Tags: graph

Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters: Advances in Derp Learning

A genuinely interesting (and droll) deep dive into derp learning …for typography!

National Security Agency (NSA) security/motivational posters from the 1950s and 1960s [PDF]

This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which was received by this office on 5 February 2016 for “A digital/electronic copy of the NSA old security posters from the 1950s and 1960s.”

The graphic design is …um, mixed.

Meet Utopia: Designing And Building With Fluid Type And Space Scales — Smashing Magazine

An excellent explainer from Trys and James of their supersmart Utopia approach:

Utopia encourages the curation of a system small enough to be held in short-term memory, rather than one so sprawling it must be constantly referred to.

Let’s Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science | Opinion | Communications of the ACM

I don’t think I agree with Don Knuth’s argument here from a 2014 lecture, but I do like how he sets out his table:

Why do I, as a scientist, get so much out of reading the history of science? Let me count the ways:

1. To understand the process of discovery—not so much what was discovered, but how it was discovered.
2. To understand the process of failure.
3. To celebrate the contributions of many cultures.
4. Telling historical stories is the best way to teach.
5. To learn how to cope with life.
6. To become more familiar with the world, and to know how science fits into the overall history of mankind.

A Wire Across the Ocean | American Scientist

Ainissa Ramirez recounts the story of the transatlantic telegraph cable, the Apollo project of its day.

Fluid Space Calculator | Utopia

Type and space are linked, so if you’re going to have a fluid type calculator, it makes sense to have a fluid space calculator too. More great work from Trys and James!

[css-fonts-5] @font-face supports incremental · Issue #6063 · w3c/csswg-drafts

This could give a big boost to web performance!

System fonts don’t have to be ugly /// Iain Bean

You don’t have to use web fonts—there are some pretty nice options if you stick to system fonts (like Georgia, Charter, and Palatino).

This Word Does Not Exist

This is easily my favourite use of a machine learning algorithm.

Proxima Vara by Mark Simonson

Oh, nice! A version of the classic Proxima Nova that’s a variable font that allows you to vary weight, width, and slant.

Continuous Typography / MK

Sounds like some convergent thinking with the ideas behind Utopia.

I think that the idea that that any typographic attribute (including variable font parameters) can be a function (linear, exponential, stepped, Bezier, random, or otherwise) of any given input variable (user preference, screen dimensions, connection speed, time of day, display language, or whatever else) is an incredibly powerful one, and worth exploring as an aesthetic as well as a technical proposition.

Here’s a demo you can play with.

archives.design

All of these graphic design books, magazines, and type specimens are available for perusal on the Internet Archive.

Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination - Spotlight at Stanford

There are some beautiful illustrations in this online exhibition of data visualisation in the past few hundred years.

How to avoid layout shifts caused by web fonts – Simon Hearne

A terrific in-depth look at improving the performance of web fonts.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

A fascinating crowdsourced project. You can read the backstory in this article in Wired magazine.

Cameras and Lenses – Bartosz Ciechanowski

This is a truly wonderful web page! It’s an explanation from first principles of how cameras and lenses work.

At its most basic, it uses words which you can read in any browser. It also uses images so if your browser supports images, you get that enhancement. And it uses interactive JavaScript widgets so that you get that layer of richness if your browser supports the technology.

Then you realise that every post ever published on this personal site is equally in-depth and uses the same content-first progressive enhancement approach.

Time Lords | Lapham’s Quarterly

A fascinating look at the history of calendrical warfare.

From the very beginning, standardized global time zones were used as a means of demonstrating power. (They all revolve around the British empire’s GMT, after all.) A particularly striking example of this happened in Ireland. In 1880, when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland declared GMT the official time zone for all of Great Britain, Ireland was given its own time zone. Dublin Mean Time was twenty-five minutes behind GMT, in accordance with the island’s solar time. But in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, London’s House of Commons abolished the uniquely Irish time zone, folding Ireland into GMT, where it remains to this day.

CSS Stats

A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:

CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.

An Ocean of Books

What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.

This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.

Google font to SVG path

Cassie pointed me to this very nifty tool (that she plans to use in your SVG animation workshop): choose font from Google Fonts, type some text, and get the glyphs immediately translated into an SVG!