Hello! This is new. I am nervous. Not as nervous as I was for the fashion special, but still this is something that is not my “thing”. I’ve taken liberties with what I think about as “design”. What is design, anyway? It’s what makes something more useful, efficient, and beautiful. Let me know what you think, and maybe if I should do this again eventually. It’s a fun activity to collect nice things to share, and slowly decide if they can be bucketed into any particular special.
Aaaaannd. I’ve been planning this for a while. But next week I am going to send out a climate/environment special. It’ll be something. The reason I’m telling you now is because I’ve been procrastinating on it for so long, and by telling you I’m holding myself accountable. I’ll find the hours in which to do it.
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Here goes. I enjoyed compiling this, the way I usually enjoy compiling. I hope you get something out of it too.
1. What Made the SR-71 Blackbird Such a Badass Plane
As I learnt in a quiz a few years ago, the SR-71 is an amazing plane. Beyond a certain threshold speed, the engine changes its behaviour and lets the incoming air enter the afterburner directly. This increases efficiency and let the plane fly faster. It looks amazing. And it is the fastest plane we have built. Ever!
2. The Most Important Rule in UX Design that Everyone Breaks
This article talks about something called Miller’s law, which places a limit on how much information you retain in your head when you are exposed to something externally. Sooo, when you design something that people are going to look at, keep this in mind! An exercise that this piece asks you to do to establish this point is: take a list of 20 random words, spend a minute memorizing as many as you can without writing them down, and then spend half a minute recalling as many as you can by writing them down. Apparently people remember only 7-9 of the words, usually.
3. Inside Adidas Robot-Powered On-Demand Sneaker Factory
Meet Speedfactory: a special type of Adidas manufacturing facility where you can personalise the shoes you want.
4. Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours: a Pre-Photographic Guide for Artists and Naturalists
Beautiful and so relaxing to look at.
5. This is how the World’s most Covetable Cameras get Made
Hasselblad, a Swedish company, makes arguably the most iconic pro cameras. Hasselblads have been everywhere, and the company itself operates entirely out of a three-story nondescript building. It’s incredible.
6. To Hell With Helvetica: Is an 1874 Type Catalog the Worlds Most Beautiful Book?
7. How One Typeface Landed on the Moon
Magenta is a great outlet if you want to read about deep takes into design. Futura is a font that you might’ve used; I have, on occasion. It started off, apparently, as an expression of modernism in the 1920s, but by the 1960s, was firmly colonized and used by NASA. Recognize it? I love the sharp thin strokes.
8. The Controversial Process of Redesigning the Wheelchair Symbol
Over the last decade or so, the conventional wheelchair symbol for accessibility has been taken over in places by a new one. Why, you ask? Because it shows a person being more active, in a more positive, in-motion pose. Funnily, it started off only as a street art project in Boston, but it’s now seen widely in many places around the world.
9. Apple, Influence, and Ive
Hodinkee is a magazine about watches, and I really liked this interview of Jony Ive. It’s extremely rare to see him talk to the public in any capacity, but he does it well! He comes across as highly individualistic, and even a bit of an enigma. A well-done interview overall.
I don’t look at watches for their relationship to popular culture, which I know is so much of the fun – but rather as somehow the distillation of craft, ingenuity, miniaturization, and of the art of making.
10. This 11-Foot ‘Ribbon Map’ Puts the Whole Mississippi River in Your Pocket
I’m just going to leave the picture here. So much detail and such a novel format.
Phew. See you over the weekend.