A Pretty 1940 Map of American Diversity, Annotated by Langston Hughes

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.”

See also

• Distribution of the slave population of the southern United States, 1860 — In 1861, in an attempt to raise money for sick and wounded soldiers, the Census Office produced and sold a map that showed the population distribution of slaves in the southern United States.
• 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 — Two cartograms from Benjamin Hennig’s Views of the World website showing how the US voted in the 2016 election and how the UK voted in the EU referendum.

Just Add Water: The Dark Past of Sea Monkeys

The Dark Past of Sea Monkeys

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.

Evolution of the English Alphabet

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.

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

Medieval trade routes and geography

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.

(via @stephenniem)

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.
• Subway-style map of Roman roads, c.125 AD
• Distribution of the slave population of the southern United States, 1860

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.

The Story of Tetris

Gaming Historian: In 1984, during the Cold War, a Russian programmer named Alexey Pajitnov created something special: A puzzle game called Tetris. It soon gained a cult following within the Soviet Union. A battle for the rights to publish Tetris erupted when the game crossed the Iron Curtain. Tetris not only took the video game industry by storm, it helped break the boundaries between the United States and the Soviet Union.

See also

• Tetris: The Games People Play — A graphic novel by Box Brown telling Alexey Pajitnov’s story.
• Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris — A fun music video.
• PC gaming history: Quake & Doom

The stories maps tell

Entertain the Elk talks about the history of real world maps and the design of the fantasy maps for Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia and Game of Thrones.

Throughout history, maps have always communicated ideas and stories to its audience, but what about maps of fictional worlds? In this video, I examine the maps of Middle Earth (Lord of the Rings), Narnia (The Chronicles of Narnia), and The Known World (Game of Thrones) in order to find the tiny details the mapmakers chose to include that point to their larger stories.

See also

• J.R.R. Tolkien’s annotated map of Middle-earth discovered
  & See the sketches Tolkien used to build Middle-Earth
• Concept art for the Game of Thrones opening title sequence
• Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world
  

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.

Medusa Home Video

CIC Video

Wizard Video

Children’s Video Library

Thorn EMI Video

VCR, Inc.

Midnight Home Video

Cannon Video

Walt Disney Home Video

GoodTimes Home Video

Trans World Entertainment

Super Video

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

Ten letters we dropped from þe alphabet

10 Letters We Dropped From The Alphabet

Austin McConnell: Think you know the English language? Here are 10 letters folks used to use, but didn’t quite stand the test of time. Elemenopee, my homies.

See also

• To be or not to be… original — Shakespeare’s language not as original as dictionaries think.
• Merriam-Webster: How a word gets into the dictionary — An infographic.
• Lessons about language from a Turkish typewriter — by Marcin Wichary, Design lead & typographer at Medium

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.”

The Collection: Letterpress plates for print film advertisments

The Collection

The Collection is a short documentary about two friends, DJ Ginsberg and Marilyn Wagner, and their discovery of an astonishing and unique collection of movie memorabilia, comprised of over 40,000 printer blocks and 20,000 printer plates used to create the original newspaper advertisements for virtually every movie released in the United States from the silent period through 1984, when newspapers stopped using the letterpress format.

The collection, which spans nearly the entire history of the film industry from the silent era to 1984, was recently appraised at ~$10 million and is available for acquisition. (via Kottke)

What appeals to me about this story is less the collection itself, and more the opportunity to enjoy a project like this! To unpack all of these plates, clean them, print them, catalog them… Fun! One day I hope I make a similar discovery.

See also

• The man who made some of cinema’s most iconic movie titles — Title designer Dan Perri explains how he designed movie titles for films such as “Star Wars,” “The Exorcist,” and “Raging Bull.”
• The Great 78 Project — The Internet Archive will soon be home to hundreds of thousands of audio recordings that would otherwise be lost forever.
• Movie posters in motion — Wonderful animated movie posters by Pablo Fernández Eyre.

The Great 78 Project

The Outline: The Great 78 Project is preserving our sonic past

The Internet Archive will soon be home to hundreds of thousands of audio recordings that would otherwise be lost forever.

George Blood’s four-armed turntable

Zoë Beery: So, the original set of records that started this project off came from the Internet Archive itself. Since they’re known for hosting so much old stuff, the guy who founded it, Brewster Kahle, has just slowly accumulated 78s over the years, from museums, libraries, collectors, anybody who has it and is like, “Oh, they like old stuff. Maybe I’ll give it to him!”

• The Great 78 Project — a partnership with New York’s Archive of Contemporary Music and the Internet Archive.
• What is the function of music? — “I feel like I should have a really good answer for this, but somehow I also feel that the question is wrong.”
• Extended score for Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan… new on vinyl!

Hitler rehearsing, 1925

Mashable: Hitler asked his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann to take photos of him rehearsing speeches. Hitler would try out various gestures and expressions, then review the pictures to see if his postures looked stunning or stupid.

Though Hitler ordered Hoffmann to destroy the pictures for being “beneath one’s dignity,” the photographer kept them in his studio. He later published the photos in his memoir, Hitler Was My Friend.

See also: Hitler was high during most of World War II

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)

Hitler was high during most of World War II

Hitler was High During Most of World War II Says Norman Ohler

Vice News: There are many things considered to be common knowledge about Hitler. He was vegetarian, partial to the toothbrush mustache, a failed fine artist and a Nazi despot responsible for the reprehensible, systematic murder of six million Jews. What has only recently surfaced is the assertion that Hitler was also high off his face for the entirety of World War II. As was most of the third reich. That’s according to Blitzed by Norman Ohler, the international bestseller that’s been translated into 26 languages.

See also: How to play Secret Hitler

How realistic are the fantasy castles from films and games?

Shad M Brooks is a huge, huge fan of swords and castles, amongst other geeky subjects, all of which he enthusiastically explores on his YouTube channel, Shadversity. I’ve been really enjoying his castles playlist.

Skyhold from Dragons Age Inquisition apparently gets quite a lot right…

However, he’s less complimentary about the ‘castles’ of Skyrim, which get some basics right but completely fall apart when you look at the details…

There’s some praise for The Lord of the Rings, but also a lot about the castles that doesn’t make sense…

It’s worth starting at the beginning of the playlist with the first two videos on fantasy vs. reality and the names and terms of a medieval castle parts.

In those videos Shad shows off and explains his own rather cool design for a more realistic fantasy castle he calls ‘Honor Guard’.

See also

• Dyson Logos is a prolific and talented creator of Dungeons and Dragons maps
• How game designers make dungeons: Durlag’s Tower
• Chess set architecture

• The Shandification of Fallout — ‘What do they eat?’

Anglo Saxon London Map

A map by Matt Brown at Londonist: In 2011, we put together a map showing the London area in Anglo Saxon times (roughly speaking, 500－1066AD). It’s pieced together from many resources, showing our guess at the roads, rivers, forests and marshland that characterised the region.

The main purpose was to highlight the many villages, hamlets and farmsteads whose names are still part of modern London. For example, the map shows ‘Wemba Lea’, the land belonging to a local chieftain by the name of Wemba. We know nothing about Mr Wemba, yet his name is familiar to millions, perhaps billions, through its continuation into our own times as Wembley. Similarly, Croydon is a corruption of Crog Dene, which meant something like ‘valley of the crocuses’.

Central London was once largely marshland. The first major Anglo Saxon settlement was Lundenwic (now Covent Garden/Aldwych). Later, King Alfred re-established a town within the old Roman walls, known as Lundenburh.

North-west London, with the ‘nose-shaped hill’ (Neasdun), Wemba Lea and the curling River Brent, which still flows through the area.

See also

• Seminal William ‘Strata’ Smith geology map rediscovered — …acknowledged as the first geological map of a country ever produced. ⋮ Smith spent the better part of 15 years collecting the information needed to compile the map. It is said he covered about 10,000 miles a year on foot, on horse and in carriage, cataloguing the locations of all the formations that make up the geology of the three home nations.
• Recovering The Doves Type from the bottom of the Thames — In 1916, the Doves Type was seemingly lost forever after it was thrown into the River Thames.
• Distribution of the slave population of the southern United States, 1860 — Based on data from the 1860 census, this map was the Census Office’s first attempt to map population density.

To be or not to be… original

The Guardian: The game is up: Shakespeare’s language not as original as dictionaries think

In an article for the University of Melbourne, Dr David McInnis, a Shakespeare lecturer at the institution, accuses the Oxford English Dictionary of “bias” over its citation of Shakespeare as the originator of hundreds of words in English.

“His audiences had to understand at least the gist of what he meant, so his words were mostly in circulation already or were logical combinations of pre-existing concepts.”

McInnis: If something happens “without rhyme or reason”, people are said to be quoting Shakespeare’s As You Like It, when Rosalind asks Orlando whether he is as head-over-heels in love as his rhymes suggest, and Orlando replies “Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much”.

The OED traces the phrase back to the 1400s – centuries before Shakespeare. So why do we think it’s Shakespeare’s coinage?

Probably because, as happens so frequently, Shakespeare isn’t the first to think of something, but he presents it in such a clever or memorable way, that it becomes firmly associated with his version.

McInnis also traces the roots of other famous ‘Shakespearean’ phrases like “it’s greek to me”, “a wild goose chase”, “eaten out of house and home”. It’s not all OED ‘bias’ however; the bard did have a knack for coining and popularising turns of phrase, like “to make an ass of oneself”…

To describe behaving stupidly and embarrassing yourself as “making an ass of yourself” seems like a very contemporary expression, but Shakespeare seems to have genuinely invented both the easy-to-quote phrase and a very memorable situation. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom the Weaver is magically turned into an ass. Other characters remark upon Bottom’s transformation, but he thinks they’re just mocking him: “This is to make an ass of me, to fright me, if they could.”

See also: Churchillian drift: How great quotations find their way to famous names

The Great Pyramid of Cholula

BBC: For an obscure temple no one’s heard of, Cholula holds an impressive array of records: it’s the largest pyramid on the planet, with a base four times larger than the Great Pyramid at Giza and nearly twice the volume.

Never mind the largest pyramid – it’s the largest monument ever constructed anywhere, by any civilisation, to this day. To locals it’s aptly known as Tlachihualtepetl (“man-made mountain”). Thanks to the church on top, it’s also the oldest continuously occupied building on the continent.

In fact it’s not one pyramid at all, but a great Russian doll of a construction, consisting of no less than six, one on top of the other. It grew in stages, as successive civilisations improved on what had already been built.

“They made a conscious effort to maintain and in some cases display previous construction episodes. This is pretty novel, and shows deliberate efforts to link to the past.”
David Carballo, archaeologist

See also

• BBC Future: The giant pyramid hidden inside a mountain — This temple at Cholula dwarfs the Great Pyramid at Giza, yet it went unnoticed by Spanish invaders. Why?
• Wikipedia: The Great Pyramid of Cholula, also known as Tlachihualtepetl (Nahuatl for “artificial mountain”), is a huge complex located in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico. It is the largest archaeological site of a pyramid (temple) in the New World, as well as the largest pyramid known to exist in the world today.

• Traditions like Thanksgiving aren’t natural — They’re invented, and at the time of their invention they called to a past that’s not really there. An imagined past; a constructed authenticity that serves the purposes of the present.
• Mummy Brown and Other Historical Colors — Korwin Briggs looks at the history of some fascinating colours with this ‘digital approximation of paint-blobs-on-paper’.
• Primitive Technology: Making a bow and arrow — I made a bow and arrows in the wild using only natural materials and primitive tools I’d made previously from scratch (as usual). The tools used were a celt stone hatchet, a stone chisel, various stone blades and fire sticks.

Guy wearing gas mask and sandals explores Fukushima’s Exclusion Zone. Takes time to check out 2011 porn.

When i enter the red zone, i can feel a burning sensation in my eyes and thick chemical smell in the air. before i went there the authority told me that i need a special permit to visit this town and it take 3-4 weeks to get the approval from the local council,, well too much bureaucracy bullshit for me..so i just sneak in the forest to avoid cops on the road …AND IT WAS AMAZING !!!!!

The radiation level is still very high in the red zone. not many people seen this town for the last 5 years…is like it vanished … i can find food,money,gold,laptop and other valuable in the red zone….I’m amaze that nobody looted this town clean.

(via reddit)

See also

• The Telegraph: Inside Fukushima’s nuclear disaster exclusion zone, in pictures — Photographer and filmmaker Arkadiusz Podniesinski visited abandoned toxic towns and villages that once housed hundreds of thousands of people inside the 20km zone.
• The most dangerous selfies ever taken — Rolling Stone hang out at the top of the world with Moscow’s death-defying ‘roofers’
• Movile Cave: The unique life isolated deep underground for 5.5 million years — Despite a complete absence of light and a poisonous atmosphere, the cave is crawling with life. There are unique spiders, scorpions, woodlice and centipedes, many never before seen by humans, and all of them owe their lives to a strange floating mat of bacteria.

Lessons about language from a Turkish typewriter

What I learned about languages just by looking at a Turkish typewriter, by Marcin Wichary, Design lead & typographer at Medium.

I don’t speak Turkish, and can’t read it either. I have never been to Turkey. I honestly don’t even know that much about Turkey. Why did I ask for a Turkish typewriter, then? Because it has one of the most fascinating keyboard layouts ever.

Some highlights:

1. We’re not beholden to Q·W·E·R·T·Y — The new layout had nothing in common with Q·W·E·R·T·Y. It was ergonomically superior, and measured to be up to twice as fast in typing; Turkey went on to break dozens of world records in typewriting championships before the end of century.
2. Accented characters aren’t always second-class citizens — To me, this keyboard says “we’re proud of our language and we will treat it with respect.”
3. Each language has a crazy secret — …in Turkish, i gets capitalized to… İ, its tittle still there. But I exists also! And its lowercase form is, you guessed it… ı. Dotted i and dotless ı coexist in perfect harmony, and both have separate keys on the keyboard.
4. Some of those other languages need to be accommodated also — Look at the Turkish keyboard. There are three letters, w, x, and q, in a somewhat unusual location: right next to the digits in the top row.
5. Punctuation is the first to go when sacrifices need to be made — Since backspacing was often physically difficult — welcome to the mechanical world — typewriters invented a certain power user shortcut. To type two characters in one space you would hold the spacebar, press as many characters as needed, and then release the spacebar to move to the next position.

See also: 216 positive emotions that have no direct English translation

See also

The first variant of the patch of the Russian-American-Brazilian crew of the Soyuz TMA-8 spaceship.

Atlas Obscura: These rare Russian insignia are a colorful relic of Soviet space travel

The patch of the Russian-French crew on the Cassiopée program, 1996–1997. On this mission, astronaut Claudie André-Deshays became the first French woman in space.

This patch is a variant used by the Soviet-Czechoslovakian crew, in 1978 for Soyuz-28.

The personal badge of cosmonaut Gennadi Manakov, used in 1996.

Patch for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first joint flight between the Soviets and the U.S.

• The creepy, kitschy and geeky patches of US spy satellite launches — “If anything, it’s an internal gag. Like, how far can you take it without being reprimanded? Or maybe the patches represent jokes that cropped up in the processing of the satellites, which we’ll never know unless they’re declassified—and maybe not even then.”
• The story behind the NRO’s sinister octopus logo — “It’s really neat to me. It’s kind of saying the enemy has nowhere to run.”
• What does the red swoosh in NASA’s ‘meatball’ logo mean? — The distinctive red shape wasn’t just a designerly flourish.
• Trippy retro DEA patches — DEA and other federal agencies created their own patches to identify different units, and they had a particularly definitive flair during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.

Smithsonian: Enterprise Studio Model Back on Display

(via @airandspace)

The Enterprise model, a genuine television star of the 1960s, now rests in the south lobby of Milestones in a new, state-of-the-art, climate-controlled case. From the center of the Hall, the restored Enterprise rests with its camera-ready side on full view.

Malcolm Collum and Will Lee discuss the markings on the bottom of the saucer section.

Kim Smith adds red detailing to a carefully masked area of one of the nacelles.

John Goodson shows off the complex masking used to create the markings on the bottom of the secondary hull.

Washington Post: Here’s what’s new:

A green-gray paint job. Using the original paint on the top of the saucer as a reference, conservators returned the ship to its proper color by removing paint applied during previous restorations and adding new paint where needed. “People are going to say it looks too green now, but it looked more gray on TV because of the powerful incandescent studio lights,” [museum conservator, Malcolm] Collum says.

Bill George and John Goodson, both of ILM, mark the position of windows on the secondary hull before painting.

Space tarnish. Artists from visual-effects studio Industrial Light and Magic applied bronze-colored streaks and specks, lost during past restorations, to the exterior. “It looks like the ship was speeding through space and ran through a cloud of something that splattered across its hull,”Collum says.

Old-school decals. With historic photos as a reference, ILM artists added lettering to the sides of the starship using the waterslide method (the same technology that underlies temporary tattoos) used by the original model makers.

A more authentic deflector dish. Before coming to the Smithsonian, the Enterprise lost its deflector dish — the saucer at the front that projects a force field to protect the ship from space debris. During an earlier restoration, “the museum made a not-very-accurate replacement — we referred to it as the salad bowl,” Collum says. The new dish is a perfect replica, re-created using the original specs.

Lights that won’t cause fires. In addition to blinking lights throughout the ship, the Enterprise’s nacelles appeared to have spinning lights inside, an effect created with motors, mirrors and Christmas lights. The old incandescent bulbs ran hot and actually scorched the inside of the wooden model, which is why they were removed long ago, Collum says. The restored version uses LED lights to replicate the original effects. “When you turn on the lights, it just brings the ship to life,” Collum says. “It’s an incredible transformation.”

Previously…

• 1 Feb 2016: The original USS Enterprise returns to spacedock for detailed restoration work
• 10 Feb 2015: The USS Enterprise at the Smithsonian

Archicards

Architectural playing card designs by Italian architect Federico Babina.

Alvar Aalto

Walter Gropius

Card back

Frank Lloyd-Wright

Oscar Niemeyer

Zaha Hadid

Le Corbusier

Charlotte Perriand

“When I was young, I used to build a house with cards: why not use architecture to design cards?”

(via The Guardian)

See also

• Chess set architecture — Designing chess pieces seems to be a little like designing typefaces, but there are, perhaps, stronger architectural connections.
• Black & White: A ’70s board game about race, housing, and privilege — This satirical Monopoly-esque board game was made to underscore the socioeconomic disparities between Blacks & Whites.
• A game designed to be played in the distant future — Inspired by ancient board games like Mancala.
• An attempt to draw All the buildings in New York

PC gaming history: Quake

RetroAhoy: Quake

After his detailed history of Doom, Stuart Brown tackles Quake in this hour-long video!

Quake wasn’t perfect, but it was as good as PC gaming gets.

See also

• RetroAhoy: Nuclear Fruit — a five part exploration of the Cold War’s effect on video games.
• RetroAhoy: Iconic Arms — the history of famous weapons from games.
• RetroAhoy: Open World Origins — What was the first truly open world game? What other titles set the standard along the way? And what makes them so popular today?

Guide to Computing

This colourful series of ten historic computers, created in close collaboration between INK and Docubyte, documents the beginning of our computing history.

The IBM 1401, a variable word length decimal computer first produced in 1959

The ICL 7500 series are a range of terminals and workstations that were developed by the now defunct UK computing company, ICL, during the 1970s.

Featuring such famous machines as the IBM 1401 and Alan Turing’s Pilot ACE, Guide to Computing showcases a minimalist approach to design that precedes even Apple’s contemporary motifs.

The ENDIM 2000 analog computer, a tube-based design developed and manufactured in the former German Democratic Republic

What’s more, the combination of Docubyte’s photography and INK’s skilful retouching and post-production techniques has resulted in something wholly unique: the ageing historical objects as photographed by Docubyte have been ‘digitally restored’ and returned to their original form. As a number of these computers predate modern colour photography, Guide to Computing therefore showcases them in a never before seen context.

The HDR75, a small analog hybrid computer that was developed in the former DDR at the Technical University of Dresden

The IBM 729 Magnetic Tape Unit was IBM’s iconic tape mass storage system from the late 1950s through the mid 1960s

Photography by Docubyte. Retouching by INK.

See also

• Creative Review: Historic computers look super sexy in this new photo series by Docubyte and Ink
• Circuit Classics: Forrest M. Mims III vintage circuit board designs from “Getting Started in Electronics”
• Kodak’s Super 8 Camera revival

True to Type: Laying Letters at America’s Last Linotype Newspaper

Great Big Story: “The Saguache Crescent” newspaper in Saguache, Colo., has been printing its news the same way since the 1800s. Lay the letters. Ink. Press. Publisher Dean Coombs’ family has had the business for three generations, and has helped print out the weekly broadsheet on a linotype since he was 12 years old. See how the news is made the hard way.

“The future of the paper is… that it will be put out next week I’m pretty sure. Probably a week after that and it could be twenty years, it could be two years, I don’t know.”Dean Coombs

See also

• Making a sustainable independent print magazine — The publisher, editor and designer of Offscreen Magazine writes about the lessons he has learned.
• Facebook design — The Facebook Analog Research Laboratory is a printing studio and workshop. Its primary mission is to produce work that reinforces the values of Facebook.
• Recovering The Doves Type from the bottom of the Thames — In 1916, the Doves Type was seemingly lost forever after it was thrown into the River Thames. Almost 100 years later, and after spending three years making a digital version, designer Robert Green has recovered 150 pieces from their watery grave…

See also

Watch the RMS Titanic sink in real time over 2 hours and 40 minutes in this animation produced for a VR computer game in production, Titanic Honor And Glory.

The animation includes text frequently appearing with what is happening on board the ship. This also includes visuals of various interior rooms flooding, lifeboats launching, rockets firing, and the Californian on the horizon.

The game sounds fascinating…

In our game, you’ll be able to explore the ship inside and out. You can access every room, corridor, cabin, and pantry, with as much interactivity as we can achieve. A tour mode is available where the player can simply explore everything at their leisure, but the main focus of the game is the story mode.

Beginning in the city of Southampton, England, which is being reconstructed on an expansive scale and with as much accuracy as our ship, the player is on the run from the police. He’s accused of a terrible crime, but most importantly, he’s innocent. He must pursue the true culprit, requiring the player to find a way onto the Titanic just before it departs.

Playing through all five days of the voyage talking to passengers, gathering clues, and unraveling a grand mystery all while avoiding detection from authorities, the hero, Mr. Robert Morgan, has no idea that his whole world is about to change. When Titanic collides with an iceberg in the middle of the North Atlantic, the player must race the rising waters to complete the mystery, prove his innocence, and, most importantly…. survive.

• The Old New World — Travel back to 1930’s America in this fantastic animation that uses historic photographs and camera projection techniques.
• Explore ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ in high resolution — an online interactive adventure.
• Recovering The Doves Type from the bottom of the Thames — In 1916, the Doves Type was seemingly lost forever after it was thrown into the River Thames. Almost 100 years later, and after spending three years making a digital version, designer Robert Green has recovered 150 pieces from their watery grave…

The Old New World

Travel through a steampunk time machine back to 1930’s America in this fantastic animation by Alexey Zakharov that uses historic photographs with camera projection techniques to great effect.

(via Laughing Squid)