The Art of Whaling: Illustrations from the Logbooks of Nantucket Whaleships – The Public Domain Review
Scrimshaws and sketches.
Feels like a Zooniverse project waiting to happen.
Tags: illustration
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Saturday, January 16th, 2021
Friday, July 31st, 2020
British & Exotic Mineralogy
A really lovely unmonetisable enthusiasm:
All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color.
You can dive in and explore or read more about the project and how it was made.
It reminds me of Paul’s project, Bradshaw’s Guide: the both take a beloved artifact of the past and bring it online with care, love, and respect.
Thursday, April 30th, 2020
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.
Monday, December 2nd, 2019
Oddly Amazing Animals from A to Z
This book is a beautiful tribute to Cindy.
Several talented illustrators have come together to create a unique book about unique animals. Each contributor has a special connection to the book’s original illustrator, Cindy Li. When she was unable to complete the illustrations before passing away in 2018, many of Cindy’s talented friends offered to help finish the project.
I think you should get a copy of this book for the little animal lover in your life this Christmas.
Proceeds from the sale of this book benefit Apollo Li Harris and Orion Li Harris, two out-of-this-world kids who had an amazing mom.
Tuesday, April 9th, 2019
Tuesday, November 6th, 2018
How to get on the #indieweb!
As well as graciously hosting Indie Web Camp Berlin on the weekend at Mozilla’s offices, Yulia has also drawn this super-cute comic.
Friday, August 10th, 2018
Accessible Comics - Axess Lab
Nice! It sounds like Lucy and Andy went above and beyond the call of duty when it came to the alt text for 100 Demon Dialogues.
Monday, July 23rd, 2018
Astronomical Typography
Typography meets astronomy in 16th century books like the Astronomicum Caesareum.
It is arguably the most typographically impressive scientific manual of the sixteenth century. Owen Gingerich claimed it, “the most spectacular contribution of the book-maker’s art to sixteenth-century science.”
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2018
unDraw
Liberally licensed SVG illustrations by Katerina Limpitsouni with customisable colour schemes.
Tuesday, October 17th, 2017
The Era of Newshammer - daverupert.com
Dave has redesigned his site. Now it’s extra Dave-y.
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2017
INCREDIBLE DOOM
A print & web comic series about 90’s kids making life-threatening decisions over the early internet.
The first issue is online and it’s pretty great.
Monday, September 25th, 2017
Short Trip - Alexander Perrin
Well, this is simply delightful.
Sunday, August 6th, 2017
Alpaca Lunch (@alpaca_lunchnote) • Instagram photos and videos
Jon’s been drawing a lunch note for his daughter every day since she was four years old. They are somewhat puntastic.
Wednesday, July 26th, 2017
Improbable Botany by Wayward — Kickstarter
Improbable Botany is a brand-new science fiction anthology about alien plant conquests, fantastical ecosystems, benevolent dictatorships and techno-utopias.
This is the book plants don’t want you to read…
The illustrations look beautiful too.
Sunday, July 23rd, 2017
100 Demon Dialogues – Lucy Bellwood
This is easily the most relatable 100 Days project I’ve seen:
I began posting a daily dialogue with the little voice in my head who tells me I’m no good.
Now you can back already-funded the Kickstarter project to get the book …and a plush demon.
Monday, May 1st, 2017
Electronic Items
I love the way Guillaume Kurkdjian uses animation here to demonstrate how these gadgets from the ’90s would work.
Thursday, November 24th, 2016
History of Icons – a visual brief on icon history by FUTURAMO
An illustrated history of digital iconography.
Wednesday, May 25th, 2016
Jessman5 on Twitter: “I made a poster from @adactio’s talk about Resilience. :) This took me way too long…”
I love this illustration that Jess made of my Resilience talk at the Render conference.
Tuesday, August 25th, 2015
Building the dConstruct 2015 site
I remember when I first saw Paddy’s illustration for this year’s dConstruct site, I thought “Well, that’s a design direction, but there’s no way that Graham will be able to implement all of it.” There was a tight deadline for getting the site out, and let’s face it, there was so much going on in the design that we’d just have to prioritise.
I underestimated Graham’s sheer bloody-mindedness.
At the next front-end pow-wow at Clearleft, Graham showed the dConstruct site in all its glory …in Lynx.
I love that. Even with the focus on the gorgeous illustration and futuristic atmosphere of the design, Graham took the time to think about the absolute basics: marking up the content in a logical structured way. Everything after that—the imagery, the fonts, the skewed style—all of it was built on a solid foundation.
It would’ve been easy to go crazy with the fonts and images, but Graham made sure to optimise everything to within an inch of its life. The biggest bottleneck comes from a third party provider—the map tiles and associated JavaScript …so that’s loaded in after the initial content is loaded. It turns out that the site build was a matter of prioritisation after all.
There’s plenty of CSS trickery going on: transforms, transitions, and opacity. But for the icing on the cake, Graham reached for canvas and programmed space elevator traffic with randomly seeded velocity and size.
Oh, and of course it’s all responsive.
So, putting that all together…
The dConstruct 2015 site is gorgeous, semantic, responsive, and performant. Conventional wisdom dictates that you have to choose, but this little site—built on a really tight schedule—shows otherwise.
Tuesday, June 30th, 2015
Why availability matters
A superb illustration of why playing the numbers game and dismissing even a small percentage of your potential audience could be disastrous.
It’s not 1% of people who always can’t see your site and 99% of people who always can. It’s 1% of visits. Almost all the people who don’t get your site correctly actually should have been able to. They don’t have JavaScript turned off. They’re not browsing on a WAP phone over a 2g connection from a shanty town. They’re you, in a cellar bar or a hotel room or waiting for the phone network to wake back up.