Jake Berman makes better transit maps. I found this beautiful late-night subway service map of his on the New York City Subway Wikipedia article.
It reminded me of the famous 1972 Massimo Vignelli map which hangs in my kitchen, but turns out it’s primarily influenced by the relatively obscure 1966 system map. That map is [...]
Books follow me around and accumulate in stacks: by my desks, bed, coffee table, couch. Sometimes they get in the way but I like having them around. If I could have the current active lot organized into a single stack based on pages viewed, notes taken and ideas generated, it would probably look like this:
1.
A [...]
From Thorpe and Fabre-Thorpe, 2001
I was first alerted to the work of Irving Biederman, professor of neuroscience at USC, via this WSJ article on the nature of addictive websites. I’ve been a fan ever since. His experiments are fascinating, probing everything from the neural basis of shape recognition—with members of remote African tribes with no [...]
I listened to a Jon Udell podcast with David Huynh regarding Huynh’s Freebase Parallax project a while back but it’s something you really have to see in action to appreciate. I just saw it in action and now I appreciate.
Freebase Parallax is an interface for browsing related sets of data on Freebase, a Wikipedia-like database [...]
Julia Rothman regularly showcases fascinating book objects on Book By Its Cover but the sketchbook category is especially special. Look at what she’s talked people into sharing:
Jim Stoten’s madly detailed secret drawings.
Andrés Sandoval’s accordion fold-out sticker collages.
Reka Kiraly’s thick bold lines.
Calef Brown’s characters.
Etsy seller Iris Schwarz’s delicate line drawings.
The handmade category is worth extensive clicking [...]
Excerpt from the text I created by clicking around Whitney Trettien’s combinatorial thesis on seventeenth-century digital poetry:
Harsdörffer used pieces of wood to make anagrams, designed letter-dice to teach children to build word combinations, and assigned numbers to letters to unlock a poem’s hidden values, earning him the title Der Spielende, or “the Player,” in the [...]
BibliOdyssey’s board-game roundup had me at “Filosofia cortesana de Alonso de Barros.” More can be found via a search for “game-board” on the British Museum’s Prints Database.
Last weekend in Providence I ended up checking out bits and pieces of Interrupt 2008, a festival co-hosted by Brown and RISD on “language-driven digital art,” and seeing a lot of old familiar faces. I actually find it comforting that the genre hasn’t changed much in the last ten years, and the low-tech aesthetic embraced [...]
For all the dorks like myself who obsess about notebooks, this post is for you.
Full disclosure: I tend to be partial to notebooks of the pocket-sized, reporter-style, durable, flexible, wirebound and blank variety, but I use and sample all kinds. To my mind there are two types of notebooks: portable and desktop. Portable notebooks [...]
Before breaking out the wireframe sketches and paper prototypes, some back-to-paper web types get the juices flowing with mind maps and sketch notes. Then they blog about it.
“UI porn”: notes by Mike Rohde
Mike Rohde is kind of the king of these. 37Signals recently posted his sketch notes from the Seed 3 conference and they’re a [...]
Many an urban internet meme collector can tell you about the 25-year-old Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles—embedded in hundreds of city streets throughout the Western Hemisphere, a cryptic message from an unknown crank: TOYNBEE IDEA IN KUBRICK’s 2001: RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER.
Researchers have traced it back to a handful of tantalizingly vague possible [...]
I mean BookMooch—have you tried it? It’s enough to send a book hoarder past the point of no return. You go and list the books you have that you no longer want and if they’re good ones, you’ll receive email alerts within minutes from people who have those same books on their wishlists and would [...]
NNDB Mapper from the NNDB (Notable Names Database) is a sophisticated visualization tool for the people—the kind of thing we’re starting to see a lot more of—and you can use it to uncover little-known connections between Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker contributors who have been parodied as Muppets and philosophers featured on the cover of Sgt. [...]