Beautiful collages by book designer John Gall.
A New Yorker video on Sylvia Beach Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare and Company in Paris.
1000 Frames of Hitchcock: A Wiki that has separated each of Hitchcock’s 52 major films down to 1000 still frame images.
Ten Dollar Fonts: a collection of experimental sans-serif typefaces.
A slideshow of Andy Sandberg playing iconic tennis players and moments.
A nice resource on how to dye Easter Eggs naturally.
The Harriet Series: a type specimen translated for the web.
Lux: an experimental (and wonderfully typographic) film in the eighties using strobe effects.
A documentary film on Gregory Crewdson, filmed over a decade and being premiered this weekend at SXSW.
Futile Devices: An animated typeface by Nicolas Ménard
An incredible archive of cigar box labels.
A video that documents making a logotype out of 11,400 matches (to be burned in a later video).
A flickr set of vintage signage.
The Curator’s Code: a source code that enables better attribution of original sources as one curates and discovers on the web.
An in-depth interview on Art of the Title with David Fincher and Neil Kellerhouse on the title sequence and poster design for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Volume magazine published an interview with their designer, Irma Boom, on the differences between book and magazine design.
I once wrote as an email subject line, “Edward Hopper paints how I feel.” It certainly sounds trite now, but there’s something about the way Hopper captures numbness that makes him one of my favorite painters. His subjects are typically isolated, either physically alone or emotionally alone. But most are positioned against the backdrop of the modern, urban city, where one should find connection with other people. One day, I’d like to study how light and windows function in his work, as well as how cinema and photography shaped his work. Hopper’s use of dramatic, cinematic light has also subsequently influenced directors, including Alfred Hitchock, who created a near replica of Hopper’s House by the Railroad as the Bates home in Psycho, and Terrence Malick in Days of Heaven.
I also found this incredible process sketch for Morning Sun below, where we see Hopper’s detailed anatomical revisions of light and color.
An archive of vintage vogue spreads.
A video of The Boneyard Project, where artists paint abandoned warplanes.
Long exposure photographs of fireflies.
A fantastic montage of all of the “Yeah”s in Fargo.
The only semi-decent scene in Midnight in Paris: Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali.
An endearing video of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel singing “What are you doing on New Year’s Eve?”
Beyonce singing 1+1 backstage.
A nice print of props in Seinfeld by Nathan Manire.
Marina Abramovic’s Silent Party at Sundance—responding to her silent sitting for “The Artist is Present.”
Modern Pictograms: an incredibly useful font designed by The Design Office in Providence. And another useful download from The Design Office: Contact Sheet, an image gallery plug-in for WordPress.
Audio lecture by Michael Bierut, along with a conversation with Doug Scott at RISD.
AIGA Interview with MoMA’s Creative Director Julia Hoffmann on in-house design studios as the “future of successful branding.”
William Deresiewicz on “The Entrepreneurial Generation” and small business as the “idealized social form of our time.”
New York Times video gallery of the best film actors of the year—but I prefer the conceit of last year’s collection.
Pentagram partner Luke Hayman mapped New York City design studios onto an ampersand version of the famous Massimo Vignelli subway map.
Different layout options for reading the New York Times online.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are writing the third Before Sunrise/Sunset film.
Christopher Payne’s photographs of asylums (and Jon Crispin’s as well).
The Nightmares Fear Factory, a notorious haunted house in Niagara Falls, Canada, may have the most hilarious flickr set. As This is Colossal put it, they’ve published photographs of “people at the peak of absolute terror. There are literally hundreds of photos like this, family and friends tackling their loved ones, desperate screams, unbridled fear the moment they encounter some unspeakable ghoul in the depths of this haunted house. It’s the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen. I actually think there’s art here somewhere. An enterprising gallery curator might make enormous prints of these.”
The Evolution of the Web: a site which tracks the history of web browsers and how their interfaces changed.
Ragtime: Game on, typesetters! Fathom produced Ragtime, a game to “fix a bad example of ragged text and make it Swiss-perfect. Rag Time puts you up against the clock to make the best rag you can.” Surprisingly competitive.
Drawn Netflix Envelopes: a blog collecting returned Netflix envelopes covered with doodles.
“Solitaire Win”: a three-dimensional sculpture which recreates the old Windows game Solitaire.
“I went to MoMA and…”—a nice campaign by the Museum of Modern Art which incorporates visitors messages and drawings of their museum experience.
Paper.js: the latest Jonathan Puckey project, an “open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas.” See the examples (and the editable code) here.
Shoot Factory: a website with a dedicated library of shooting locations in London.
Beautiful microscopic images on FEI company’s flickr stream.
Simon Walker’s “vintage” logo designs (1 2).
Hilarious video of a New York City bicyclist receiving a ticket for not riding in the bike lane (so as to avoid common bike lane obstructions).
A brief history of the hashtag, a symbol that can be “a more sophisticated, verbal version of the dread winking emoticon that tweens use to signify that they’re joking.”
“Technology and Political Sex Scandals”—in a digital flux, self-confident politicians recklessly disregard common sense.
“Why Women Don’t Get Caught Up in Sex Scandals”—an interesting New York Times article on how gender can define a politician’s behavior.
“Faux Friendship”—another excellent article by William Deresiewicz, this time on facebook and friendship.
Just when I learn Final Cut, Apple introduces Final Cut Pro X. David Pogue’s review of the easier-to-use software.
JR on the stoops of Brooklyn.
“Collection is additive. Curation is subtractive. Collecting is for yourself, curating is for others.”—a post by Frank Chimero on curating v. collecting.
New York Times article on how European cities are “openly hostile to cars,” favoring bicycling and public transit instead.
“Male cyclists in New York outnumber female cyclists three to one.” Time to move to Copenhagen or Amsterdam.
An editorial by James Gleick, author of The Information, on how the need to see an original book is sentimentalism—no one owns information in the age of digitization.
A beautiful New York Times visualization that plots reader’s comments on how Congress should respond to the debt crisis.
Stieg Larsson’s “trilogy that has been met with such an enthusiastic but curiously apolitical response [though it] was written by a consummately political man”—an article that revisits Larsson’s warning of far-right movements in light of the Oslo attacks.
A video of 12,000 screenshots of the New York Times homepage—watch events from the past year unfold and see how much advertising can occupy and overtake the news.
Otlet’s Shelf: A Tumblr theme, which includes a bookmarklet for Amazon.com, that looks like a display bookshelf. Designed by Andrew LeClair and Rob Giampietro.
A hilarious tumblr blog with submitted photographs of Hovering Art Directors.
Lost Type Co-Op: a nice selection of fonts from the first pay-want-you-want type foundry (which includes $0)
WeatherSpark—a website displaying every possible data point on the weather and forecast.
Vintage Collective: a fantastic and extensive flickr stream of vintage type, letters, signs, symbols, and more.
© 2011 Jessica Svendsen