Archive for September, 2009
Once more into the brooch, dear friends
This sounds like something made-up: Madeleine Albright had a collection of crazy pins that she would wear in accordance with different diplomatic occasions. Bees, lions, daggers and flags.
Obviously, reality does not—cannot—carry this far enough. What you really want is a world where all diplomacy is conducted via pin, brooch, badge and pocket-square. All words are mutually understood to be superfluous; just pleasant theater. The real business is encoded in the placement of pins, and their migration over days of diplomacy. “Did you see? This morning—she’s wearing the bee on the left! We are ruined! RUINED!”
I know half of my frosting is wasted… I just don’t know which half
Media needs new metrics. Pageviews and unique users are too crude, too homogenized. They don’t capture the nuance, the humanity, or, frankly, the power of the best audiences on the web today.
So, you remember Daily Drop Cap. Of course you do. It’s lovely. And it’s six days old.
Someone baked a Daily Drop Cap cake.
You’ve already guessed it, haven’t you? I propose time-to-cake as a new media metric—sort of a proxy for virality and engagement. Also, sometimes, for deliciousness. So, in this case, Daily Drop Cap scores a TTC of 6, which is pretty awesome.
A morning filled with four-hundred billion suns
This is so well done. Cosmos gets autotuned, via Hilobrow:
Don’t miss Stephen Hawking’s verse!
See also: Stephen Hawking’s previous appearance on Snarkmarket.
I support the rock-star-ification of designers
Chip Kidd has a band! Here’s the video for their single, called Asymmetrical Girl. I think it’s pretty awesomely sincere, and the song’s got a good hook, and there’s lots of typography. I want more!
BYO Remix
1. Start this Delrious time-lapse video of clouds in San Francisco, then immediately pause it to let it buffer and lower the volume to mute. (Nothing against His Boy Elroy, who provides the original score. I actually used that music in a movie of my own once.)
2. Press play on this song from Jason Kanakis and His Coalition of the Unwilling.
3. Start the Delrious video. Full-screen it, if you swing that way.
Two great tastes that taste great together. Delrious discovered via Towleroad and Kanakis via Aurgasm.
Butcher, baker, candlestick maker
Given access to a super-precise, industrial-strength, programmable robot arm, what would you do with it?
In the 21st century, we will all be called upon to answer this question.
Me, I’m imagining the coolest ice cream shop ever.
Type in space
I don’t always love it when type gets sort of reduced to a graphic element—just pretty shapes—but these shapes are so pretty, so sublime, that in this case, I’m all for it.
Yeah yeah, glimpse of the numinous, etc. etc.
Listen, I know it’s totally American Beauty to be moved by this little video, but that’s okay—I won’t tell if you won’t. To be clear, you are looking at flower petals dancing on an invisible spider web. I KNOW.
And Lauren is right: Erik Satie makes everything sound like magic.
Daily Drop Cap
aily Drop Cap is a new blog from Jessica Hische. She draws a beautiful new drop cap every day (you probably guessed that part, huh?) and, brilliantly, provides the code to use it in a blog post. Like I just did.
Building an imaginary tower
Over at robinsloan.com, as part of my Kickstarter book project, I just posted a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of an illustration. This one, in fact:
And, nerds take note, it involves Processing! Which, just between you and me, was probably not 100% necessary—but, as I’ve said before, one should always be looking for excuses to use cool tools.