7x7

triangulate your influences: maps of the USA and UK with cities and towns represented by their most prominent or notorious natives—via Things Magazine  

don’t go jason waterfalls: a medley of misquotations, a lot of which are new to us too—see also

unbranded: gorgeous images of Tokyo digitally denuded of cables and signage by Rumi Ando—via Present /&/ Correct  

map app: create custom vintage style maps of anywhere at any historical period—via Web Curios 

 *: a historical style symbol (previously)—via Stan Carey  

princeself: an affirming survey and guide to neo-pronouns—via ibīdem  

muchmusic: a fun, nationally sourced soundtrack for the Canadian census

ducks unlimited

Via the happily back from sabbatical Web Curios, we are treated a treasury—an embarrassment really of more than one could ever use—of little pixel-banked of little graphic design images from Iconduck, providing a consistently styled archive of over one hundred thousand free and open source illustrations categorised by subject and theme to use as one sees fit.

obscenicons

We really enjoyed revisiting the maledicta of grawlixes and the like (previously) from the always excellent Shady Characters as developed by Mort Walker’s lexicon and learn a bit more of the visual vernacular with jarns (🌀), quimps and nittles that mask the curses and waftaroms and indotherms that represent fragrant smells. More to explore at the links above.

monotype

Default settings are an announcement to one’s audience and become the pervasive standard of least-resistance—as seen in the domineering notes, notices and presentations appearing in the pre-set font family of the Microsoft Office suite of products and so it was a welcome bit of news that the choice was not to be so much foisted on users or queued up in recently used—in the architecture of the programming—but rather would rather replace, unseat King Calibri (Lucas de Groot’s 2002 creation is a fine one but suffer from ubiquity) with a user-juried selection (albeit a self-selecting pool) with contenders including the symmetry-breaking Seaford from Tobias Frere-Jones, Grandview from Aaron Bell that is informed by older German roadway signage and the Mid-Century modern Bierstadt of Steven Matteson—namesake of a suburb of this other Deutsch font city.

7x7

and the oscar goes to: highlights and surprises from the 2021 Academy Awards  

zauberwald: Robert Mertl’s forest photographer captures the aesthetic I aim for during my woodland walks  

canzone russa italianizzata: the Russian Italo-Pop musical stylings of Alla Pugacheva  

cards against humanity: the brilliantly sullen poetry of John Giorno  

yahoo the destroyer: maligning the cannibalised early internet for contributing to the Digital Dark Ages via Waxy—plus a different approach to archiving going forward  

the trouble with tribbles: marketing Flatcat as one’s next robotic feline companion  

art of the title: film lettering over the decades

he who waits behind the wall

First invoked by name in a 2004 on-line form for creepypasta and attributing it to the influence of the eldritch, Lovecraftian primordial deities, Zalgo text, epithet above, refers to the certain aesthetic of overly adorning and stacking text with diacritical marks to produce a glitchy, destructively (sometimes maliciously in the form of copy-bomb and can result in transmission errors) cursed, spooky effect (see also)—with the reader either interpreting their computer or brain malfunctioning, overcome by the preternatural and unfathomable.

7x7

cortège: the custom Land Rover hearse that will convey Prince Philip on his funeral procession

whiter-than-white: ultra-reflective coating (previously) could help cool the climate—via Slashdot  

eboracia: housing developer Keepmoat Holmes discovers sprawling Roman ruins in North Yorkshire  

elenctic debate: honing one’s critical thinking with the Socratic method 

emojinal rescue: the Unicode subcommittee reconvenes, heralding the coming of new glyphs  

ramshackle: illustrations of antient structures that survived the Great Fire of London before they were ultimately demolished  

pleurants: bright and bold floral urns for cremains

9x9

oh, i travel—a sort of licenced troubleshooter: a lexicon of the Bond franchise in all its forms 

riptide: an homage to the pre-code (previously) Hollywood actress Norma Shearer 

dead pilots’ society: CBS Summer Playhouse and similar vehicles were venues for anthologies of failed television shows—see also  

la vie électrique: Albert Robida’s 1893 vision of the future includes a remote courtship by means of a télephonoscope 

the sensational she-hulk: Marvel comics hand-lettering from Reagan Ray—previously  

buzz-saw: the ancient shark-like Helicoprion had spiral tooth-whorls 

reinventing the wheel: engineers in Seoul develop transforming, load-bearing tyre using principles of origami—see previously  

oh—the pint pot, half-a-pint, gill pot, half-a-gill-quarter-gill, nippikin and the brown bowl: conventional measurements of liquid (see also) anticipated the next in a binary fashion  

shaguar: if Austin Powers were to be revived today, he would have been cryogenically frozen in 1991

7x7

tsugite: software that generates traditional Japanese joinery (previously) that can be 3D printed or precision cut

prince albert in a can: a collection of fish tin labels from a digital museum dedicated to the Portuguese canning industry 

cosmic nature: artist Yayoi Kusama exhibits at New York’s Botanical Garden  

tune-dex: the real-fake book of jazz standards, essential to musicians in the 1970s 

dingbat: thirty select works of Mid-Century Modern print for inspiration 

beer is proof god loves us and wants us to be happy: brew theorems post US National New Beers’ Eve ahead of the anniversary of rescinding parts of the Volstead Act that allowed for consumption of higher proof beer 

ukiyo-e: the unintentional ASMR of a master printmaker at work

an elaborate hoax

The fictive archipelago shaped like a semi-colon and full of puns related to printing and fonts, the Guardian featured a seven-page supplement (see also) celebrating a decade of independence for the nation of San Serriffe, discussing the island’s history, economy and tourism with in-depth articles. Originally it was to be positioned in the Atlantic neighbouring Tenerife but a tragic airline disaster a few days prior prompted the newspaper’s editorial board to move it to the Indian Ocean, near the Seychelles. In an era before desktop publishing and the wide adoption of home computers, the terminology of typefaces was specialists’ jargon and most readers would have missed the jokes.

open-apple q

We don’t quite know what to make of this keyboard with keys resized to approximate the frequency of their use in a given lexicon (see also) that touts itself as an innovation rather than perhaps a physical manifestation of predictive text or an homage to a type-setters’ box. What do you think? As much as I aspire, I’ve never been the fluid touch-typist that I would like to be and code-switching between keyboard layouts regularly can be distressing enough on its own without the taxing dexterity of having to dodge commoner letters.

hypodermic

Via Duck Soup, in a fascinating parallel analysis of the vetting process (though the stakes are much lower) that underpins which emojis enter into common parlance and how they are rendered across platforms (see previously) and approval of new vaccines and other medical interventions, though the correspondence is of course heavily weighted against the former with science and evidence-based research, taste, lobbying, politics and shifting cultural norms play a part in both, which can in usual cases take years. The original syringe and needle emoji dates back to 1999, adopted as a Unicode standard in 2010, and was meant to encourage blood donation in Japan, later used a shorthand to urge people to get tested for communicable diseases, retaining the drops of blood throughout most iterations and incarnations. Now, however, the emoji is being modified slightly to remove those drops of blood (a separate drop of blood emoji was approved in 2019 to represent both donation drives and mensuration and 🅰️, 🆎, 🅱️ and 🅾️ already refer to blood types) across most platforms—like what immunologists hope for adapting existing vaccines to combat new variants as they arise in an expedited fashion since the template is already established, and communicate vaccination status and acceptance and support. It may seem trivial but the ability to signal is immensely important and a lot of people have a lot invested the success of the campaign that these symbols represent.

🗻

Via Spoon & Tamago, we learn that graphic designer Kenya Hara and Nippon Design Centre studios have released over two-hundred-fifty pictograms reflecting Japanese culture and lifestyle in support of the eventual return of tourism free for all to use. We especially liked the icons for sumo wrestling (相撲) and udon (wheat flour noodles, うどん) Some are even animated to convey the ritual relaxation of bathing at an onsen (see previously). Much more to explore at the links above and at the Experience Japan project website.

optimisation of manual labour

Eighteen types of elemental motions to study the economy of movement and exertion in the workplace as with a flow-chart, therblig units are intended as controls for eliminating unneeded steps. Created by industrial psychologists Lillian Moller Gilbreth and Frank Bunker Gilbreth (as near reversals of their surname), they first appeared in a 1915 trade paper article as “the elements of a cycle of decisions and motions” the scheme famously and indelibly suggesting that it be common protocol that a surgeon is handed their implements and that various checklist are put in place. Purposefully, the last step prior to execution is the admonition “to think” (not depicted as a diagrammatic symbol) rather than the first.

guillemets

Used in a number of orthographies around the world instead of or in combination with quotation marks, the term is a diminutive of Guillaume (William) after the pioneering sixteenth century French printer and font-founder Guillaume Le Bé—France being the primary place where they are employed, though the nested quotes are used elsewhere and in other ways, including in Japan and China where « » sets off the title of a book or album, in Portuguese and Swiss German (called Möwchen, little Sea Gulls) to indicated a reported quotation within a quotation, and inwardly pointing » « to bracket off direct speech. In Quebec, a singular right pointing guillemet itératif is used as a ditto mark.

don’t @ me

While the earliest known attested use is to be found in a fourteenth century translation of a Greek chronicle with the at symbol substituted for the α of amen for unknown reasons and in commerce as a glyph representing the unit of volume and mass the arroba on the Iberian Peninsula—about two stone or twelve kilograms before signifying a going rate, despite its inclusion on most Western keyboards, it remained something of a mystery until the widespread use of the internet and social media. Traditions outside of English general ledger accounting (and in reality everyone prior to email) perceived the rather useless upper carriage key as something twee mentioned in a typo—as in Afrikaans, Dutch, Finnish, German, Macedonian and Polish where it’s a tail of a pig, puppy, cat or monkey. Astutely in Norwegian, Welsh, Korean, Esperanto, Italian, Hungarian, Ukrainian and Belarusian it is the word for snail, whereas in Catalan, Hebrew, Swedish and Slovak it is the word for a pastry roll. Though informal stylings probably prevail, in the Kazakh language, @ is officially called айқұлақ—that is, the Moon’s Ear.

👁️‍🗨️

Via Waxy, we are referred to an expansive and growing and searchable collection of graphic design related items, materials and resources organised from and available at the Internet Archives (previously) by curator Valery Marier. Categories include font specimens, annuals, style guides, book jackets, infographics, data visualisations, various advertising ephemera and vintage branding devices. 

 

 

 

8x8

testi stampati: the riotous typographical illustratrations of Lorenzo Petrantoni  

painterly realism: Nathan Shipley trained a neural network to turn portraiture into convincingly true-to-life photographs 

civilian climate corps: a vision of how putting people to work on conservation projects can help save both the environment and the economy  

narratology: a purportedly exhaustive list of dramatic situations—see also here and here  

stonx: a long thread explaining the GameStop short-squeeze—via Miss Cellania  

paradoxical undressing: National Geographic forwards a new theory to account for the Dyatlov Pass Incident (previously) of 1959  

butler in a box: before digital assistants there was domestic aid in the late 1980s 

will success spoil rock hunter: Art of the Title looks at the opening montage of the 1957 CinemaScope classic

тысячи

First articulated out the Cyrillic script (see previously) in the Bulgarian Empire in the tenth century following a long established Greek, Ionian convention to differentiate numerals from letters when context was not exactly clear with spacers, dots and a diacritic over the glyphs called a titlo ҃ or as a prefix signalling a long string of numbers to follow ҂, like a tilde or macron. Still sometimes seen in Slavonic Church publications and in old monuments and coinage, the system was in use until the civil reforms (see also) of Peter the Great in the early seventeen hundreds when Hindu-Arabic representations were introduced and because of this centuries-long custom continued well into the early modern era, elaborate signs were developed to express powers of magnitude and in terms of both a long and short scale (lesser and greater count multiplier) for accounting and scientific purposes. Align with the Greek (rather than alphabetically), one through ten, correspond with the Cyrillic letters: А, В, Г, Д, Е, Ѕ, З, И, Ѳ and І. The pictured powers of ten using the older alpha form, with the Myriad (Тьма) encircled    ⃝   either ten-thousand or a million and Many Myriad   ꙲   either one billion or 10⁵⁰.

monogrammed

The comprehensive rebranding—new uniforms, colour scheme, packaging, signage plus digital assets and merchandising (see also here and here) returning to the fast food franchise’s corporate branding circulated and experimented with from 1969 through 1999. Especially brilliant is the letterform, a double-struck B and K in a bun for Burger King by Jones Knowles Ritchey.  The mascot and monarch are not featured in this new roll-out but we are assured that he has not abdicated or been otherwise dethroned.