The Joe Biden campaign just got a typeface upgrade. Read the rest
Joe Biden campaign upgrades typeface
Clean HTML layouts that use just 1 line of CSS
This video and website from Una Kravets presents ten website layouts that use just one line of CSS. Beautiful and amazing! Read the rest
Pop-up wearable tent for COVID-19 protection in offices, schools, and medical facilities
A few years back, my brother Rick Pescovitz came up with Under The Weather Pods, single-person pop-up shelters. (You may have caught Rick on Shark Tank.) Rick was sick of getting soaked at his kids' soccer games and was inspired by a portable toilet he saw by the field. Under The Weather Pods are designed for watching sports, fishing, and other outdoor events where it's raining, windy, or cold, but you are either obligated to watch or having so much fun you don't want to leave.
When the pandemic began, my brother quickly made two new designs for hospitals and healthcare workers: The IntubationPod is a pop-up shield for medical procedures involving the head and neck area. It's apparently much less expensive than the rigid plastic boxes that are commonly used during intubation. Meanwhile, the ShieldPod enhances protection for physicians and nurses as they move through medical facilities treating patients. Both devices are now in use at several hospitals around the country. I'm proud of my brother Rick and his wife Kelly who is president of Under the Weather!
Schools, businesses, and air travelers are now reaching out to Rick about the ShieldPod for use in classrooms, office settings, and on flights. Stay safe everyone.
ShieldPod (Under the Weather)
Milton Glaser, legendary graphic designer, RIP
Milton Glaser, the graphic designer who defined the visual style of the 1960s and 1970s, has died at age 91 of a stroke. Thanks for all the color, Mr. Glaser. You've seen his work everywhere, from the iconic "I ♥ NY" graphic for a 1977 tourism campaign to the incredible poster included in Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits album in 1967. He was also co-founder of New York magazine. From the New York Times:
Read the rest“We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence,” Mr. Glaser, who designed more than 400 posters over the course of his career, said in an interview for the book “The Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration” (2004). “Art Nouveau, Chinese wash drawing, German woodcuts, American primitive paintings, the Viennese secession and cartoons of the ’30s were an endless source of inspiration,” he added. “All the things that the doctrine of orthodox modernism seemed to have contempt for — ornamentation, narrative illustration, visual ambiguity — attracted us.”
Mr. Glaser delighted in combining visual elements and stylistic motifs from far-flung sources. For a 1968 ad for Olivetti, he modified a 15th-century painting by Piero di Cosimo showing a mourning dog and inserted the Italian company’s latest portable typewriter at the feet of the dead nymph in the original artwork.
For the Dylan poster, a promotional piece included in the 1967 album “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits,” he created a simple outline of the singer’s head, based on a black-and-white self-portrait silhouette by Marcel Duchamp, and added thick, wavy bands of color for the hair, forms he imported from Islamic art.
Why the Cooper Black typeface is everywhere
Vox made a good video about the history of the Cooper Black typeface, created in 1919 and still in common use today.
There’s a typeface that has made a resurgence in the last couple of years. It’s appeared on hip hop album covers, food packaging, and advertising. Perhaps you know it from the Garfield comics, Tootsie Roll logo, or the Pet Sounds album cover by the Beach Boys. It's called Cooper Black, and its popularity and ubiquity has never waned in the hundred years since it was first designed.
In the video above, Steven Heller and Bethany Heck tell the story of Cooper Black and deconstruct all the reasons it's been pop culture's favorite font for so long.
Image: By Evan-Amos - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Modified, Link Read the rest
The various Lego computer interfaces
Present & Correct, designer office/stationery online retailer and curator of a wonderful Instagram account, posted this fantastic collection of Lego computers. Quite a few appear to have integrated displays. As a youngster, I often liked adding an external screen as represented by a simple Lego window. Read the rest
The revolutionary art of Black Panthers graphic designer Emory Douglas, a short documentary
From 1967 through the 1980s, Emory Douglas was the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, the revolutionary social justice and political organization founded in Oakland, California. Douglas was the art director, designer, and primary artist for The Black Panther Newsletter and created the iconic Black Panther flyers, handouts, and posters. His work is as relevant, and as necessary, right now as it was 50 years ago.
Art historian, artist, and professor Colette Gaiter referred to Douglas as "the Norman Rockwell of the ghetto, concentrating on the poor and oppressed."
To this day, Douglas creates powerful work that communicates urgent ideas and calls for action.
image: "All power to the people" by Emory Douglas (1970) Read the rest
Here's a jet with an outdoor deck for the ultra rich who've made a killing from Covid-19
"You've probably heard that America's billionaires have gotten at least $282 billion richer during the pandemic," writes Rain Noe on Core77. "What will they spend that extra cash on, once this is all over?" Rain recommends the Aviro Business Jet Explorer, a private jet with an outdoor deck. It's just a concept design for BAE by Design Q, but I'm sure they would be happy to make it for any customer willing to pay for it.
Image: Design Q Read the rest
Michael Connelly's imaginary Blue Note albums
Police procedural novelist Michael Connelly is a connoisseur of jazz music so it's no surprise that his most famous character, LAPD detective Hieronymus 'Harry' Bosch, is also a deep enthusiast of the genre. (Connelly has a page on his personal Web site all about the "music in the novels.") Illustrator Russell Walks took those cues and his own penchant for Los Angeles noir and mid-century design to create a terrific series of imaginary Michael Connelly albums released by Blue Note Records.
"Most of these pieces were influenced or inspired by the work of Reid Miles, the designer who created somewhere around 500 covers for Blue Note Records in the mid-twentieth century," Russell writes. "I’m not breaking new ground here; Miles’ work has been the launching point for a thousand other designers and artists. Still, there’s something about the way these mid-century colors & typefaces just seem to fit Harry’s L.A., a place where shadows and sadness are as common as sunshine."
"The Bosch Series" (Russell Walks Illustration)
Stuck on VHS is a visual history of video store stickers
Stuck on VHS is a book that has over 1000 photos of stickers that video rental stores of the 1980s and 1990s would stick onto the cassettes. These stickers would be used to let people know about a video's genre and rating, and also to remind them that they could be fined if they neglected to rewind the tape before returning it. I don't have a copy, but it looks like a true delight for anyone interested in design.
For a taste of what's inside, check out their Instagram account.
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In honor of today's LSD anniversary, a sale on The Family Acid: California
On April 19, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman ingested 240 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide, a curious compound he had synthesized for possible use as a respiratory and circulatory stimulant. An hour later, Hoffman wrote one sentence in his journal: "Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh." As he rode his bicycle home, the effects intensified. Eventually though, the fear gave way to wonder.
"Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes," Hoffman wrote. "Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux..."
April 19 is now celebrated as Bicycle Day to commemorate the first intentional acid trip, a hallucinogenic revelation that had a profound impact on art, music, culture, and consciousness.
We can't go out right now, but we can go in. Way in. To celebrate Bicycle Day, my Ozma Records partner Tim Daly and I are offering a 33% discount on The Family Acid: California, a book of marvelous photographs drenched in the psychedelic experience.
For more than 50 years, photographer Roger Steffens has explored the electric arteries of the counterculture, embracing mind-expanding experiences, deep social connection, and unadulterated fun at every turn. After serving in Vietnam at the end of the 1960s, Steffens immersed himself in California’s vibrant bohemia. Since then, with his wife Mary and children Kate and Devon, he has sought out the eccentric, the outlandish, and the transcendent. Read the rest
Tape as a COVID-19 design intervention
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Tape_measures is a fantastic Instagram account of photographs documenting how tape is being used as a design intervention to direct physical distancing in Singapore.
(via Kottke)
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View this post on InstagramRead the restToilet, Bras Basah Complex / 5 April 2020 [📷: @punkturedfunktion]
Secret wine storage drawers built into stairway
Murray Berrill Constructions in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia created this wonderful "easy access wine cellar" in the dead space under a stairway. With a few modifications to the design, it could be entirely secret storage!
(via Laughing Squid) Read the rest
A good way to spend time in lockdown: hand-lettering exercises
I've been a great admirer of the design work of House Industries since the early 90s. They're famous for their logos and font designs (like the one they did for Jimmy Kimmel's show). I just got my copy of the brand new House Industries Lettering Manual and I'm looking forward to doing the exercises in the book.
The book itself is beautifully designed, and makes great use of hand-lettered type as a design element for the book. (I love self referentiality like that.)
Recently discovered: Eiffel's drawings for a slightly different Statue of Liberty
In 2018, Barry Lawrence Ruderman, a rare map dealer from California, bought a folder of documents and blueprints related to the Statue of Liberty. What they didn't realize is that the lot contained almost two dozen original engineering drawings for the Statue produced by Gustav Eiffel's workshop. Ruderman and Alex Clausen, director of Ruderman's gallery, hope to eventually show the drawings at a museum but for now you can inspect scans they posted online. Greg Miller writes in Smithsonian:
Read the restBerenson thinks the drawings may nail down something that historians have long suspected but not been able to prove: that Bartholdi disregarded Eiffel's engineering plans when it came to the statue's upraised arm, electing to make it thinner and tilted outward for dramatic and aesthetic appeal. Several drawings appear to depict a bulkier shoulder and more vertical arm—a more structurally sound arrangement. But one of these sketches (below) was marked up by an unidentified hand with red ink that tilts the arm outward, as Bartholdi wanted. “This could be evidence for a change in the angle that we ended up with in the real Statue of Liberty,” Berenson says. “It looks like somebody is trying to figure out how to change the angle of the arm without wrecking the support.”
The date on that sketch, July 28, 1882, as well as dates on several pages of handwritten calculations and diagrams pertaining to the arm, suggest that this change was made after much of the statue had already been built. “It’s really late in the game,” Berenson says.
Artist reimagines classic horror films as vintage Disney children's books
Swedish artist Daniel Björk is the mad mind behind these wonderfully evil visions of classic horror films reimagined as Disney's Wonderful World of Reading vintage children's books. My wish upon a star is that they were real! See more at Björk's Instagram.
Ikea makes pizza table that looks like the little plastic table inside pizza boxes
Ad agency Ogilvy Hong Kong teamed up with Ikea and Pizza Hut to create a life-size table, the Säva, that looks just like the little plastic "tables" inside pizza boxes. (Those little tables are officially called "pizza savers.") From Hypebeast:
Read the restEach table arrives in a humorous package that resembles a pizza box and, like other products, comes with details on how to assemble the product. IKEA illustrates a step-by-step process on unpacking the different parts, assembling the legs, calling Pizza Hut, receiving the pizza and placing it on the perfectly-sized table.
