Khoi Vinh on the book Never Use Futura:
I’m so happy to see this new book by designer, writer, and historian Douglas Thomas all about the typeface Futura which, it’s worth noting, predated Helvetica by three full decades—and it looks as beautiful and timely as ever.
Futura is probably my favorite typeface that ships with macOS by default. It’s one of the few bundled with an OS with more weights than just Regular and Bold.
A video adapted from Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer, where complex subjects are explained “using only drawings and a vocabulary of the 1,000 (or ‘ten hundred’) most common words.” I believe this all started with the XKCD cartoon Up Goer Five, “the only flying space car that’s taken anyone to another world.”
I love this part at the end of the video.
You can find Thing Explainer at book stores, or by using your computer to search the place where computers think together.
See also: Time Magazine’s interview with Munroe, where his responses are all stick figure drawings. And also the MinutePhysics YouTube channel.
This makes me want to stop whatever it is I’m doing, slam my laptop shut, and go spend the rest of the day at a used bookstore.
Animation by Henning M. Lederer, music by Jörg Stierle. Cover images from Book Worship and Julian Montague Project.
Link via BoringPostcards
As a coding exercise for a course I’m teaching this semester I created this single-serving site serializing Moby Dick into tiny individual texts. Remember single-serving sites? Sadly many of those domains have expired, but one of the best of them—Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle—is still there, if a bit quaint. I ruthlessly stole the design.
With apologies to Mat Honan. See also: Joshua Cohen serializing his novel PCKWCK (after Dickens’s Pickwick Papers) live on the Internet.
The 1st of January is as arbitrary as any day to designate a new year. Reading the Wikipedia article on the Gregorian calendar outlines some of the competing times to round out a new year – in March, May, September, December, as well as January – even when limiting oneself to the history of Europe.
But here I am, reflecting on the year ahead. Here is a short list of specific resolutions I’ve set out for myself:
It’s in the interest of this last resolution that I’m setting aside the book I’ve recently started to start reading The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, which was recommended by my friend James. I like the idea of synchronizing my reading with friends for the sake of discussion. In case you might be interested in doing the same, I’ve added my Goodreads profile to my list of networks in the sidebar (heads up to RSS feed subscribers, there’s a sidebar you can’t see from there!).
I suppose I’ve taken some inspiration from Woody Gothrie’s 1942 “New Years Rulin’s”, many of which I also aspire to for the coming year:
For some reason I decided to listen to this song on repeat on the subway this morning. There are two spoken audio samples that are always kind of in the back of my mind: “You are something that the whole world is doing” and “a culture is no better than its woods.”
