Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Don’t Be a Sucker
Don’t Be a Sucker, a surprisingly (and sadly) relevant 1947 film from the U.S. Department of War about how xenophobia, suppression of minorities, and the obliteration of facts and education can quickly lead a country into ruin.
(I guess this wouldn’t have been made just a few years later, as McCarthyism swung into full gear?)
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What Keeps Al Jaffee, the Genius Behind Mad Magazine’s Fold-Ins, Going After 52 Years
If it ever gets too bleak, just remember that Al Jaffee is still making the world a better place through his incredible (and bitingly funny) illustrations for Mad at age 96 (!!!).
I was making fun of the fold-outs you’d see in Playboy or National Geographic or Life Magazine. They had these big, fancy, full-color fold-outs. Well, at Mad we didn’t have that kind of budget. So I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to do the exact opposite? We’d do a cheap black-and-white fold in.
I love that the Fold-In started as another subversive bit of meta-humor about how “cheap” Mad magazine is.
On a side note, Columbia University acquired Jaffee’s paper archives a couple of years ago — I’d be amazing to look through that trove of 50+ years of sketches.
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Chibi: The Japanese Word That’s Cute And Offensive
Chibi has its roots in kobun, or classical Japanese. The kobun noun tsubi 粒つび, which means “tiny, rounded thing,” eventually evolved into the verb tsubu 禿つぶ, which describes something becoming worn down or sharp edges getting rounded out.
A good example would be a calligraphy brush losing its hairs (because that’s what they used to write back in the days of classical Japanese).
The reading of tsubu eventually changed to chibiru 禿ちびる, and suddenly we’re not too far from chibi.
I had a brief curiosity about what chibi fully means and came across what may be my new favorite post on etymology. Thorough history, examples, usage issue notes and cautions, and even a drawing guide. More word explications should come with an adorable drawing guide.
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Douglas Crockford Atari Burgers and Maniac Mansion
I recently went on a dig through the Archive.org Atari 8-bit Manuals archive, clicked on a fairly random manual for a not-exactly-popular shoot-em-up (Burgers!), and was surprised to find that the game was written by Douglas Crockford, well-known JavaScript developer and creator of the JSON data format standard.
This also reminded me that I’d also seen his name on early Lucasfilm Game products — he was the one who had to bowdlerize the NES port of Maniac Mansion for the NES! Go read his Expurgation of Maniac Mansion post, it’s worth it if you’re a fan of that era of adventure game.
Anyhow, I kind of envy his career path.
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They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo
From JWZ, co-creator of Mosaic and Netscape, the history of an iconic early logo design on the WWW, which was way more directly connected with Shepard Fairey than I had thought.
So that was the time that I somehow convinced a multi-billion dollar corporation to give away the source code to their flagship product and re-brand it using propaganda art by the world’s most notorious graffiti artist.
Side note: it’s a good time to rewatch They Live.
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Methods for Controlling Spacing in Web Typography | CSS-Tricks
A decent roundup of ways that you can fine-tune your word/character-level typography on the web — I don’t 100% agree with all of his suggested specific fixes, but knowing how one can make these adjustments in the first place is the important part. I might also add mention of the CSS overflow-wrap: break-word rule which has come up twice as something I needed in the last couple of projects I worked on (okay, that’s not really a spacing technique so much as a fix for overly-long words, but thought it worth mentioning alongside font tweaks)
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How I Came to Love the En Space
Not only is every letter an object, but every space between every letter is also an object. Every space between words, every space between lines—every bit of white space is an object. When typesetting, a printer has to think about negative space as something tangible.
A nice essay from The Atlantic on the development of the humble metal (or wood) block known as the en, the invisible assistant of legibility in classic printed text.
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He Wanted People to Read Novels As Carefully As
He wanted people to read novels as carefully, as ardently and as sleeplessly as they would read dirty letters sent from abroad. It was one of modernism’s great insights. James Joyce treated readers as if they were lovers. From Kevin Birmingham’s new historical account of the publication of Ulysses, The Most Dangerous Book, which was reviewed very favorably in today’s NY Times.
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Dennis Hopper Russian Dynamite Death Chair
[Video no longer available]
In 1983, immediately after screening his new film Out of the Blue at Rice University, Dennis Hopper invited the attendees out to a racetrack outside city limits by way of school bus where they could watch the actor sit in a chair ringed by dynamite and witness him explode — or hopefully not, if the trick he called the “Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act” is pulled off successfully…
In attendance for the explosive, not-entirely-sober stunt: Wim Wenders (presumably in the vicinity while filming Paris, Texas?), Terry Southern (screenwriter: Dr. Strangelove, Casino Royale, Easy Rider), and a 22-year-old Sam Houston State student named Richard Linklater (!).
Dangerous Minds has the full story.
(hat tip to Caitlin Moore and John-Mike who heard the episode firsthand from Mr. Linklater at a recent Austin Film Society event)
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The Only Unit of Time That Matters Is Heartbeats
The only unit of time that matters is heartbeats. Paul Ford, in an excellent keynote speech given to the graduating MFA students at the School for the Visual Arts, on our slippery understanding of time and how we make use of the seasons (days, hours, heartbeats, nanoseconds) allotted to us and the users of our work as designers.