A0 magazine is a photojournal printed on 5 sheets of gigantic A0 paper, with stitching down the spine. I love it. [via typeforyou]
Category: design
Cathrine Kullberg makes these sweet lamps from thin birch wood, and carves them with natural scenery.
Interaction of Color (review: 4.5/5)
The Yale University Press recently reprinted an expanded version of Josef Albers‘ classic book Interaction of Color. Unlike many books about color, this one eschews most discussion of optics and wavelengths and the physics of light. It’s not about theory and systems.
Instead, this one is meant to be a very hands-on book—experiment and observation. Each small chapter is dedicated to a particular color concept, a sort of visual consciousness-raising, if you will. Though it only takes an hour or two to read the book and ponder the examples, actually following through with the projects takes hours and hours of cutting out paper samples and ceaselessly arranging and rearranging.
To offer one tiny quibble, the layout of the text
really threw me for a loop.
The sentences are arranged in such a way
that they don’t continue to the true margin
on the side of the page,
neither making a justified block of text
or a comfortable right-ragged edge.
I’m not sure of the reasoning
for this decision.
But it really made the whole thing harder to read.
That aside, it’s a fantastic book.
Etched in Stone is an animated short film, a murder-mystery revolving around typefaces, specifically Trajan. Watch the trailer first.
The Bibliochase is both a chair and a bookshelf. I love it. The armrests look a bit small, but I love it.
The Codex Seraphinianus is an encyclopedia of a fantasy world written in a fictional language. There’s a full set of scans from the book on Flickr.
Check out the a full reproduction of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, one of the most famous early printed books. It was probably written by Francesco Colonna in the mid-15th century and beautifully printed by Aldus Manutius in 1499. There’s also a copy of the 1592 English translation (Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream), which attempts to preserve the typography of the original. And of course, Project Gutenberg has a plain text English translation.
The Open Architecture Network is an online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design. [via awln]
Last October in London the Detour Exhibition was held to showcase how creatives use their Moleskine notebooks. There’s more than 70 videos flipping through the work of illustrators, designers, architects, writers, and other Moleskine afficionados.
There’s a fairly good profile of Edward Tufte in the current Stanford Magazine.
Web Typography Sucks, a pretty cool presentation at SXSW Interactive this week.
An essay on microtypography and dictionary design.
Grid systems in web design is a pretty sweet collection of tools and and resources. I think this background grid image is really cool. [via joshua blankenship]
The pages of the Manuale Typographicum by Hermann Zapf.
Some intriguing design-writ-large ideas about cities qua applications. Cities, like other things we come upon in daily life, should just work:
Given any new city, there are certain things that should be easy for tourists to comprehend without assistance. These things might include: how and when to use the subway or bus, how and where to buy fares for public transportation, how to make a call at a public telephone, how and where to flag a taxi, what to expect upon entering and leaving the airport, how and where to find postal services, how and where to find a police station, et cetera.
The Airchive is a huge repository of old airline ephemera. I like the old timetables and route maps, like these brochures from Delta. This Delta beverage ticket from makes me think of the Jetsons.
A medieval bestiary with some good links to old manuscript illustrations, engravings, woodcuts, etc.
I like these spindly bookshelves from pogoHome. You can place them wherever you want because the supports wedge between floor and ceiling.
Mark Larson 
