Photographer Thierry Cohen creates these fantastical images of urban cities made to look dark, combined with rich night skies borrowed from other, less light-polluted locations. The results suggest what New York City, say, would look like.

There is a slideshow of his work at NYTimes.com, and more information at ThierryCohen.com.

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I’m actually a big fan of Courier, so I’m intrigued by this project from screenwriter John August, who regards the ubiquitous typeface as a key tool of his trade. August writes:

“In July 2012, I asked type designer Alan Dague-Greene to come up with a new typeface that matched the metrics of Courier — thus protecting line breaks and page counts — while addressing some of its weak spots… Alan rose to the challenge, creating a typeface that is unmistakably Courier, but subtly improved in ways you wouldn’t necessarily notice at first.”

Courier Prime is available now for free. Read more and download it at JohnAugust.com.

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Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch died this morning at 88. It’s a sad moment because he was the first New York City mayor that I was aware of as a kid. The mayors who came before seem like names from a history book, whereas the name “Koch” will always sound contemporary for me.

Over at Slate, there is a smart article about how Hizzoner’s legacy was intimately tied with the emergence of hip-hop.

“Koch presided over New York City from 1977 to 1989, almost exactly the years during which hip-hop went from a small scene of Bronx block parties to a global cultural phenomenon. During those years, the history of hip-hop is the history of Ed Koch’s New York: Until the last couple years of his reign, nearly every major hip-hop artist rose out of one of the five boroughs or Long Island.”

Definitely worth a read for children of the Eighties.

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Research in Motion’s make-or-break Blackberry 10 is out today. It sports a completely new operating system, with a user interface designed by RIM-acquired The Astonishing Tribe. Ahead of the official announcement, there’s a cache of screen grabs over at BGR that reveal the UI to be remarkably… okay.

The Blackberry brand has never been synonymous with outstanding design, and RIM seems intent on at least acknowledging the new reality of highly designed smartphone interfaces — but it can manage little more than that, judging from these screens. None of what is on display here — the clean yet unremarkable typography, the tasteful but de rigueur color gradients, the straightforward but rudimentary iconography, the communicative but nearly featureless spinners, arrows and other visual cues — is particularly distinctive or unique to Blackberry. In fact, they demonstrate a startling lack of character, almost a willful desire to be mistaken for any other random operating system.

In a market this tight, where Apple and Google’s duopoly relegates players like RIM to merely vying for third place, this feels like a tremendous missed opportunity. Here was a chance for RIM to emphatically and visually declare how Blackberry 10 was clearly, dramatically different from its competition.

It’s true that, given time, what we see here, combined with what would need to be superb execution on the business side, could possibly become distinctive to RIM. But as Windows has shown, and as Palm notably showed, it’s entirely possible to establish a unique design language from the first.

Of course, that hasn’t done nearly as much as one would like to think for the former, and did almost nothing to save the latter. Design is not everything, I have to keep reminding myself.

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