034: Receipt typography, farm life, and candy lamps
Plus thoughts on the designer as writer.
Graphic design, visual delights, and things worth noticing, delivered twice a month.
Hi readers, welcome back. You get three letters this month since last week was a bonus one.
🗃️ Deck dot gallery by Muharrem Şenyil
A curation of beautifully designed decks, not just brand guidelines.
🌀 Designer as writer by Stas Aki
A visual essay about writing as an essential part of design practice via articulating ideas, shaping discourse, and finding voice. It’s a cool web experience, I recommend scrolling on your desktop.
🗞️ Authoritarian by design via Design Observer
In the grand order of things, design falls low on the list of the country’s problems, but I felt the new America by Design initiative is a larger sign of the status of things and what’s to come. Here’s another read providing more context about the history of design and policy in the US.
“‘I don’t want to get mired in the aesthetics.’ (They’re grim.) ‘Let’s look at how the site was built — after all, that’s part of ‘design.’’ The site is heavy, overbuilt, and expensive to load. Not unusual. ‘But imagine you’re one of the millions of Americans on a prepaid ‘pay as you go’ plan, or on a home network with capped, limited data.’ This is a page that is too expensive for plenty of people to view. If it can be viewed at all.”
I keep this one close by. If you work in marketing, you might want to too.
🌀 Design the next iPhone by Neal.Fun
In honor of the new Apple releases, here’s your chance to design your own iPhone. Put an antenna on it.
🖼️ This photo of a Mr. Plum receipt via Special Offer, Inc.
This sent me on a quest to find the perfect receipt typeface. No luck yet…
“No graphic designer could truly EVER go as hard as what analog systems do on their own without a ~creative~ person at the helm of the keyboard.
Existential and makes me want to throw up...”
📖 About Looking by John Berger
This book of essays by writer and art critic John Berger eloquently explores the role observation plays in our lives. He writes about our relationship with watching animals in zoos, what photographs of suits evoke, and the works of Rodin, among many other things. Reading it has not only expanded my perspective, teaching me to literally see the world differently, but also deepened my understanding of how to look at and think about art.
Some more things worth noticing:
🗞️ The ancient art and intimate craft of artificial eyes via MIT Press
Artificial eyes have been around for thousands of years and there is a dwindling number of those practicing the craft, with fewer than 200 in the US. There’s something poetic about how difficult it is to replicate the humanity and soulfulness of the person’s original eye, despite centuries of technological advancements.
“The expressive power of real eyes can be frustratingly elusive in the making of an artificial eye. Damage to an eye socket — from an accident, a fire, cancer — is sometimes so extensive that an ocularist cannot achieve full harmony and symmetry and what seems in the best cases like magic. Still, magic does often happen.”
🛒 The best Etsy shops for vintage lighting by Lindsay O’Brien
An incredible list worth bookmarking. Look at this lamp, I want to lick it.
🎞️ A glimpse of farm life around the world via Smithsonian Mag
Scroll through these beautiful photos of what farmers looks like globally.
🗞️ Tennis is the opposite of death [PDF] via The Paris Review
The US Open has left a tennis ball sized hole in my heart. This essay is a beautiful and poetic perspective on tennis and life.
“Suddenly you are in an alternate present. The ball is tracing a graceful arc back over the net. It is a kind of communication, your player’s return: a flirting. I’ve ignored that you tried to kill me, says your player’s impossibly gentle slice, and I like you. Tennis is not only sport but spell. By changing force, your player reshapes time.”
🎶 thank you for recording by Oklou
Synth-flute bard electropop realness.
xoxo 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
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Love!!!
thanks for the shout! the amount of space those lamps have occupied in my mind is... significant