New York artist and friend Ariel Aberg-Riger is one of my favorite artists right now. Her doodle-like portraits of serenely chic twenty-somethings and her portrait-like collages of peaceful abstractions are simple but delightfully specific.

She has a new portfolio site with lots of her work, and you can visit her blog here.

Architect and designer Kirsten Hively started this project late last year to photograph New York City’s many neon signs. She says, “I have been told that New York’s neon is unexceptional in comparison to Chicago’s or Portland’s. I wanted to prove otherwise. I also wanted to demonstrate (mostly to myself) that the quirky, independent New York is still here — it’s not all chain stores, standard-issue vinyl awnings and luxury condos.”

The images are really quite lovely, and she’s right, they do evoke a quirkiness and idiosyncrasy that many people complain has been drained from New York.

Hively blogs about the project over at this Tumblr blog, and she posts her pictures over at this Flickr set. Even better, she’s just released an iPhone app that shows you what neon signs are near your current location (provided of course that your current location is somewhere in New York City) and even lets you add your own photographs of neon signage to the database. Download the app here.

A beautiful new typeface apparently of Lithuanian origin, and full of incredibly elegant, fluid ligatures. Here are a few:

The kicker is that Magnola costs only US$8 from Myfonts.com. Cheap. See the project page at Typography Served.

Japanese artist Yutaka Sone carved this painstakingly detailed re-creation of Manhattan out of marble, referencing both Google Earth and primary photographic research conducted via helicopter rides over the city. It’s roughly two feet wide, eight feet long and three feet tall — and it’s probably incredibly heavy as a result.

The sculpture will be on exhibit in New York at David Zwirner Gallery starting next week. Read more about it over at Spoon & Tomago.

“Little Manhattan” reminds me a bit of the amazing miniature replicas of strategic French ports and cities that can be found at the Musée des Plans-Reliefs in Paris. I took a few photos of the exhibits there on one visit several years ago, but they barely do justice to the exquisite nature of those scale models, which were even more painstakingly created without the benefit of satellite imagery or helicopter rides.

You can see the handful of photos I took at the museum at this Flickr tag, and you can find out more about the museum at at Wikipedia.

In 1985, illustrator Mike Saenz created the artwork for “Shatter” (based on a story by Peter Gillis) entirely on a Macintosh Plus, which had an 8 MHz CPU, 4 MB of RAM and the classically diminutive black-and-white monitor common to those very early Macs. The results were primitive and, frankly, don’t hold up very well a quarter-century later, probably because Saenz’s artwork itself was hardly virtuosic. Still, it happened.

The Comics Grid, a “collaborative, peer-edited online academic journal dedicated to comics scholarship” has a brief write-up about “Shatter” at this link.

Somehow, I’m included among ‘the fifty most influential designers in America.’ It’s flattering as hell, but the fact that so many of the designers I respect and even idolize are missing from this roundup reminds me that these things are hardly definitive. Still, I’m honored.

Thankfully, the ‘list’ avoids the trap of trying to apply an artificial ranking to a very subjective and unquantifiable data set, and opts for a graphic that offers more context. See it at full size here.

A new, hardbound monograph highlighting the work of illustrator Chris Foss, who painted book covers for science-fiction luminaries like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick. If you ever perused the science fiction section of your local B. Dalton in the 1970s and 1980s, Foss’ style will take you right back.

There’s a nice if limited gallery of Foss’ work over at The Guardian. Or you can visit his portfolio site here.

Lately I find myself defending the continued relevance of now seemingly old-fashioned technology. For instance, last week I wrote a blog post insisting that, contrary to recent sentiment, email works just fine. Now I find myself compelled to respond to a post from Marco Arment from a few days ago in which he criticizes heavy use of RSS:

“If you’re subscribing to any feeds that post more than about ten items per day, you’re probably misusing it. I don’t mean that you’re using it in a way it wasn’t intended — rather, you’re using it in a way that’s not good for you…You should be able to go on a disconnected vacation for three days, come back, and be able to skim most of your RSS-item titles reasonably without just giving up and marking all as read. You shouldn’t come back to hundreds or thousands of unread articles.”

In fact, what he advises against is exactly the way I use RSS. I subscribe to several blogs and sites that post at least a dozen items per day. Last weekend I got away for one last, glorious summer getaway at the beach, and when I came back to Google Reader, I was about two hundred updates behind — in my main bucket of feeds. I have several other buckets that are thousands of posts behind. This happens to me all the time, even when I disconnect for a regular, two-day weekend.

Though I try to keep up with my main bucket of feeds, if I fall hundreds or thousands of updates behind, I just don’t worry about it. Sometimes I do mark all as read, and sometimes I just let it run unchecked. I dip in and out without feeling any serious obligation to keep up.

Basically, I disagree with Marco’s conclusion that “RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites.” I quite enjoy having tons of profligate feeds in Google Reader. Doing so lets me occasionally graze through content streams that I would otherwise never remember to return to in my Web browser. It works great for me, and I don’t feel like I’m doing it wrong or that it’s bad for me at all.

Anyway, Marco is a friend and a smart guy, so be sure to read his full post before jumping to conclusions.

Designer Christian Annyas became intrigued by the ornate illustrative typography of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company’s maps of New York City, and so he dug up samples from various libraries and universities. These are stunningly intricate. Here are two of my favorites.

This one covers the borough of Richmond, which was the original name for Staten Island.

See all of the maps that Annyas found at this blog post.