Category: Design
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Päntsdrunk, baby box, Moomin, and Finland’s other official emojis
God bless Finland, my ancestral homeland. First, there’s the new book Pantsdrunk (Kalsarikanni): The Finnish Path to Relaxation (Drinking at Home Alone in your Underwear) by Miska Rantanen. From the publisher: Danes have hygge. Swedes have lagom. But the Finnish secret to contentment is faster and easier—”kalsarikänni” or pantsdrunk—drinking at home, alone, in your underwear. When it comes to […]
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Denver Crush Walls
Got to visit Denver for the second time this year for a friend’s wedding. While there another Denver friend brought me on a walking tour of the Crush Walls urban art festival in the RiNo neighborhood, where we saw some really cool graffiti:
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Know Wonder
I’m sad I missed the TEDx event this year at my alma mater, especially because of its great theme and logo:
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OED can you see?
A used books and records store in my town just moved even closer to my place. Today I stopped by and saw a two-volume Oxford English Dictionary Compact Edition. It comes in a case and with its own magnifying glass, because they weren’t kidding when they called it compact: I exercised enough self-control to pass […]
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Fly the L flag
On my way to a concert last night, I noticed the flag-like design of the Chicago L train platform and tracks when viewed from above: Track, platform, and the space in between. “The space between” being, in essence, what public transportation is.
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Make the interrobang banal‽
99% Invisible (a personal favorite podcast) just did a typically great short history of the interrobang and its fight for survival: Today, the interrobang is just barely hanging in there. It has its own character in Unicode, the common directory of symbols which all computer fonts must reference. But Keith Houston points out that it […]
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Ain’t no road just like Lake Shore Drive
And there ain’t no road just like it Anywhere I found Running south on Lake Shore Drive heading into town Just slippin’ on by on LSD, Friday night trouble bound — “Lake Shore Drive” by Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah I’ve had occasion to drive into or through downtown Chicago several times recently, which is unusual. A […]
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Pattern-spotting in a Chicagoland alley
Though the cold, wintry weather has extended into April this year, the other day the sun beamed and the temperature jumped into the 60s. I decided to take a break from work and go for a short walk, and I soon ambled down one of the countless back alleys that cut through Chicagoland. (Here’s the […]
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New font based on Lithuania’s Act of Independence
Eimantas Paškonis made a beautiful new font based on the manuscript of the Act of Independence of Lithuania, passed in 1918: The whole project took more than 6 months. First of all, a high-resolution scan of the Act of Independence of Lithuania had to be obtained from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Then the person who […]
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Films Galore and other groovy ’70s library brochures
Digging around my library’s local history collection, I found a stack of trifold brochures promoting the services of the old North Suburban Library System (now RAILS) my library is part of. I’m guessing they’re from the 1970s since NSLS started in the late ’60s. Look at all these groovy logos and colors: And then there’s the […]