Meanwhile #073
Of particular interest to fans of tunnels, NASA, wind and cavernousness.
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.
Sad to hear of the passing of design legend Bill Gold. Casablanca, The Exorcist, Cool Hand Luke, A Clockwork Orange, My Fair Lady … influential doesn’t cover it. Posteritati is a good starting place to revisit some of his classics – and lesser know works, like this Thelonious Monk poster. Fingers crossed he’ll be celebrated by a hefty new monograph soon.
Khoi Vinh on what Rube Goldberg machines can teach us about design, physics and beauty. Related: roboticist Simone Giertz on why you should make useless things.
Throughly enjoying Matchbloc, a big pile of Eastern Bloc matchbox labels collected by the fine folks at Maraid Design and Present & Correct. Interesting how seeing them on-screen removes any sense of scale, so these could all easily be posters or book covers.
New favourite podcast: The Cinemile. Married couple Dave and Cathy record their post-film chat while walking home from the cinema. Really great idea, brilliantly done. Most importantly, they seem lovely.
I love things designed with found grids. For example: this typeface was made using cracker perforations.
No tracking, ad-tech, webfonts, analytics, javascript, cookies, databases, user accounts, comments, friending, likes, follower counts or other quantifiers of social capital … txt.fyi is the dumbest publishing platform on the web and it’s incredibly appealing.
The borrowers – why Finland's cities are havens for library lovers. Some beautiful architecture here.
Historic photographs of NASA’s cavernous wind tunnels, which will be of particular interest to fans of tunnels, NASA, wind and cavernousness.
“What happened is that the internet stopped being something you went to in order to separate from the real world — from your job and your work and your obligations and responsibilities” – Dan Nosowitz doesn't know how to waste time on the internet anymore.
Every time Chicago graphic designer Jenny Volvovski finishes reading a book, she designs a cover for it. And they’re all utterly smashing. Mostly, I envy the number of books she’s getting through – if I tried something like this, it’d just be The Gruffalo over and over and over and
That is all.