This is an old edition of Meanwhile from an inferior, more simian newsletter platform that has unhelpfully severed all the hyperlinks. It’s included here in the archive simply for sake of completeness.
The Great New York Subway Map – MoMA, The New York Transit Museum and iIllustrator Emiliano Ponzi have turned the story of Massimo Vignelli's iconic design into a children’s book. I'd love to see the Design Museum and London Transport Museum commission a companion piece about Harry Beck’s London Underground map.
One tab I can never bring myself to close: the Cooper Hewitt collection. It’s great seeing so many museums, libraries and galleries putting their collections online this past couple of years, but few do it as well as this. I particularly appreciate the presentation of metadata as simple human-readable sentences rather than just a big pile of tags – it encourages exploration down unexpected tangents without sacrificing context.
The new Art Palette thing from Google is fun. I wish they'd put this sort of power and functionality into image search results – an area that has been haemorrhaging useful features recently.
“Like the beauty industry, the home-improvement industry plays on (usually gendered) insecurity—the fear that we are unattractive or inadequate.” There is nothing wrong with your house.
I recently designed the cover for John Boughton's book Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing. His blog of the same name is well worth a visit if you’re into that sort of thing.
Good to see that Yeah Yeah Yeahs are finally recording again, even if it’s just Big Star covers. They’re playing some big festivals this summer, so hopefully a new LP is on the horizon.
Polish film posters by legendary designer Andrzej Klimowski. I particularly love the Taxi Driver one.
Couple of years old now, but the Casual Optimist’s 52 Women Book Cover Designers is always worth a visit for links to some incredible portfolios. Not sure what the gender balance is in this area – from my experience it seems pretty evenly split … ?
GifCities is an archive of GeoCities animated GIFs, from way back in the day when the internet was nothing but scrolling and spinning neon text. A more innocent, headache-inducing time.
“Wall space is so critical. Natural light. Counter/table space is so critical. So you can really throw things on the wall and not feel, like, okay, if I only have five feet of wall space, I only have five feet of idea space.” A tour of Farrar, Straus & Giroux Creative Director Rodrigo Corral’s studio. Oh what I would give for five feet of wall space.
That is all.