After thirty-two years in late night television, David Letterman announced today that he will retire in 2015.

When I was a kid, his original “Late Night with David Letterman” show had already been running a number of years on NBC before I was even aware of what late night talk shows really were. But after seeing it for the first time, I remember realizing right away that it was very different from most everything that had come before it. Letterman’s show — and the worldview that he presented through it — augured a new kind of comedy, one anchored in self-awareness and irony, that spoke directly to my generation. It’s difficult for me to believe that he’ll be retiring, especially when I look back at this video of his first show, in 1983, with guest Bill Murray — it’s still fresher than most of what we see on talk shows today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PsRDBGOzn8

I’ll miss him, but I have to look on the bright side: here, again, is another opportunity for network television to finally break its continuous string of white male late night anchors. Maybe CBS will seize this opportunity to put a minority, or a woman, or a minority woman behind their late night desk. I’ll cross my fingers but I probably shouldn’t hold my breath.

Designer Andrew Kim posted this warm tribute to the Sony Walkman TPS-L2. Released in 1979, the TPS-L2 was the first commercially available model and the beginning of a revolution in gadgetry; Kim claims that it’s “historically more significant than even the iPod.” I’m inclined to agree with him, though I feel that my own opinion is tainted by having lived through that era, and having such powerful memories of coveting this device (well, its successors, really).

Kim provides more context and many more beautiful photos in his post.

The Digital Comics Museum claims to be “the best site for downloading free public domain Golden Age Comics.” Its archive holds thousands of scanned and sorted specimens starting from the late 1930s and running roughly through the 1960s, all of them copyright free and in the public domain, so you won’t find famous titles and characters from publishers like DC and Timely/Marvel. What you will find are wonderful early specimens of the medium’s naïve, hyperbolic and often hysterical vision of the world, with names like “Men Against Crime,” “Out of This World Adventures” and “Crackajack Funnies.”

The downloads are available in the CBZ comic book archive format, which is easily read by a number of low cost or free applications (I use Biolithic’s Comic Zeal on my iPad). The scans are large and detailed, but they’re not quite the quality of John Hilgart’s fantastic 4CP blog. Still, they’re plenty of fun.

Just announced yesterday: the Toronto design studio’s famous iOS 7 templates will ship as a part of the forthcoming Sketch 3 update. This makes perfect sense; personally, I find myself opening the templates several times a week, and when I move to a new machine, they are among the first things I download.

In his announcement, Geoff Teehan makes this interesting comment:

For as long as we’ve offered the [PSD version of these templates] we’ve been asked by other software developers to include versions of it in their software. We have said no to every one. So why are we saying yes to Bohemian Coding?

Teehan explains that his team has taken note of Sketch’s surging popularity. Though he doesn’t discuss numbers, one could read between the lines and guess that the Sketch-formatted versions of their templates have seen significant downloads, and that they’re sensing a shift in the market — even as the Teehan+Lax designers have not yet made the switch themselves.

Most of us here at Teehan+Lax are still using Photoshop, but we’ll all be putting Sketch 3 through its paces once publicly released… Ultimately we believe that Sketch has a very bright future and we want to be part of shaping that future.

No word if there will be an iPad version of these templates, though.

From Barry Bearak’s profile of New York Yankees rookie pitcher Masahiro Tanaka in The New York Times. Photograph by Edward Linsmier.

If you like film and you’re not reading The Dissolve you’re missing out. They’re producing fantastic content; not just news and reviews but also superb overviews of bodies of work, like this career overview of the Coen Brothers. They’re also commissioning some terrific artwork for this content, like this one by illustrator Agata Marszalek.

Marszalek’s Behance portfolio is also teeming with superb illustrations, much of it portraiture in the same wonderfully lively, pencil-drawn style. Here are a few samples.