Lined & Unlined

month

July 2009

14 posts

Inspiration: Holt Basic Reading System

Above: Time to Wonder (Level 13, Grade 4 of the Holt Basic Reading System). Also shown: People Need People, and Books and Games. Series design by Pellegrini Kaestle & Gross. Photography by Dick Frank. Every designer I know gets visually obsessed with something from time to time. For me, one ongoing obsession happens to be the Holt Basic Reading System. I don’t know too...

Making Policy Public

The Center for Urban Pedagogy, better known as CUP, has a great initiative called Making Policy Public, which pairs designers with advocates and policy experts to produce fold-out posters on pressing social issues. Sound cool? Well it just so happens they’re accepting applications for designers through 20 August. Sign up here, and, for inspiration, check out Glen Cummings’s amazing...

Dressing up, dressing down

n+1’s Roger White on How Artists Must Dress: Whereas a dealer must signal, in wardrobe, a sympathy to the tastes and tendencies of the collector class, an artist is under no obligation to endorse these. Rather, the task of the artist with regard to fashion is to interrogate the relationship between cost and value as it pertains to clothing, and, by analogy, to artworks. (via Brian)

Above: From roelwouters on Flickr When is a website also a trolley? When it’s a WEX! Roel Wouters’s brilliant website for Amsterdam’s innovative W139 gallery is profiled by Creative Review here. More on Flickr. (How cool is the mirror ball and then the Escher sphere print in the stock photo? Genius.)

A chip with heels, a chip with wheels

Kevin Kelly, speaking at TED on the next 5,000 days of the Web: Everything will have embedded in it some sense of connecting to the machine, and so we have, basically, an Internet of Things. So you begin to think of a shoe as a chip with heels, and a car as a chip with wheels. […] A lot of people think about the new economy as something that was going to be a disembodied, alternative...

Touching the void

An amazing slideshow documenting the process of designing and installing the names included on the 9/11 memorial (via DO).

And that has made all the difference

Complete with a Salvation Army-inspired shield, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn’s Significant Objects blog has been widely posted by now, but is notable nonetheless. Do the stories we tell about the things that surround us add value to those things? Of course. So far, Significant Object’s added value seems to be around $231.90 worth of profit, which rightly stays the stories’ authors...

Some thoughts on Free

Wired editor-in-chief and Free author Chris Anderson giving a lecture in Chile last October. Photo by Carito Orellana. I’ve just finished Chris Anderson’s Free, which is available free on Google Books or as a free audiobook. There has been a debate raging around Anderson’s book for a week or two now. For those wishing to catch up, Eric Etheridge’s NYT Opinionator blog...

View Dmitri Siegel in a larger map One of my favorite people, Dmitri Siegel, is profiled by NYT’s The Moment and shares a list of some of his favorite things, both in Philly and beyond.

Texas wood type

While at UT Austin, I had the good fortune to be given a tour of the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection by its keeper and resident expert, Prof. David Shields. Shields was just finishing a major cleanup, organization, and study of the collection, and it’s great to see so much of the catalog now online. Among its treasures is this cut of DeVinne, which comes from a style of type I...

Home Library 3: Jennifer Bartlett's Rhapsody

Three years after Real Time was published, Jennifer Bartlett first showed her mammoth painting Rhapsody at Soho’s Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976. In the essay that opens the book designed by Harry N. Abrams Design Director Sam Antupit nearly a decade later, critic Roberta Smith writes, “Rhapsody is Bartlett’s great and imperfect epic, a visual event that unfolds in...

Case Study House No. 8 (Eames House), Pacific Palisades, CA. Photographed by Julius Schulman (1910–2009).

Home Library 2: Real Time

I found these books propping up a coffee table at a thrift store in northern Maine, and I was instantly drawn to their dry subtitle, proclaiming them to be simply, “a catalog of ideas and information.” Both were published in 1973 – just a year before Vint Cerf would first use the term “internet” – and the series sought to deliver information in...

Freshness ensured

Mortadella is a book documenting every slice of a mortadella sausage, painstakingly drawn by Christoph Hänsli. Published by Patrick Frey and including an essay by John Berger, it’s been beautifully designed by Cornel Windlin and Nazareno Crea. Each leaf of the book is a slice of the sausage, and the whole thing comes wrapped first in brown kraft butcher paper (cover), and then with a...