(from somewhere in Macedonia—photographer unknown)
The opposite of a truth is often an even greater truth. I love the way that “turning something over” can reveal so much more… in keeping with that great quip by Josef Beuys: “When you cut your finger, bandage the knife.”
San Francisco, California
From the web zone of Joshua Heineman…“I’m breathing new life into the past using old digitized photographs from the New York Public Library. I’ve spent hours rekindling these moments, & they will not be the last… (it’s like the past has rediscovered a dimension!)” See more here.
Reaching for the Out of Reach 12: Photographer 18 stories above Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1906.
(Thanks, Adrian).
(source unknown)
Here’s a great use for old rotary telephones… love those legs.
(source unknown—thanks Betty Jackson)
Buenos Aires, Argentina
I heard today from the Argentinian stencil-artist who created these great pieces—he’s also a talented book designer and artist working in various media (and he wishes to remain anonymous because, as he puts it, “…stenciling is illegal in my country.”) I’ve shown his work before here, and you can see more on his blog here.
San Francisco, California
On this day in 1873, clothing manufacturer Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis were granted a patent for using copper rivets to strengthen the pockets of denim overalls, paving the way for their business Levi Strauss & Co. to start manufacturing their first line of blue jeans.
In 1971, while art director at Young & Rubicam International in Brussels, Antwerp-born designer Van Bladel created this directly clever, cheeky, succinct poster-statement for the European market… stating that “slipping into a pair of Levis was as good as slithering into a very tight second skin.” Across the pond, the Levi’s poster featuring the (now) famous bare-butt with the Levis pocket stitching painted on was aborted, deemed unacceptable for the (more puritanical) US market at the time.
In Ulm, um Ulm, um Ulm herum…
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Württemberg, on 14 March 1879 and he passed on to another dimension on 18 April 1955 (53 years ago today). A fiercely impressive life left a legacy for all humankind… (For some reason I had always thought him to be a very serious personage—then I came across his irreverent tongue-out image at the [amazing, designed by Libeskind, worth a visit!] Jewish Museum in Berlin a few years back… and now I see the amazing, genius, brainiack in a totally different light). Cheers, Albert!
“Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” — Albert Einstein
Somewhere in (or near) Scandinavia…
I’m blond. I married a beautiful blonde (or so I thought at the time). I suppose I’ve always had this thing for blondes—though whether or not we/they actually “have more fun” is likely a matter for debate (if it really is true, would the Nordic countries not be the happiest place on earth)?
I recently came across this diagram at Strange Maps. The map shows the one place in the world where at least 80% of the population is fair-haired—in Norway, Sweden and Finland. Indicating the varying degrees of ‘blondness’ in Europe, it shows “how fair hair gets rarer further away from this core area—towards the south, as one intuitively might presume, but also towards the east, west and even towards the north. The consecutive bands (coloured in such a way as to approximately represent the ‘average’ hair colour in each area) surrounding the core blonde area in Scandinavia in most cases don’t correspond with national boundaries, but could be taken to represent certain degrees of ethnic variation, often with a possible historical explanation.” For the full scoop, visit here.
Q: How do you get a blond or blonde out of a tree? A: Wave. :-)
Winnipeg, Canada
Geez magazine Issue #9 arrived today (theme: “Art,” with guest art directors Diana Thorneycroft and Michael Boss)—it includes a piece I wrote on art appreciation that grew out of a bar table talk with publisher Aiden Enns some weeks back. My take on art criticism: “…what you ‘see’ is what you ‘get’ and depends largely on where you stand.”
Geez is an award-winning, non-profit, ad-free, quarterly Christian activist magazine that aims to “untangle the narrative of faith from the fundamentalists, pious self-helpers and religio-profiteers.” Find out more about Geez here.
Cover illustration: ‘Self (Bandage)’ by Dominika Dratwa. Napkin sketch: yours truly.
Winnipeg, Canada
Over the past four decades, I have collected thousands of quotations that I find engaging, inspiring, or stimulating—mostly with regard to design, but also with reference to life in general. (Anyone who has sat through my lectures knows that I draw liberally from what others have said before). I’m especially enamored with the effective use of metaphor, irony, or other rhetorical devices that drive a message home. Famous last words are often particularly profound…
God will pardon me, that’s his line of work.
—poet Heinrich Heine, d. 1856
I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that’s the record…
—poet Dylan Thomas, d. 1953
Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.
—writer Oscar Wilde, d. 1900
The splash page of our recently updated Circle website features a dozen or so quotations re: design and design thinking—this has drawn attention from quite a number of design bloggers of late, such as swissmiss.
