It has been almost a year since I last posted here, and there was a four month gap before that too, so I have decided to let my Premium subscription lapse on this blog from June 1st. This means it’ll revert to rapidnotes.wordpress.com and all of my CSS tweaks will vanish. But I plan to leave the content here for posterity and set the Sockrotation domain to redirect to here.
It’s sad to me really, because I enjoyed blogging here a great deal and I didn’t choose to stop because I got busy or lost interest per se, but because a sense of apathy and purposelessness gradually crept over my life. The kinds of things I blogged were things that delighted me, engaged me and piqued my curiosity, but these things started to feel meaningless. I stopped posting at my tumblr blog decodering.com for the same reason: A new CSS technique or web framework just kind of seemed trivial given the hellscape the modern web has become.
So anyway, it had a good 6+ year run all in all! And it’s always possible that I will get back to blogging at some point, or use the Sockrotation domain for something new. Until then I’m just going to leave the branding here. I don’t have the energy to change it.
By Pimoroni:Monitor your world with Enviro+ for Raspberry Pi! There’s a whole bunch of fancy environmental sensors on this board, and a gorgeous little full-colour LCD to display your data. It’s the perfect way to get started with citizen science!
Enviro+ is an affordable alternative to environmental monitoring stations that can cost tens of thousands of pounds and, best of all, it’s small and hackable and lets you contribute your data to citizen science efforts to monitor air quality via projects like Luftdaten.
The alarming drop in our air quality is something that’s really important to understand. Devices like Enviro+ allow fine-grained, detailed datasets that let us see shifts in air quality through time and across different areas of cities. The more devices that contribute data, the better quality the dataset becomes.
Ars Technica:Charlie Cleveland, design director for Subnautica, goes behind the scenes of the game’s development and explains how they crafted an exciting and dangerous experience without allowing the player to fight back. Charlie shows some early prototypes for Subnautica, and describes why they decided to create a game with primarily non-violent gameplay.
War Stories is a great series from Ars in which different game developers discuss what some of their biggest challenges were.
Luís Azevedo:In this video essay we look at how Wes Anderson’s style has changed since making his first animation feature The Fantastic Mr Fox. Featuring films such as Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Isle of Dogs.
New Scientist: Chemists can’t agree on the best way to arrange the elements, prompting proposals of everything from spiral-shaped alternatives to radically elongated versions.
Above:This reimagining of the periodic table, proposed by chemist Theodor Benfey in 1964, emphasises the continuity of the elements rather than imposing artificial breaks.
Redesigning the periodic table might seem a quixotic quest, but it could soon take on a new urgency. We are already on the trail of element 119. Where it will go, and how the table will morph to make space for it, remains to be seen.
Laughing Squid: Filmmaker Dylan LeVine hilariously documented his birthday candle-phobic father Vincent‘s obsession with Facebook and in particular, his overwhelming need to build an arsenal of memes, just in case. The elder LeVine shared how he researched and alphabetized every meme to ensure a full state of readiness should an argument ensue, until it became all he could think about. His family expressed repeated concern about the amount of time Vincent was spending online, but it was only after he was put on a three-day Facebook ban that he realized how much time and energy he was wasting in front of the computer.
Vox:Known as the “grawlix” — a term invented by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker — this string of symbols is almost as old as comics, extending back to the early 1900s. Comics like The Katzenjammer Kids and Lady Bountiful were truly inventing the art form and, in the process, had to figure out a way to show obscenities to kids. Enter #*@!$ like this. The grawlix performs a censorship function while, at the same time, revealing that something naughty is going on.
MagPi Magazine:The new store sells a wide range of Raspberry Pi boards, accessories, kits, and merchandise. More importantly, it has interactive product demonstrations and breakout areas for people to learn all about digital making with Raspberry Pi.
Gordon Hollingworth, Director of Software Engineering at Raspberry Pi: “The concept is about trying to get closer to a less connected demographic, people who aren’t involved with technology, and show them that coding isn’t an inexplicable dark science reserved only for a few. Instead show them that it is possible, with the right instructions and an inquisitive nature, to learn about computers and coding.”
The Raspberry Pi store has been gestating for “over six years,” says Gordon. But each year Gordon and Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi CEO and co-founder, “decided against it.”
Things changed when Maplin closed all its stores in 2018. “With the demise of Maplin, we decided there was the possibility of recruiting just the right person to launch the store for us.”
Fast Company:If you’ve ever been to a National Park, chances are you’ve come across signage with the same distinctive lettering. The type, which features rounded edges carved into wood in all caps, has become an icon of the National Parks system.
[Jeremy] Shellhorn, who was on sabbatical from his current job as an associate professor of design at the University of Kansas, was redesigning the park’s newspaper and wanted to include the type found on National Park signs. But he soon discovered there was no digital typeface because the letters are simply formed with a CNC router in the park’s sign shop, chiseled into wood. The shape of the letters were determined by the size of the router bit.
It doesn’t really exist as a typeface unless a sign is made.
Anatomia: a quirky grotesk typeface — grotesk typeface born from the skeleton of an old Scotch Roman used in an anatomy book printed in the early 20th century.
Inkwell: a typeface for expressive writing — A tiny universe of fonts that combines the informality of handwriting, the expressiveness of lettering, and the versatility of type.
Since Shellhorn published the typeface in summer 2018, it’s been downloaded by people in all 50 states and in several other countries. Next, he hopes to assign students to create a series of dingbats to go along with the typeface.
Tom Patterson recently made available this high-resolution Equal Earth Physical Map as public domain.
The Equal Earth Physical Map focuses on the natural world—terrain, rivers and lakes, vegetation, land cover, and the ocean floor—free of obscuring country boundaries. Because the map projection is equal-area, continents and oceans are shown at their true sizes relative to each other.
The Equal Earth Wall Map is in the public domain. You may use the map any way you like, including modifying the content, reproducing it on any type of media, and selling it for profit. Consider it as yours.
A closer look at the the European region of the E. Asia and Australia version of the political map.
Detail of the physical world map centred on the Bay of Bengal.
It is a companion to his earlier Equal Earth political wall map, which is also provided in three versions, each centred on a different regions: Africa/Europe, the Americas, and East Asia/Australia.
The Equal Earth Wall Map is for schools, organizations, or anyone who needs a map showing countries and continents at their true sizes relative to each other. Africa appears 14 times larger than Greenland as it actually is.
See also
Canyonlands National Park texture and shaded relief map — “National Park Service cartographer Tom Patterson is a master of texture and shaded relief. He’s released this gorgeous map of Canyonlands National to the public domain.”
The first relief map — With his map Gyger reached a fundamental progress by displaying mountains – until then drawn in template-like side views – as elevations of mass.
The Equal Earth map projection is a new equal-area pseudocylindrical projection for world maps jointly developed by Bojan Šavrič (Esri), Tom Patterson (US National Park Service), and Bernhard Jenny (Monash University). It was created to provide a visually pleasing alternative to the Gall-Peters projection, which some schools and socially concerned groups have adopted out of concern for fairness. Their priority is to show developing countries in the tropics and developed countries in the north with correctly proportioned sizes.
Slate:This map, issued by the Council Against Intolerance in America in 1940, shows the ethnic groups living in the United States, offering a picture of their geographical locations, typical employment, and religious commitments.
The map omits state boundaries, opting instead to show the mix of ethnic groups by area. For heavily-populated areas, such as the Northeast or Chicago, pop-out keys framed with line drawings of people engaged in typical industries show the diversity of urban citizenry.
Altas Obscura:“Maps of this kind were not particularly common and especially not at this scale,” says Ian Fowler, the director of Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine, who notes that the physical map itself is quite large. “While this map does borrow stylistic elements from pictorial maps produced during the 1920s and ‘30s, it is very unique in its emphasis and display of information.”
WEB Du Bois: Using data to show inequality, updated — The civil rights pioneer and scholar is most famous for his book The Souls of Black Folk, but his use of data to show inequality is still profound today.
The Council Against Intolerance, a New York group active from the late 1930s through the mid-1940s, was founded by left-leaning Jewish author James Waterman Wise. Wise is notable for having warned of the dangers of Nazism in several books as early as 1933. — Slate
Futurism:The results are spectacular. Even small seemingly random details like freckles, skin pores or stubble are convincingly distributed in the images the project generated.
“Researchers at NVIDIA have harnessed the power of a generative adversarial network (GAN) — a class of neural network — to generate some extremely realistic faces. The results are more impressive than anything we’ve seen before.” — Futurism
Gameumentary:Explore the very beginnings of Larian Studios and the Divinity franchise in our feature-length documentary. Discover the struggles the studio faced on their journey to becoming an independent studio, and how each game in the Divinity franchise laid the foundation for what would become, Original Sin.
In 1942, Athelstan Spilhaus produced a world map with a unique perspective, presenting the world’s oceans as one body of water. The Spilhaus Projection could be just what the oceans need to get the attention their problems deserve.
Big Think: This is a world map unlike any other. Uniquely, it centres on Antarctica. Disturbingly, it rips Asia and the Americas to shreds. And compellingly, it presents the seas and oceans – 71% of the Earth’s surface – as a unified body of water. The map was designed by a renaissance man who also invented the skyways of Minneapolis and the secret weather balloon that caused the Roswell Incident. And yet you’ve never heard of him.
See also
Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world — An important and extraordinary manuscript world map drawn up on a north polar projection to form the largest manuscript map of the world at 9 by 9 feet. […] This printed version was published in 1604 on 64 plates, and is the only printed copy known.
The AuthaGraph world map: A new way to look at the world — A large bulk of the 20th century was dominated by an emphasis on East and West relations. But with issues like climate change, melting glaciers in Greenland and territorial sea claims, it’s time we establish a new view of the world: one that equally perceives all interests of our planet.
“Athelstan Spilhaus (1911-1998), geophysicist and oceanographer, proposes a representation of the Earth centered on the oceans . The poles are located in South America and China, deforming the continents in particular, but the oceans merge into a closed inland sea.”
Pixel intensities show regions where each feeling was associated with statistically significant bodily sensations.
British Psychological Society:“How do you feel?” is a simple and commonly asked question that belies the complex nature of our conscious experiences. The feelings and emotions we experience daily consist of bodily sensations, often accompanied by some kind of thought process, yet we still know very little about exactly how these different aspects relate to one another, or about how such experiences are organised in the brain.
Now, reporting their results in PNAS, a team of researchers in Finland, led by neuroscientist Lauri Nummenmaa of the University of Turku, has produced detailed maps of what they call the “human feeling space”, showing how each of dozens of these subjective feelings is associated with a unique set of bodily sensations.[⋮]
The new results provide yet more evidence for the emerging idea that the body plays a crucial role in cognitive and emotional processes – something which has, until very recently, been overlooked. “In other words,” says study co-author Riita Hari, “the human mind is strongly embodied.”
Whether you’ve heard of Dwarf Fortress or not, i’m here to take you on adventures within it’s infinite worlds! I hope you’re ready to see exotic locations, battle DEADLY beasts and hunt down long forgotten treasures, because all that and MUCH more awaits here, in the world of DWARF FORTRESS!
Kruggsmash is a YouTuber who plays the graphically simple but highly complex sim Dwarf Fortress and illustrates his world and the stories that unfold.
I’ve never played Dwarf Fortress myself, but I admire the scope of the game and I’m a huge fan of creative gamers like Kruggsmash here.
Great Big Story:This is the story of how a tiny, magical creature was transformed into a cultural phenomenon by inventor, marketing genius and complicated eccentric Harold von Braunhut. Full of fun facts (both charming and disturbing), Just Add Water is a colorful short film about a half-century of marketing directly to children, the force of nostalgia in pop culture, and an unlikely meeting of flim-flam and hard science. A film by Penny Lane.
Vice News:These promos are “that one form of advertising that you actually want more of,” explains Jon Penn, CEO of the National Research Group. And thanks to an increase in online availability, they’re also easier to find, watch, rewatch, analyze and share theories about.
This trailer boom has lead to an increase in the number of trailers being cut and a robust job market for professional trailer makers. More work can mean more competition, too, as a studio will often hire several vendors to work on the same trailer, picking their favorite as the face of their film’s campaign. That means trailer makers are constantly one-upping each other to be the most eye-catching and innovative of the bunch.
What are the rhetorical strategies the alt-right uses to legitimise itself and gain power? How do these strategies work? Why do they work? How do we keep from falling for them? And how do we catch ourselves when we start using them, too?
Ian Danskin (aka Innuendo Studios) creates video essays about games, art, politics, and culture. This is the first video in an ongoing series about how the Alt-Right operates.
Matt Baker:Fyi, the above chart was actually just a simplified promo for a much larger chart – a Writing Systems of the World poster. So, if you’re concerned about the fact that thorn, wynn, or any other letters are missing, rest assured that they were indeed included on the main chart.
“Shouldn’t you have titled this ‘Evolution of the Latin Alphabet?'” Well, yes, that would have been correct as well. But it’s also not incorrect to refer to an “English alphabet”. Obviously, many European languages use the same Latin script. But some use a slightly different number of letters. When one is referring to the set of Latin letters used for a particular language, it’s ok to refer to that set as the “[language name] alphabet”. — Matt Baker / UsefulCharts.com
Boing Boing:In a recent Johns Hopkins experiment, only 7 out of 25 people were able to identify the correct letter. Only 2 out of 38 even knew a second lowercase “G” existed, and only 1 was able to correctly write it.
Johns Hopkins:Many researchers are thinking now that learning to write plays an important role in learning to read. People are writing less and less in our culture nowadays. This kind of gives us an intriguing way of looking at some of those questions. The main thing this makes us question is the notion that if you see something enough times you know it. There are things that we see in everyday life all the time but somehow don’t possess enough knowledge of it to access it consistently.
I was able to identify the correct ‘g’ — but it took me a moment and I’m someone who takes a particular interest in type design. I’ve actually recently been working on two typefaces of my own and I think that type designers may be partly to blame for this unfamiliarity as this character lends itself to some unconventional experimentation. The single-storey ‘g’ is probably the better choice for typefaces intended to be readily legible.
The Public Domain Review:A selection of the more inventive entries to a competition to design a new tower for London. The year previous, 1889, saw the hugely successful Eiffel Tower go up in the centre of Paris, and the good people of London, not to be outdone, decided to get one of their own. A wonderful array of designs were put forward. Many were suspiciously similar to the Eiffel Tower and many erred on the wackier side of things…
The very practical design number 37 by Stewart, McLaren and Dunn was eventually chosen to be awarded the 500 guinea prize-money and built in Wembley Park. Construction began in 1892 but the company in charge of the erection, The Metropolitan Tower Company, soon ran into problems including falling chronically behind schedule due to marshy ground and then financial difficulties which eventually led to their liquidation in 1889. Construction ceased after only 47 metres had been completed.
The Pedway: Elevating London…a documentary on the post-war redevelopment in the City of London – focusing on the attempt to build an ambitious network of elevated walkways through the city. The film explores why the ‘Pedway’ scheme was unsuccessful and captures the abandoned remains that, unknown to the public, still haunt the square mile.
Even before modern times the Afro-Eurasian world was already well connected. This map depicts the main trading arteries of the high middle ages, just after the decline of the Vikings and before the rise of the Mongols, the Hansa and well before the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope.
Credit for this map goes to Martin Månsson who posted this on /r/MapPorn, which has some interesting discussion.
The map also depicts the general topography, rivers, mountain passes and named routes. All of which contributed to why cities came to be, and still are, up until modern times.
The Silk Road is not just one, but many roads that leads through all of Asia, from Constantinople in the west, through Central Asia and the Himalayas, to Liangzhou in the east. During this time, the Chinese Song dynasty was in its height and it was one of those Chinese dynasties that were open to foreign trade and invested in commerce and infrastructure. Foreign trade was mostly concentrated to the southern ports were both Jews and Muslims had their own communities.
Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world — An important and extraordinary manuscript world map drawn up on a north polar projection to form the largest manuscript map of the world at 9 by 9 feet. […] This printed version was published in 1604 on 64 plates, and is the only printed copy known.
The high middle ages were a time when the stars aligned in terms of commerce for many areas of the world. In central Europe many German and French cities initiated annual trade fairs, some of which are still active today – most notably in Frankfurt.
Shani Avni:The first Hebrew type family by Ismar David – In 1932, Ismar David emigrated to Palestine from Germany. With his knowledge of, and familiarity with, the richness of Latin type, he conceived the first Hebrew typeface family. The design process spread over two decades, during which David researched the origin of the Hebrew script and writing traditions, and experimented in search of innovative letterforms.
In 1954, David completed his typeface family. However, it was not fully published until 2012. Parts of it were never produced, others were rejected by the locals, leaving Hebrew typesetters short.
This talk is based on research for my MA dissertation at the University of Reading. I will present David’s design process and ground-breaking results and will share the story of this lost design, offering reasons for its disappearance.
Today, type designers are challenged with creating larger type systems of manifold scripts. The making of this typeface family is therefore presented as a case study. It is particularly relevant to those who engage in enriching type systems outside the Latin realm, as it illustrates how to draw from the prosperity of the Latin, without forcing it on a different script.
Victor Gaultney:Soon after the invention of upright roman type, an interloper entered the arena—italic. Rather than displacing roman, it wound its way into our typographic culture, becoming an essential part of languages that use the Latin script. Our written communication depends on it, yet in all the books that have been written about type design there are often only a handful of pages about this essential style.
This talk will explore the roles italic plays in our typographic culture: as a language feature, a typographic element, a historical marker, a design object, and a business product. These roles have shaped the design of italic and inspired innovation and creativity. But they have also often forced italic into a subservient position. What is the essence of italic? Has that identity survived its use as a secondary complement to roman? Is it possible that this servitude has given italic the freedom to flourish?
This is the story of how italic established itself as part of our typographic language, was transformed as it was relegated to secondary roles, and yet remains a strong and essential part of typeface design.
David Jonathan Ross:As a native English speaker, I draw hundreds of accented Latin characters in my fonts that I will never use myself. These can easily become a source of stress, because of their unfamiliarity and their sheer quantity; I often find myself wondering, “Am I doing this right?”
Sofie Beier:When a reader encounters an illegible letter, he or she can draw on information from the neighbouring letters and from the sentence structure and thus make an educated guess as to what the letter might be. The same is not the case when the target is a number. In such situations, there is no additional help from the surrounding numbers or from the structure of the text. It is therefore essential that one number not be mistaken for another. In spite of this, there is very little relevant research on numeral legibility.
Legibility is one of the aspects of type design I find to be most interesting and worthwhile. Sofie Beier’s book Reading Letters is highly recommended.
Bruno Bernard:“Excoffon will be the end product of all my thinking, the sum of everything that I have accumulated during my career as a typographer.” This is how typography master Roger Excoffon would describe the typeface he was working on in 1974, a daring and uncommon oldstyle face. Unfortunately the typeface failed to be published because of a contractual misunderstanding, and Excoffon died a few years later.
Based on Bruno Bernard’s exploration of the Excoffon archives this presentation will summarize his gatherings about this fascinating project. It will try to identify the concepts Excoffon wanted to piece together to propose new ways of thinking about type design. Finally it will raise questions about how to find the right way to value this typeface and present it to the public.
Other ATypI 2017 Montréal talks I enjoyed
We need to talk about standards — Bruno Maag:This presentation aims to start a discussion on how we, as an industry, can implement standards for all fonts that are produced and sold commercially, and how we can define a terminology which users can rely on to be consistent, irrespective of where the font comes from.
Marginalized Typography — Daniel Rhatigan:This overview of men’s magazines for mature gay audiences looks at the often novel and witty use of typography and design in genres rarely considered for anything other than their photography.
Atypical Practice, Intentional Typography in Dynamic Systems — Jason Pamental:Through better font selection, OpenType features, the adoption of available techniques in CSS, and available helpers, we can achieve digital typography that is as compelling as the best printed books.
Cartier: What was Carl Dair thinking? — Nick Shinn:The 1950s and ’60s saw a stunning adoption of modernism by Canada’s creative arts community, and Carl Dair was a key player. His work as a graphic designer was thoroughly up to date, and yet for Canada’s first proper typeface he went back to the Renaissance, old metal, and calligraphy for inspiration and effect.
Caleb Kraft for Make:I needed a desk for my office. Being a maker that is also loaded down with fancy tools, I couldn’t bear to go to the store and buy something. I decided I wanted to make something, and the design would have to be one that I wouldn’t mind looking at for long periods of time.
The big question at this point, however, is what to do with the files. Do I share them even though this is a knockoff of Helmut Magg’s work?
This is a lovely project idea and something I would very much like to do for myself.
This particular project raises some interesting questions as the desk is based on a fairly famous 50s writing desk designed by Helmut Magg. It and other similar Magg desks are still sold from licensed vendors for thousands of dollars apiece. There is also a pretty healthy knockoff market. Like the author, I think these kinds of designs are fine to use as inspiration for personal projects, but selling them — or even giving away the design blueprints — definitely puts you in a grey area. You’d probably be opening yourself up to a lawsuit, even if you were ultimately well within your legal rights.
See also
Make: Design for CNC — This book introduces the knowledge and skills that you’ll find widely applicable across all kinds of CNC projects. Not only will you learn how to design, fabricate, and assemble a wide range of projects, you’ll have some great furniture to show for it!
In Autodesk Fusion360, I designed my own. This is where things start to get muddy. I looked at his, then put it away and designed my own. All my angles and measurements are actually different than his. However, I very obviously was designing something to look pretty much just like his.
A visual experiment that evaluates the evolving graphic symbolism of the United States, True Colors is a collection of flags generated from the 2016 American Community Survey. Each flag is based on data specific to its state, and provides information at a glance.
Alaska
California
Arizona
Massachusetts
Mississippi
North Dakota
District of Columbia
Florida
Most existing flags share the same common visual cues: stripes, circles or polygons, and stars. You’ll find these familiar components in the flags of True Colors as well but their color, size, shape, and position are all determined by data.
Population – background
Housing – stripe
Economy – foreground
Education – star
Each layer of the flag corresponds to subjects that provide an informative snapshot of life in that state. The background visualizes population, the stripe shows housing, the circle or polygon represents economics, and the star indicates education.
The flag of the Refugee Nation — “A black and orange (colors of the life vests) is a symbol of solidarity for all those who crossed the sea in search of a new country.”
WEB Du Bois: Using data to show inequality, updated — The civil rights pioneer and scholar is most famous for his book The Souls of Black Folk, but his use of data to show inequality is still profound today.
The divided states of America: A cartogram of the 2016 election results — Benjamin Hennig is a geographer whose work looks at social inequalities, humanity’s impact on Earth, global sustainability and new the development of concepts for analysing, visualising and mapping these issues.
How do the United States flags look when data decides their designs?True Colors was created by Olivia Johnson, a graphic designer and flag enthusiast based in New England.
Diglû consists of 440 characters and 404 pictograms developed for the analysis and mediation of archaeological finds. It was developed as a research project of the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research as a part of the doctoral thesis of Fabienne Kilchör.
A lineal typeface designed with 6 weights and 844 pictographic symbols Diglû is a substantial subset of the Unicode standard focused on one specific area of application.
Diglû will be made available through the independent type foundry Extraset.ch, where other pictograms serving different niches will be developed.
Anatomia: a quirky grotesk typeface — A grotesk typeface born from the skeleton of an old Scotch Roman used in an anatomy book printed in the early 20th century.
Inkwell: a typeface for expressive writing — A tiny universe of fonts that combines the informality of handwriting, the expressiveness of lettering, and the versatility of type.
Rhystic Studies, a YouTube channel that explores the art, history, and culture of Magic: The Gathering, takes a detailed look at the design of Magic’s card frames.
Sockrotation 