Category: Design
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The art of ‘90s photo envelopes
While going through my library’s bevy of old staff and event photos, I encountered lots of what used to be commonplace but are now practically ancient artifacts: photo envelopes. Most of them were from the 1990s and early 2000s, which you can probably guess from the designs. (See also: groovy ’70s library brochures.)
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Tiles, trains, and all the magnetic feels
Two of my favorite activities to do with Mr. Two Years Old is play with his train tracks and Magna-Tiles. We started with a relatively small batch of both, but then he got big upgrades for Christmas and from his cousins as hand-me-downs, so recently we’ve been really going wild. When we first got the […]
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City roads turned into line drawings
Andrei Kashcha’s City Roads tool beautifully renders every road of any city in the world into a simple line drawing using OpenStreetMap. I did my hometown of Madison (above), knowing its isthmus gives it a distinct look. I then did the city where I work and discovered that for some reason it includes a large […]
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This is my backpack
Part of the This Is My series. Thanks to the magic of email, I know that in March 2009 my mom asked if I wanted anything from REI. She had a coupon that was about to expire but didn’t need anything for herself. REI is one of those stores I love in principle but don’t […]
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This is my jacket
Part of the This Is My series. If you have met me in the last 15 years, there’s a decent chance you have seen me in this orange jacket: I acquired it in 2004 on a trip from Madison to Kansas City with a few people from my youth group to attend a conference. We […]
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Circle of lives
Somewhere on the Internet I stumbled upon this print from the artist Nina Montenegro’s series Against Forgetting: It struck a chord in me not only because I’ve been reading the tree-centric novel The Overstory, but also because six days ago I became a father. And I’ll tell ya, I know I’m barely a week into […]
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LEGO my DeLorean
Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me you built a time machine… out of LEGO? While rearranging the apartment in advance of Baby, I was sorting our small games collection and stumbled upon the unopened LEGO Back to the Future set my dad got me a few years ago. I gotta say, it was […]
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Paper Only! No TVs
This sign is posted in the parking lot outside my work. Why “NO TV’s”? A while ago someone left an old TV next to what they thought was a dumpster for trash but is actually a dumpster for paper recycling. But only people who had seen the TV there before it got picked up will […]