Links
A regularly updated collection of things I find worth reading, watching, or listening to. Subscribe via RSS.
-
Arun Venkatesan outlines how Japan’s railway companies all carry one logo across thousands of vehicles, maintaining a distinct, shared visual identity for what is actually eight different organisations.
[...] the new corporate identity was commissioned as a single system that would apply across all the companies. In just 124 days — beginning with the passing of railway reform bills — the new JR companies launched across Japan, with new branding applied to every vehicle. The brief was minimal. The designers were given full control, told only that the group had to be called either “Japan Railways” or “Nippon Railways”. It was up to them to find a solution that worked aesthetically and within the constraints.
Workers applying the JR branding. Image courtesy of NDC. Great story for a great brand identity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its design process is reminiscent of Studio Ghibli’s, in that an older man struggled to delegate the design work to a younger team, and pulled all-nighters to deliver it.
-
The strangest thing happened in my brain today, where SpaceX’s IPO reminded me of this guitar teacher, who hears Radiohead’s Weird Fishes/Arpeggi for the first time, tries to deconstruct it on the fly, falls for it, and is especially taken by Phil Selway’s drumming like a metronome.
-
Over the past few years I’ve grown to appreciate Jeff Parker (virtuoso guitarist from Chicago) very much. The jazzy, improvised nature of his work—best exemplified on a few of his recent albums, like The Way Out of Easy and Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy—is just phenomenal.
The latest album he’s released with his quartet, Happy Today, might be my favourite so far. International Anthem and Nonesuch Records recently uploaded the video of its recording to YouTube, and it is a trip.
Jay Bellerose on drums and percussion, Anna Butterss on acoustic bass, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone—I hope to catch them live all together one day. I can’t believe this has accrued just 14K views so far!
-
For five centuries, every typeface size was its own unique design. What we now call optical sizing—the practice of adapting a typeface’s design for different sizes to keep it readable—is a modern attempt to preserve that deliberate design choice to honor size-specific type, even though the physical reasons for it no longer apply.
A nice reminder by Elliot Jay Stocks on optical sizing in typography, and how variable fonts quietly restore this craft. Using
opsz, the browser already mapsfont-sizeto the right optical size for you, but you can take it one step further and tweak it by hand for different resolutions (as Elliot has done on his personal website).Similar to his, my site uses Oh No Type Co’s Degular too, and I have optical sizing enabled as well. You’ll see it render differently in page titles than it does in the inline
opszhere in the body copy. -
Once a climate project, electrification is now a geopolitical insurance policy. Seventy-five percent of the world’s population lives in net fossil fuel importing countries and collectively spends $1.7 trillion a year importing fuels. Many of those governments facing a loss of confidence in global oil and gas markets are expanding clean energy and electrification projects. In April, France announced $10 billion in subsidies for EVs and heat pumps. The month prior, Spain introduced measures to further speed up electrification, renewable generation, and storage. Vietnam is about to ban petrol motorbikes in downtown Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City; the country’s giant conglomerate Vin is abandoning a planned LNG terminal in favor of a renewable project. Nigeria’s solar imports from China in March were more than five times the level of a year earlier. The list is endless.
Two wars in four years, and especially the war on Iran, are accelerating the energy transition. Domestic electrons are starting to look like security.
-
The collage work of Mike McQuade. I’ve been drawn to collages recently. A friend shared an article from The Atlantic, a while back, and it featured the work of Mike McQuade, whose work I was familiar with from the Meet Me In The Bathroom posters, but I’d never dug through his portfolio in detail. Well worth your time.
-
A kid introduces his professor, a poet, to Kendrick Lamar. The professor, expertly spinning his pencil, impressively sinks his teeth into Kendrick’s lyric, from across a few albums, and—admiringly—lays out the poetic nature of his work.
-
Bibliobus
№ 130
An example of a Bibliobus. Back in the days, in small villages in the Netherlands like the one I grew up in, there used to be a Bibliobus: a library bus or van that visited the village at set times so the residents could borrow books to read (biblio comes from the Dutch word for library, bibliotheek).
This photo collection on Flickr (found via Daniel Benneworth-Gray) shows a few of them. Different times and, in some cases, tremendous graphic design.
-
Current: an RSS reader
№ 129I linked to Terry Godier’s thoughts on RSS before.
He followed them up by launching his own RSS reader, Current. It has no unread count: new posts arrive, linger for some time, and then quietly fade away.
A lot of deep thought went into its creation and, the occassional UX niggle aside, I find it very pleasing to use.
I’m glad he turned the concept of RSS upside down and gave it a good shake. (I do hope the square-shaped macOS icon will be updated soon!)
-
Image from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. A geeky typographic deep-dive into upside-down H’s.