ephemera

I can't wait to get a copy of Jason Thompson's brand-new project, Playing with Books: The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Reimagining the Book. Thompson, the founder and creative director of Rag and Bone Bindery, has long kept a blog featuring the best book and paper artists. Now he's edited a book art book, and it looks great. I mean, it has a section on "shaping books with power tools" - what more do you need?? Playing with Books: The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Reimagining the Book at Amazon
The Japanese have created some. . . disturbing. . . signage for the Tokyo subway. Not only are all the signs populated with pupil-less passerby-zombies staring with blank jealousy at the youthful protagonists, but the messages are a little mixed: That's right - please go HOME to pass out in your own vomit minus a shoe. It's the civilized thing to do. Kicking bookworms in the knee is also best done at home. Unless you don't have bookworms there to kick. In which case you can disregard this sign. Go tell it on the mountain! (Why are you trying to take the subway to the mountain anyway…
From Richard Waller, "A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours with a Specimen of Each Colour Prefixt Its Properties"Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 6, 1686/1687 (London, 1688) Noting the lack of a standard for colors in natural philosophy, and inspired by a similar table published in Stockholm, Richard Waller indicated that his "Table of Physiological Colors Both Mixt and Simple" would permit unambiguous descriptions of the colors of natural bodies. To describe a plant, for example, one could compare it to the chart and use the names found there to identify the…
Blooms, Efflorescence, and Other Dermatological Embellishments: Cystic Acne, Back Lauren Kalman, 2009 Metalsmith and mixed-media artist Lauren Kalman explores the nexus of body, adornment, and disease in her remarkable series "Blooms, Efflorescence, and Other Dermatological Embellishments". Yes, those faux-diseases are actually piercing the skin - but only temporarily: they're gold acupuncture wires modified into jewelry by the artist. The temporary/permanent nature of the piercings echoes the temporary visibility of the diseases she depicts, like syphilis and herpes, which eventually clear…
A little Sunday reading: "Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store," one of several wonderful short stories by San Francisco writer Robin Sloan. It's sort of like magical realism for techies: Back at Supply and Demand. The air is crackÂling with wi-ââfi; Kat and I are havÂing the only spoÂken conÂverÂsaÂtion in the entire place.She's wearÂing the same red-ââand-ââyellow "BAM!" t-ââshirt as yesÂterÂday, which means a) she slept in it, b) she owns sevÂeral idenÂtiÂcal t-ââshirts, or c) she's a carÂtoon character--all of which are appealÂing alternatives.I don't want to come out and conÂfess…
Sonar from Renaud Hallée on Vimeo. Via Fast Company.
A few thoughts on this ad I spotted last week in Boston: 1. Yes, that appears to be a giant gel electrophoresis. Geez, this town is nerdy. 2. I hope that attractive woman is supposed to be a genetics PhD. Because we're all supermodels. 3. Why didn't I ever think to do a random restriction digest and blot on my own DNA back when I was in the lab 18 hours a day, so I could false-color it in Photoshop, hang it above the mantel, and brag about my trendy home decor? Bah! I suppose maybe there were rules about that sort of thing. 4. The loft development website asks, "What's your design DNA"?…
Mark Goetz makes me LOL: Via lots of places, most recently Pollster.
Won't the dismal, subdued palette of winter release its hold on you? Never fear, a stripe of spring magenta is approaching! This infographic by Fernanda Viagas and Martin Wattenberg of HINT.fm depicts the dominant colors in flickr photographs of Boston Common around the year, starting with summer at the top: It makes me wonder what similar graphics would look like for other geographic regions - or even for flickr photos in general across continents or hemispheres. Would seasonal trends be detectable? Do we compensate for the dismal palette outside by photographing lots of technicolor…
Polly Law's Word Project is a series of mixed-media illustrations representing obscure words like dasypygal and nidifice. Though Law has exhibited her work in galleries, she hasn't found a backer to publish them as a book. . . yet. So she's seeking help at the entrepreneurial startup Kickstarter.com: The Word Project book will be a soft cover, 10"x10". Each piece will get its own spread accompanied by its meaning, pronunciation & an example of use. Since 2002 I have been raiding the attics, basements and dusty cupboards of the English language in search of intriguing, odd & obscure…
Delicious - and suprisingly convincing - x-ray images of animals with "skeletons" made of typography by Katerina Orlikova. Be sure to check out _Motion Picture, a running cat-like creature reminiscent of Eadweard James Muybridge's vintage motion photography. Via Street Anatomy.
Only National Geographic would dare cross The Amazing Race with the mystery of conception to get. . . The Great Sperm Race: Each of us was the grand prize in an ultimate reality competition, the amazing race a sperm makes on the road to fertilization. Millions of sperm compete while overcoming armies of antibodies, treacherous terrain and impossible odds to reach their single-minded goal. To illustrate the full weight of the challenge, Sizing Up Sperm uses real people to represent 250 million sperm on their marathon quest to be first to reach a single egg. Obviously there aren't 250 million…
By Joseph Hewitt, who clearly understands the Sb atmosphere quite well.
For the annals of humorous translation mistakes, this package from a digital antenna we bought last fall promises to . . . do something. I'm not sure what. For John O, who enjoys terrible advertising.
The cover of a 1922 issue of Life: it's a visual pun on at least one level, but it's also just pretty!
A friend of mine recently turned me on to the great street art blog Wooster Collective. Check out this unexpected street art in Richmond, Virginia: pairs of old shoes dangling in trees seem mundane by day, but by night, they're like streetlamps from a Tim Burton cartoon. Solar panels inside the shoes supply the light. No idea who the creator is. Check out more stealth art at Wooster Collective.
A blunt animated message for Surfrider's Rise Above Plastics, with Portland's Borders Perrin Norrander (full credits here) Via Notcot and others.
Campbell's is redesigning their iconic red-and-white soup packaging. Why? The answer's in your brain - or so they think: Campbell's said traditional customer feedback wasn't telling the company why soup sales weren't doing so hot. "A 2005 Campbell analysis revealed that, overall, ads deemed more effective in surveys had little relation to changes in sales," the WSJ says.So they turned to "science." Campbell's hired Innerscope Research Inc. to conduct tests on a whopping 40-person sample to see what design elements produced the most "emotional engagement."The team clipped small video cameras…
Google may have done Buzz all wrong, but they do Chrome right in these adorable, Rube Goldberg-style ads.
Jesse ("Jess3") Thomas's brand-new clip, like a slimmed-down, retro-styled, updated cousin of that ubiquitous "Right here, right now" video, is the perfect appetizer to complement the Pew's brand-new report on participatory news. Enjoy.