044: Diamond crocodiles, unlearning school, and airport art

Plus, how art and cultural crisis go hand in hand.

May 04, 2026

Graphic design, visual delights, and things worth noticing, delivered twice a month.

Hello everyone. I have a lot of great design tools for you today and a great article about Cartier’s history with María Felix.

🎶 Listen to my friend Ian’s new EP while you read

🛠️ Tools for better thinking by Untools

A curated selection of thinking tools and frameworks for problem solving, decision making, and communication skills. My brand strategist husband loves this one.

🌀 Color memory game

This is a fun game that lets you show off your color and memory skills. My high score is 46.5.

🛠️ ASCII Art Archive

ASCII Art is any sort of pictures or diagrams drawn with the printable characters in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange character set. This is a large collection of text based artworks, organized by category. You can even make your own.

🛠️ Risograph printing tools by Risotto Studio

Risotto is a print and design studio in Glasgow and they offer great tools for those looking to get into risograph printing. They have tons of tools and tutorials, but my favorite is their print simulator, where you can upload your artwork layers and preview how your work will look on a variety of paper.

🛠️ Pica, a better font manager by Josh Puckett

This font manager has color themes, custom collections, and full OpenType support. I feel constantly frustrated by my Mac’s font manager so this feels like a great option.

🗞️ What these creatives unlearned after graduation via Readymag

Happy graduation season! Read about a bunch of creatives who share what they unlearned after they left school. You have to learn it before you can unlearn it!!!

“The most important thing I had to unlearn after school is that no one holds secret knowledge, and no one does things perfectly. What matters is experience, education, and your level of engagement.”

📖 Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Style

I was in Seattle last weekend for my brother and sister-in-law’s baby shower and they took me to one of the best book stores I’ve ever been in, Peter Miller Books. Peter Miller is a lovely shopkeep, who wrote a book about shopkeeping, and he keeps a wonderful shop. I went crazy mode in there and bought 40 lbs worth of stuff, this type book included.

Some more things worth noticing:

🗞️ Does cultural crisis breed artistic fertility? by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

A republished piece from 2017 that remains relevant today. It draws a line from post WWI Germany’s Bauhaus movements to present day and explores what crisis does and doesn’t do to art movements.

“Jazz musician Vijay Iyer worries about the greater pressures placed on artists by the strongman state, but says: ‘Creativity doesn’t ever stop under such conditions. Certain art worlds might get pushed underground or into tight, hidden places. But you can’t block the impulse. That is a simple fact, as old as humanity.’ The role of the artist in this situation is to ‘offer a different sense of what’s possible, and to inspire others to imagine a different reality for themselves. And, we hope, some might be moved to take action.’”

🪑These stools by Atelier Bopa

I had some delicious pastries at Holy Focaccia this Saturday and fell in love with their handmade stools and their almond torte.

📹 Giuseppe Verdi’s retirement home for elderly musicians via Open Culture

To remedy the isolation of old age, opera composer Giuseppe Verdi donated his royalties to the construction and administration of a retreat for retired musicians. Casa Verdi was founded in 1899 and is still running today. It’s a beautiful thing, really.

🗞️ Cartier’s crocodile necklace is an ode to cinema’s femme fatale, María Felix via Artnet

Earlier this week I shared that María Felix is my latest style inspiration. She is one of the most iconic figures of Mexican’s golden age of cinema and is known for being an extravagant and eccentric woman.

In 1975, she commissioned a crocodile necklace while carrying a baby crocodile (in a jar?????) at the Cartier store in Paris. Since then, Cartier has revisited its crocodile collection and it has become a mainstay in their designs, using the same artist who made the original.

🗞️ How is art selected for New York City’s airports? via Hyperallergic

LaGuardia Airport is home to art pieces that make you go “huh?” and “oh, sure.” This article dives into how this art gets there, the 6–8 figure cost, and the mysterious art selection process. I was left with a lot of questions and I hope they get answered someday.