We’re back with a spring installment of more things the design team has been looking at, reading, inspired by, or in some cases, just getting a good laugh out of over the last few weeks.
Enjoy, and if you feel so inclined, let us know what you’ve been into lately, and we’ll look to include it in the next round.
1. Awful Taste But Great Execution
Pretty much speaks for itself.
2. ASCII art goodness
A live editor and playground for creating all kinds of computational ASCII art with ~40 pre-coded demos.
3. RIP Google Reader
Memorializing “an old friend gone too soon.”
4. Your Typeface
Make and control a variable font with your face
5. A New Article Page Design at ProPublica
A nice…
I recently discovered the poster shop on 1stDibs, and dang that I’m gonna get myself into trouble there. Here are some that caught my eye today, nothing profound or particularly smart to say about them apart from that it is a nice reminder of how powerful an arresting image can be. That, at it’s core, is what drew me to design in the first place, and it’s nice to get back to that now and then. This “FOOTBALL” poster is a particular fave. Just…dang.
A quick one today from Muriel Cooper’s monograph published by MIT press (naturally). From Lisa Strausfeld’s foreword (emphasis mine):
From Muriel, I learned to separate design and technology conversations. This may sound antithetical to what you would expect of an MIT Media Lab professor, but Muriel was known in the VLW for, essentially, forbidding technology conversations. She knew they needed to happen but insisted (often with an index finger on an outstretched arm pointing to the door) that they take place “in another room.” She focused the important dialogue on design, narrative, and human experience. Technology wasn’t unimportant or unconsidered, but its role was clearly in service of something other than itself.
Unit Editions’ “Studio Culture” is a book of interviews conducted by Adrian Shaughnessy, published in 2009.
I’ve read through this book a couple of times since picking it up probably 4 or 5 years ago, but picked it up recently to specifically scour for gems on design studio culture and what it takes to make good work. Here are a few selections and passages that stood out to me.
Experimental Jetset on the challenges of putting your soul into your craft:
“We have a very difficult relationship with graphic design: we wouldn’t want to do anything else, but at the same time it sometimes hurts us. It is very much in the…
When Armin passed late last year, I wanted to re-familiarize myself with his work after really not thinking about him too too much since my years in school (yeah yeah, I know, I should do better). So, I picked up his Graphic Design Manual as a place to start. It was originally published in 1965, and revised in 1988, so its, uh, a bit dated. However, no suprise that there’s stuff in there that’s just as applicable today as it was in ‘65 or ’88 or whenever it was originally written. …
Every two weeks, in our design team all-hands, we share links to beautiful or interesting things we encountered recently. These can be interesting interactions, compelling visual design, essays on design, code experiments, etc.
These last few weeks, we’ve been talking about jazzy keys, holograms, virtual worlds, and face masks added in post.
- JazzKeys from Plan8 turns a simple text editor into an instrument. Pretty enjoyable if you like jazz. Not so enjoyable if you don’t.
2. It’s hard to imagine the next few links, featuring personal holographic displays and virtual exhibits, aren’t in direct response to literally the whole world…
If for some reason you’re on this site and haven’t noticed, we rolled out a new brand system last week. Expect some additional posts and details about it over the next few weeks. For now, you can check out this post from Karene, Medium’s VP of Marketing, on the genesis of the thing and where we’re heading.
Every step, sketch, iteration and refinement that led us to the final logotype for our most recent publication, LEVEL.
Since early 2019, Medium has launched seven new anchor publications, and each of those publications has a graphic identity designed to support the subjects they cover and the unique characteristics that each represent.
The most important component of each of these identities is the logotype. Here we’ll take you through each step of the process of designing the logotype for our most recent publication, LEVEL, which launched in late November of 2019. …
FUTURE HUMAN
Let’s imagine a world that isn’t rushing headlong into the apocalypse
It’s easy to believe that the human race won’t be around for long, when you consider the state of the world today. But it’s often been the role of the artist to bring us hope. That’s why we’ve asked several illustrators this month to envision what humans might look like in 100 years as part of our monthly magazine, Future Human. You can check out the first and second entry here.
This week’s installment imagines technology as a positive force rather than one that will destroy us. Maybe we’ll pour all of our workforces into a global cleanup crew. Or…
Future Human
It’s good or bad, depending on who you ask
Sometimes, an image can tell a better story than a pile of words. That’s why we asked some talented artists to participate in Medium’s latest monthly magazine, Future Human. The task: imagine what we’ll look like far in near-far future, and then send us a spec.
We asked them to consider a handful of questions:
1. How has the human body changed—due to climate change, evolution, our sex lives—in the past 100 years?
2. What do we do for a living now? What’s our work?
3. How has technology changed our bodies?
4. In the future, what will bring us…
Ryan Hubbard
Brand Design @ Medium
