Tags: graphic

Canadian Typography Archives

Go spelunking down the archives to find some lovely graphic design artefacts.

Paul Rand: Modernist Master 1914-1996

A lovely fansite dedicated to the life and work of Paul Rand.

Remix Icon - Open source icon library

I love how easy it is to use these icons: you can copy and paste the SVG or even get it encoded as a data URL.

Highlights | Catalogue | Sainsbury Archive

There are some tasty designs in this archive from Sainbury’s.

Which color scale to use when visualizing data - Datawrapper Blog

A fascinating four-part series by Lisa Charlotte Muth on colour in data visualisations:

1. Which color scale to use when visualizing data
2. When to use quantitative and when to use qualitative color scales
3. When to use sequential and when to use diverging color scales
4. When to use classed and when to use unclassed color scales

Basic Pattern Repository

A nice little collection of very simple—and very lightweight—SVGs to use as background patterns.

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.

archives.design

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

Star Trek: The Motion Picture | Typeset In The Future

The latest edition in this wonderful series of science-fictional typography has some truly twisty turbolift tangents.

CSS photo effects - a Collection by Lynn Fisher on CodePen

These wonderfully realistic photo effects from Lynn are quite lovely!

Works offline

How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?

Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.

What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.

The Fonts in Popular Things Identified Vol. 1 · Typewolf

I’d watch this game show:

Welcome to the first installment of a new series on Typewolf, where I’ll be identifying the fonts used in popular things. The focus here is on anything you might encounter in contemporary visual culture—movie posters, TV shows, book covers, etc.

Dams Public Website

I had the great pleasure of visiting the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp last October. Their vast collection of woodblocks are available to dowload in high resolution (and they’re in the public domain).

14,000 examples of true craftmanship, drawings masterly cut in wood. We are supplying this impressive collection of woodcuts in high resolution. Feel free to browse as long as you like, get inspired and use your creativity.

Emma Willard’s Maps of Time

The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.

Photopea | Online Photo Editor

I found myself needing to open some old Photoshop files recently, but I haven’t had Photoshop installed on my computer for years (not since Adobe moved to the Mafia pricing model). It turns out there’s an online recreation of Photoshop!

I remember when this was literally the example people would give for the limitations of the web: “Well, you can’t build something like Photoshop in the browser…”

SVG Artista

A handy tool for tweaking the animations in your SVGs.

How using component-based design helps us build faster

A case study from Twitter on the benefits of using a design system:

With component-based design, development becomes an act of composition, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.

I think that could be boiled down to this:

Component-based design favours composition over invention.

I’m not saying that’s good. I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m also not saying it’s neutral.

Science and Tech Ads on Flickr

Stylish! Retro! Sciency!

The ineffectiveness of lonely icons | Matt Wilcox, Web Developer & Tinkerer

When in doubt, label your icons.

When not in doubt, you probably should be.

Letterform Archive – From the Collection: Blissymbolics

The fascinating story of Charles K. Bliss and his symbolic language:

The writing system – originally named World Writing in 1942, then Semantography in 1947, and finally Blissymoblics in the 1960s – contains several hundred basic geometric symbols (“Bliss-characters”) that can be combined in different ways to represent more complex concepts (“Bliss-words”). For example, the Bliss-characters for “house” and “medical” are combined to form the Bliss-word for “hospital” or “clinic”. The modular structure invites comparison to the German language; the German word for “hospital ” – “krankenhaus” – translates directly to “sick house”.