This happened while I was on vacation last week: Stephen Coles and company relaunched their wonderful Fonts in Use site, opening it up so that anyone can submit samples of type in the wild.

“Today we introduce the Collection, a much larger archive of typographic design open to public contributions. With this new site, our visitors become collectors. Submit your own work or other examples of typography you admire. Build a page of your contributions, a reflection of your typographic taste, headlined with your profile and bio.”

It’s already a great resource, and it will only become more valuable over time. Read about the relaunch here.

The Spanish studio Atipo photographically re-created A.M. Cassandre’s famous “Dubo Dubon Dubonnet” poster.

There’s a video of the process here, but more to the point, the project is a promotion for Cassannet, the studio’s new, Cassandre-inspired typeface — which is free.

Back in June, Patrick Radden Keefe wrote this harrowing investigation of the Mexican drug trade in The New York Times. In this New Yorker blog post, he considers the parallels between reality and the popular and critically lauded cable show “Breaking Bad.”

“the show’s portrayal of Mexican cartels is devastatingly accurate. It has been suggested that [show creator] Vince Gilligan has a sick mind, but nothing he could dream up, even the unfortunate fate of Tortuga, can rival the creative barbarism of the cartels. Many viewers were repulsed when Walt and Pinkman used acid to melt a body in an early episode, but this is such a common disposal technique in Mexico today that it has acquired a nickname — the guiso, or ‘stew.’”

You can read the full blog post here. The Times article is also worth a read, though most people won’t find it nearly as fun. And if you’re in the mood for even more bummer content, The New Yorker itself ran an amazing article on the power of Mexican drug cartels late last month.

My friends over at Mule Design launched this daily summary of the top news of the day not long ago and it’s attracting well-deserved attention. I didn’t realize that I had played a small part in its genesis, but this Read Write Web story uncovers the sordid truth. You can tune into Evening Edition daily at 5:00p here.

The antiquated illustrations in this Flickr set are charming, but what I find really terrific is that many of them capture the artifacts of the mechanical paste-up process that used to define the craft.

Yellowed masking tape, the texture of illustration board, colored pencil markings, rubber stamps… you don’t see that stuff much, even though vintage art can be found in abundance on sites like Pinterest. View the full Flickr set.

On the occasion of its centennial, Paramount asked the design firm DKNG to create this poster, in which one hundred of movie studio’s iconic films (one per year) are represented as, um, icons.

The prints are 24 x 36 inches and look beautiful, but regrettably the limited edition run of 3,500 is only available to Paramount employees. Nevertheless you can examine the poster at high resolution on the DKNG blog.

A totally mesmerizing series of motion graphic experiments done in a 1980s sci-fi style.

See them all at Mrdiv.tumblr.com.

This small publisher aims to be an “independent platform for graphic art, Illustration and art comics in the U.K. and abroad,” as well as “to become a leading proponent of quality in book design and a standard bearer for original creative content in print publishing.” They have a stable of incredible artists, including the French illustrator Blexbolex (whose children’s book “L’imagier des Gens,” though not from Nobrow, is still a favorite of mine). I received a copy of his Nobrow comic “Dogcrime” as a gift. Here’s a shot of another comic, “Abecederia.”

Find out more or order books at Nobrow.net.

A wonderful project from Spanish artist Angelica Dass: a series of photographic portraits in which she sets her subjects against a background of a specific PANTONE color that matches his or her skin tone.

View the full “Humanæ” project or read the write-up at Designboom. Via Nina Mehta.

Like many inveterate users of Photoshop, I’ve never really known what the blend modes (found on the Layers palette) do. That is, I know the effects they produce, mostly through repeated usage, but I’ve never really understood the operations they perform to achieve those effects. (It doesn’t help that their names, e.g., Color Burn, Linear Dodge, Pin Light, Hard Mix, etc., are not exactly self-evident.) This blog post lists all of the blend modes and offers simplified technical explanations of each. For instance, here’s Pin Light in plain English:

“Pin Light replaces the colors [in the underlying image], depending on the blend color. If the blend color (light source) is lighter than 50% gray, pixels darker than the blend color are replaced, and pixels lighter than the blend color do not change. If the blend color is darker than 50% gray, pixels lighter than the blend color are replaced, and pixels darker than the blend color do not change.”

That’s pretty enlightening and actually very useful. Read the whole post here.

As is common when big box stores close up shop, when the Wal-Mart in McAllen, Texas shut down, the town was left with a 124,500 square foot building. They decided to turn it into a public library, with surprisingly attractive results.

In fact, the project won a 2012 Library Interior Design Award. Read more here.