A Pandemic
Yes, movie theaters are still closed. But one enterprising filmmaker has the No. 1 film in the US. And his story is better than any script. [more inside]
Boss of the beach
"Why don’t we have space to do longform?”
The Messengers: One Small Magazine’s Fight for the Indian Mind (The Virginia Quarterly Review): "The implications, if true, meant major election fraud in the world’s largest democracy. Did they want to look into it? Jose glanced at me, almost helplessly. He had never imagined that his little magazine, with limited funding, a staff of thirty-eight people, and an inclination toward fiction and poetry, would ever become one of the only outlets breaking major, sensitive political stories in a country of over one billion people. “This is the job for leading newspapers and weeklies, but nobody was stepping in to cover them,” he told me after hanging up the phone. He couldn’t help but feel obligated. “How are you supposed to respond to stories which are journalistic but nobody else is doing them?”
Lean Out
Leigh Stein, former cofounder and executive director of Out of the Binders/BinderCon, maps out the meteoric rise and sudden fall of the Girlboss: "The girlboss didn’t change the system; she thrived within it. Now that system is cracking, and so is this icon of millennial hustle." [more inside]
سرقة السيارات الكبرى
Egyptian graphic designer Ibrahim Hamdi has taken a bunch of famous and iconic gaming logos and translated them, keeping their overall design but switching out English (or...whatever is left of the language after everything's been miscapitalised and underscored) with Arabic. The cool thing here, of course, is that he hasn’t simply translated them (or, to be more accurate, transliterated them), but recreated them seamlessly within the design principles of the original Western logo, then dropped that logo onto the box art. You can check the whole project out at Hamdi’s Behance page. [Warning: loud autoplay music on his website.] [via: Kotaku]
now with science!
Ze Frank shares True Facts About The Macaque.
Alicia Keys -- Tiny Desk Concert
If you want to be Happy, if you want to feel Joy, if you want a blast of Pure Art and Beauty, see this video. I'd never heard her name prior to seeing this Tiny Desk Concert mentioned on Kottke.org but I trust that most Tiny Desk Concerts are at least interesting and often spectacular. (Hello Adele.) So I staggered over there yesterday afternoon and my internet connection kept flopping so I downloaded it, watched it just before going out on my bicycle ride, couple hours ago. Alicia Keys had tears coming down my cheeks, just such a great artist. She's beautiful but that's easy, what's not easy is her kind of beautiful, smiles that make it all the way into her eyes. And her band absolutely kicks ass.
The Power of Olive Morris
Today's Google Doodle celebrates what would have been the 68th birthday of Olive Morris, a community leader and activist in the feminist, black nationalist, and squatters' rights campaigns of the 1970s in the UK. [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »