Raspberry Pi has opened an official retail store in the Grand Arcade, Cambridge.

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.”

See also: Other posts tagged ‘raspberry pi’

National Park Service typeface

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.

Available for anyone to download for free, the typeface comes in four weights: light, regular, heavy, and outline.

See also

• Diglû: a pictographic typeface for archeology — Diglû consists of 440 characters and 404 pictograms developed for the analysis and mediation of archaeological finds.
• 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.

Entries to a Competition to Design a New Tower in London (1890)

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.

(via @PublicDomainRev)

See also

• Descriptive illustrated catalogue of the sixty-eight competitive designs for the great tower for London — on archive.org
• 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.
• Johnston100: a modernisation of TfL’s classic London Underground typeface

Is My Mid Century Modern Desk An Homage or a Cheap Knock Off?

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!
• Around 75% of all IKEA’s product images are computer generated
• AxiDraw: a plotter that uses your pens
• Colourful digital restorations of historic computers

Diglû

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.

(via @typeroom_eu)

See also

• Diglû on Behance and Emphase.ch
• 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.
• Google’s Noto Project: a unified font for all languages — Google has been developing a font family called Noto, which aims to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel.

A history of the design of Magic: The Gathering cards

Framing 25 Years of Magic

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.

See also

• Twenty lessons learned over twenty years of designing Magic: The Gathering — Magic’s head designer Mark Rosewater shares twenty lessons learned over twenty years of designing one of the world’s most popular collectible card games.
• The Mystical Universe of Magic: The Gathering — A Vice video primer.
• Architectural playing cards — Architectural playing card designs by Italian architect Federico Babina.

VHS Distributor Logos

Reagan Ray has compiled an extensive gallery of retro VHS distributor logos on his blog: I was a little surprised to find out that there have been over 2,000 different movie distribution companies since the late 70s. Most of the heavy hitters are still around, but a lot of them are long out of business.

GoodTimes Home Video

VCR, Inc.

Walt Disney Home Video

Cannon Video

Wizard Video

Midnight Home Video

Medusa Home Video

Trans World Entertainment

CIC Video

Thorn EMI Video

Super Video

Children’s Video Library

See the rest →

(via The Latest)

See also

• Reagan Ray: 80s Movie Studio Intros
• The evolution of the Star Wars logo
• The best Logos from the Commodore Amiga Scene

Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world, full of places and creatures, real and imagined

Altas Obscura: Born near Milan in 1544, Urbano Monte lived a life of leisure and luxury. For him, such freedom meant scholarship, and the accumulation of a library renowned in the region. In his early 40s, his interests turned to geography, and a mammoth 20-year effort to synthesize and consolidate everything known of the world’s geography into a few volumes. More than that, he wanted to make a planisphere map of the world “to show the entire earth as close as possible to a three-dimensional sphere using a two-dimensional surface.”

DIY animator’s stopwatch with Arduino

Mateusz Urbanowicz:

Just me making another DIY solution for my work. This time a stopwatch that counts time not in seconds and milliseconds but seconds and frames.

See also: Mateusz Urbanowicz’s incredible watercolour paintings of Tokyo storefronts

Scoring DOOM: Mick Gordon on his amazing 2016 game soundtrack

DOOM: Behind the Music

GDC: In this 2017 session, Doom composer Mick Gordon provides a detailed look into the compositional process, production techniques and creative philosophies behind the hell-raising soundtrack to the 4th installment of the seminal first-person shooter franchise, Doom.

This is one of the best talks I’ve seen on the GDC YouTube channel! In addition to the new Doom game, Mick Gordon has composed music for the new Wolfenstein games and Prey. In his talk Gordon covers a lot of ground, including how he approached the brief, making satisfying bass come across on unsatisfactory equipment, hiding subliminal messages and courage vs. confidence.

See also

• A history of Doom — If you had a PC — you had to have Doom.
• The art of Firewatch — A recreation of Jane Ng’s talk from Game Developers Conference 2015.
• Black MIDI — Have you ever been listening to a normal song and thought, “I really wish this normal song had 280 million notes and took up 1.1 terabytes of data and was literally unplayable on any computer?”

ZeroPhone

Hackaday blog: There are several open source phones out there these days, but all of them have a downside. Hard to obtain parts, hard to solder, or difficult programming systems abound. [Arsenijs] is looking to change all that with ZeroPhone. ZeroPhone is based upon the popular Raspberry Pi Zero. The $5 price tag of the CPU module means that you can build this entire phone for around $50 USD.

Features:

• Raspberry Pi Zero in a PCB sandwich
• No proprietary connectors, hard-to-get parts or chips that are tricky to solder
• All the specifications for making this phone yourself will be available
• Python as the main language for developing apps (aiming to add other languages later)
• UI toolkit making development quicker and easier
• Numeric keypad, 1.3" 128×64 monochrome OLED screen (with screen header supporting other types of screens)
• 2G modem for phone functions, can be replaced with a 3G modem
• WiFi (using an ESP8266), HDMI and audio outputs, a free USB host port
• GPIO expansion headers for customization
• RGB LED and vibromotor – for notifications
• Tons of Pi Zero-related hacks that were discovered along the way, that I'll share with you as the project goes =)

See also: Other posts tagged ‘Raspberry Pi’ & Phones for the people

Inkwell, by Hoefler & Co.

A tiny universe of fonts that combines the informality of handwriting, the expressiveness of lettering, and the versatility of type.

This typeface family is gorgeous. I am itching to use it for some publication!

Typefaces, by design, are unyielding in their style: a good typeface commits to a single visual idea, and explores it with thoroughness and consistency to produce a dependable tool for designers. Contrast this with handwriting, which serves only to record the thoughts of an author, but has the freedom to move from style to style as the message dictates. A writer might scribble a paragraph in cursive handwriting, but punctuate key points with capitals, or backtrack to over-ink some crucial point with darker and more deliberate strokes. It’s a flexibility that makes handwritten communications compelling, and makes the medium of writing infinitely expressive. By comparison, typography can feel almost stifling.

Roman Roads

Sasha Trubetskoy: It’s finally done. A subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.
Creating this required far more research than I had expected—there is not a single consistent source that was particularly good for this. Huge shoutout to: Stanford’s ORBIS model, The Pelagios Project, and the Antonine Itinerary.

I’m not a big fan of the ‘fantasy subway map’ genre, but it’s the research and real data that make this one special. I think I’m going to order the PDF to print my own! (via kottke)

See also

• Genetic map of the UK shows which invasions created Britain’s DNA — Britain has a long history of invasions: over the past two millennia, various armies from the Romans to the Anglo-Saxons conquered the bulk of the British Isles. A new genetic analysis of the country has revealed which invading force had the greatest impact on its DNA.
• Mini Metros — Peter Dovak — a graphic designer and self-confessed ‘lifelong transit nerd’ — has shrunken and simplified 220 metro and light rail maps from around the world to produce this fun poster.
• Anglo Saxon London, mapped — a map showing the London area in Anglo Saxon times (roughly speaking, 500－1066AD)

Braille Bricks: Lego letters for literacy and inclusion of blind children

Braille Bricks: A toy building brick can be whatever you imagine it to be, or even something you’ve never imagined. Braille Bricks is an experiment that transforms these bricks into a tool capable of encouraging creativity, helping blind children learn to read and write. It also encourages the inclusion of children with or without visual impairment.

See also: Lego sets are getting grayer — The transition from the old grays to the current bluish grays (or “bley”) is a hot-button topic for many Lego fans.

The psychology behind video game sounds

The Beeping, Gargling History of Gaming’s Most Iconic Sounds

Wired: Four video game sound designers explain the thinking behind some of the world’s most recognizable video game sounds. Featuring sounds from the Legend of Zelda, Half-Life, The Sims, Minecraft, Dota 2 and more!

See also

• The Psychology Behind Video Game Sounds – Part 1 (1972-1998) — Featuring sounds from Pac-Man, Sonic the Hedgehog, Donkey Kong, Mario Kart, Contra, Street Fighter II, Doom and more!
• How Shovel Knight gets nostalgia right
• Nintendo’s design documents from The Legend of Zelda

Portraits of Imaginary People

A work in progress by Mike Tyka:

For a while now I’ve been experimenting with ways to use generative neural nets to make portraits.

Adding a third stage allows upressing up to 4k. However I dont have any actual training data at that resolution, meaning the network only learns to generally predict smooth edges etc, It can’t know the details of what skin pores or eyelashes look like. A super-highres database of faces would be needed here. Still for purposes of printing it’s nicer to create some interesting looking artifacts at this resolution, rather than bilinear interpolation of just pixelation.

Anyways, the goal is to make these into printable physical-world art pieces but I found in practice the resolution and detail has to be pretty high or it just doesn’t look nice printed. Like I said, it’s all work in flux and progress, more soon.

(via waxy)

See also

• Sunspring: a short film written by an algorithm — filmmaker Oscar Sharp turned to his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin to build a machine that could write screenplays.
• Blooms: Strobe animated sculptures — Clever 3-D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light.
• Wellcome Image Awards 2015: The art behind the science of life, death, sex, and disease —
  The best in science imaging talent and techniques.

Skyline Chess — New York City Edition

Following the success of the London edition, we are delighted to present the next skyline in our range – New York City.

We are funding on Kickstarter to allow us to complete our first production run of sets and packaging – this will allow us to produce the full 32 piece chess set, complete with presentation box and folding board. Each set contains an information sheet with details on each building and how to set up the board.

We’ve chosen a range of buildings from across the city, some of which capture the essence of the early 1900’s construction boom and the growth of skyscraper architecture, through to their more contemporary counterparts, along with some of the city’s most recognisable silhouettes.

We gave careful consideration to selecting each piece on the board, to ensure that it both visually reflected the appropriate chess piece and also reflected the architectural status and scale of that building in the city.

King – One World Trade Tower

Queen – Empire State Building

Bishop – Chrysler Building

Knight – Flatiron Building

Rook – Guggenheim Museum

Pawn – Brownstone House

(via ARCHatlas)

See also

• Skyline Chess – New York City Edition on Kickstarter
• Beautiful and unusual chess sets — Some designs, as with the Communist Propaganda set, arose from ideology. Some were born out of wealth, such as the opulent rock crystal and silver set from 16th-century France. And some were made from necessity, such as the cardboard pieces created during the 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II.
• Chess set architecture — As chess increased in popularity across Europe in the 1800s, the proliferation in the variety of chess sets caused confusion amongst competitors, especially those hailing from different countries.
• Architectural playing cards — designs by Italian architect Federico Babina.

Blooms: Strobe animated sculptures

BLOOMS: Strobe Animated Sculptures Invented by John Edmark

John Edmark: Blooms are 3-D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light. Unlike a 3D zoetrope, which animates a sequence of small changes to objects, a bloom animates as a single self-contained sculpture. The bloom’s animation effect is achieved by progressive rotations of the golden ratio, phi (ϕ), the same ratio that nature employs to generate the spiral patterns we see in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotational speed and strobe rate of the bloom are synchronized so that one flash occurs every time the bloom turns 137.5º (the angular version of phi).* Each bloom’s particular form and behavior is determined by a unique parametric seed I call a phi-nome (/fī nōm/).

(via @5tu)

See also

• Instructables: How to make these phi-based strobe animated sculptures, by John Edmark — “This instructable demonstrates and explains blooms, a unique type of sculpture I invented that animates when spun while lit by a strobe light (or captured by a video camera with a very fast shutter speed). Unlike a traditional 3D zoetrope, which is essentially a flip book of multiple objects, a bloom is a single coherent sculpture whose ability to be animated is intrinsic to its geometry.”
• SLO: 3D Printed Camera — Amos Dudley made made his own 3D printed camera, with lens. He has even made the design files available for download so you can print your own.
• Still File: Real recreations of computer renderings — …a series of 4 photographs recreating computer renderings as physical scenes.

Better Letterer

Comic lettering tips from Nate Piekos, who has created some of the industry’s most popular fonts and has used them to letter comic books for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, and Image Comics.

See also

• Blambot’s Comic Book Grammar & Tradition — The majority of these points are established tradition, sprinkled with modern trends and a bit of my own opinion having lettered professionally for a few years now. The majority of these ideas have been established by Marvel and DC, but opinions vary from editor to editor, even within the same company.
• How the comic book typeface developed
• Comic Neue: A more palatable Comic Sans

MKBHD tours Casey Neistat’s studio

Casey Neistat Studio Tour!

Famous tech vlogger Marques Brownlee recently toured the studio of famous vlogger personality Casey Neistat. I’m fascinated by this space.

You can see Casey’s video featuring Marques too…

If by some miracle you’ve never watched one of Casey’s vlogs, it just so happens that this recent episode is one of his most entertaining. He’s taken a bit of a break from YouTube in recent months, but seems to be uploading fairly regularly again now.

See also

• I posted a previous tour of the Neistat studio three years ago: Casey Neistat’s amazing workplace of which I am not at all jealous — The space has actually been renovated since then, but it was equally cool before.
• Casey Neistat: What You Don’t See — A profile of neistat by The Nerdwriter.

(It shouldn’t bother me, but I hate that the misspelled word ‘propellar’ features prominently in the video!)

Mateusz Urbanowicz: “Tokyo Storefront” series

When I moved to Tokyo, more than 3 years ago I was really surprised that upon my walks I encountered so many shops still in business in really old buildings. Differently to Kobe, where the earthquake wiped out a lot of these old downtown houses and shops, in Tokyo they still survive.

Spoon & Tamago: Mateusz Urbanowicz, also known as Matto, is a Polish artist and illustrator currently based in Tokyo. ⋮ One of his latest projects is the Tokyo Storefront series.

See also

• Some brilliant tutorials by Urbanowicz which show the amount of detail and technique that goes into his paintings.
• mattjabbar.tumblr.com — Urbanowicz’s blog is also an incredible source of inspiration.

Black MIDI

Black MIDI songs will kill your brain and your computer

This Exists: Have you ever been listening to a normal song and thought, “I really wish this normal song had 280 million notes and took up 1.1 terabytes of data and was literally unplayable on any computer?” Of course, you’re only human. Black MIDI is the hypnotic madness you’ve been craving.

Black MIDI is a sequenced MIDI file so dense with notes, it literally just appears to be jet black.

[Black MIDI] Nyan Trololol

See also

• This Exists — Digging up the pop culture peculiarities and nonsense that exists in the darkness on the edge of town.
• Rhizome: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

• YouTube Poop — …does YTP ⋮ qualify as a “statement” of sorts? Is it a way to reclaim these pop culture symbols and create something that is truly our own? Or are they just the annoying byproduct of having video editing software and too much time on your hands?
• Mechanical techno demonstration — Made at Lime Wharf Machines Room as part of Rhythm & Drone Research & Development residency, September 2015
• The “millennial whoop” is taking over pop music — The same exact whooping, melodic sequence has been showing up in a surprisingly high number of recent pop songs

Mozilla’s new brand identity

I don’t do many posts highlighting new brand identity work, but I really like this. Some might reasonably argue that the design is too clever, but I feel like that’s fine for this company logo. If this were the new Firefox logo, that might be a different matter.

Our logo with its nod to URL language reinforces that the Internet is at the heart of Mozilla. We are committed to the original intent of the link as the beginning of an unfiltered, unmediated experience into the rich content of the Internet.

The font for the wordmark and accompanying copy lines is Zilla. Created for us by Typotheque in the Netherlands, Zilla is free and open to all. [The font will be made available later.]

We chose to partner with Peter Bilak from Typotheque because of their deep knowledge of localization of fonts, and our commitment to having a font that includes languages beyond English. Prior to partnering with Typotheque, we received concepts and guidance from Anton Koovit and FontSmith.

Selected to evoke the Courier font used as the original default in coding, Zilla has a journalistic feel reinforcing our commitment to participate in conversations about key issues of Internet health. It bucks the current convention of sans serif fonts.

Anyone can create the Mozilla logo by typing and highlighting with the Zilla font, making the logo open and democratic.

The black box surrounding the logo is a key building block of the design, and echoes the way we all select type in toolbars and programs.

See also

• Brand New: New logo for Mozilla by johnson banks

• Google’s Noto Project: a unified font for all languages — Google has been developing a font family called Noto, which aims to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel.
• Facebook design — “One of the first communication designers to join Facebook’s team in California, Ben Barry’s focus was on developing Facebook’s internal culture, voice and brand.”
• How the 2016 Olympic font was created — “On this project we were extra careful to be super right, because it will be seen by billions of people.”
• Channel 4’s surreal new brand identity — “The broadcast media landscape is a much more complicated place than it was ten years ago, so there’s a need to stand out more than ever before.”

‘Rooms’ by Jordan Bolton

These creative movie posters are made by recreating a film’s set design in miniature.

Prints are available on Etsy and Amazon. (via ARCHatlas)

See also: The man who made some of cinema’s most iconic movie titles & these wonderful animated movie posters by Pablo Fernández Eyre.

The World’s Most Beautiful and Unusual Chess Sets

Atlas Obscura: Some designs, as with the Communist Propaganda set, arose from ideology. Some were born out of wealth, such as the opulent rock crystal and silver set from 16th-century France. And some were made from necessity, such as the cardboard pieces created during the 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II.

A John Company—the informal name for the East India Company—chess set, made in India c. 1830.

A Chinese chess set from the early 18th century. The pieces are depicted as rats, the first animal in the Chinese zodiac. Carved from ivory, the eyes are pieces of ruby and amber.

An improvised Russian chess set, made from bent wire in a gulag in the 1970s.

The set designed for cosmonauts on board the 1970 Soyuz 9 mission.

An insect chess board, created in Italy in the late 18th century.

An ivory and mother-of-pearl chess set created in South Asia. In 1712 it was gifted by the Emir of Bukhara to a Polish prince.

Master Works: Rare and Beautiful Chess Sets of the World — This book brings together some of the most beautiful and unusual chess sets ever made. Over hundreds of years, from five continents, they are culled from private collections and museums, including: 200 year-old sets made by nameless Indian craftsmen; sets by Peter Carl Fabergé; sets from Soviet gulag prisoners; and sets by leading artists of the 20th century, including Max Ernst.

See also

• Chess set architecture — Daniel Weil has created a new design for the chess set which is making its debut at the World Chess Candidates Tournament in London.
• Archicards — Architectural playing card designs by Italian architect Federico Babina.
• D&D maps and cartography Dyson Logos is a prolific and talented creator of Dungeons and Dragons maps.

Boldly Go to Upstate New York to Board the USS Enterprise

Wired: [In] Ticonderoga, New York, in a former supermarket. There, at 112 Montcalm St., a valiant would-be commander named James Cawley has constructed a precise replica of the original starship set used for Star Trek: The Original Series.

Cawley began construction in 1996, crafting set pieces in his grandfather’s barn-turned-workshop. Over the past 20 years, he has spent an “astronomical” (he said it, not us) sum painstakingly rebuilding the Enterprise. Some items, like Scotty’s wrenches and a Klingon costume, are originals from the show. Others, like Captain Kirk’s chair, Cawley built from scratch.

The Star Trek Tour is permanently housed in Historic downtown Ticonderoga, New York. The sets are full recreations based upon original blueprints. ⋮ The recreated sets achieve a high-degree of accuracy based on original blueprints, hundreds of hours of serious research and thousands of photos – both period images and images culled from extensive review and capture from latest Blu-ray images.

See also: Other posts on this blog tagged ‘Star Trek’, including many on the restoration of the original USS Enterprise model at the Smithsonian.

Beautiful Wooden Lego

Fubiz: French designer Baptiste Tavitian (aka BTmanufacture) made these gorgeous wooden sculptures of Lego ‘minifigs’ and bricks.

Made entirely by hand, the little figurines resemble the famous minifigs, and exist in several sizes; The largest measuring 80cm, and are manufactured in very limited edition.

See also: Lego sets are getting grayer

The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings (1882)

The Public Domain Review: The French artist, astronomer and amateur entomologist Étienne Léopold Trouvelot is noted for ⋮ the 7000 or so illustrations he created from his astronomical observations, the quality of which reached their zenith in the 15 exquisite pastel works which were published as ‘The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings’ in 1882.

As well as his illustrations, Trouvelot also published some 50 scientific papers, and was credited with discovering “veiled spots” on the Sun in 1875.

See also

• The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings: Atlas on The New York Public Library Digital Collections website. Includes high resolution (~70MB TIFF) downloads of all images, free to use without restriction.
• The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual (1882) on the Internet Archive.

See also: Other posts on this blog tagged ‘space’.

AxiDraw: a plotter that uses your pens

Evil Mad Scientist: AxiDraw V3

The AxiDraw is a simple, modern, precise, and versatile pen plotter, capable of writing or drawing on almost any flat surface. It can write with your favorite fountain pens, permanent markers, and other writing implements to handle an endless variety of applications.

The AxiDraw is an extremely versatile machine, designed to serve a wide variety of everyday and specialized drawing and writing needs. You can use it for almost any task that might normally be carried out with a handheld pen.

While no parts on AxiDraw require regular replacement, this new machine is built with a “screws not glue” design approach throughout, where essentially every part can be replaced by the end user if it should ever become necessary.

(via prostheticknowledge.tumblr.com)

Mini Metros

Peter Dovak — a graphic designer and self-confessed ‘lifelong transit nerd’ — has shrunken and simplified 220 metro and light rail maps from around the world to produce this fun poster.

In a blog post about the designs, he compares some of his minified designs to the original transit maps. Below you can see Seoul, one of the more complex examples.

Peter sells his designs as posters, magnets, mugs and more.

See also: Johnston100: a modernisation of TfL’s classic London Underground typeface