The Mad Genius Who Invented Sea-Monkeys

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The Awl tells the story of Harold von Braunhut, the man responsible for several memorable if outlandish novelties sold in the back pages of comic books for decades. These included X-ray specs and, maybe most famously, a variety of brine shrimp marketed as Sea Monkeys.

Sea Monkeys

These ads are very familiar to me from my misspent, comic book-reading youth. But I had no idea that its inventor was a patron of the Aryan Nation nor that he was born and raised a Jew. Much like the wares he peddled, he was not what he appeared to be. Read the whole story here.

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The Atlantic: The Campaign to Remember Ladislav Sutnar

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Steve Heller writes about the efforts to secure a rightful place in design history for seminal information designer Ladislav Sutnar, led principally by his son. The younger Sutnar began his efforts in the 1970s, but was stymied by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia which tried to eradicate his father’s works from the history books, owing to his anti-communist activities. Read the full story here.

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An Unfinished Theme for Google Reader

As I wrote yesterday, I’m encouraged by the recent design improvements that Google has made in its products, especially its new Gmail theme. I’m assuming — hoping — that Google will apply this new sensibility to its many other products too.

Number one on my list would be a refresh of the interface for Google Reader. Yes, I’m one of the diminishing devotees of RSS. Every morning and many, many times throughout the day (and often in the middle of the night when besieged by insomnia, too) I check the copious feeds that I’ve collected over the years, devouring all manner of updates from all corners of the Interweb. They’re a critical source of news, information, education and entertainment for me.

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Does Google Get Design Now?

It’s only been a short while since Google co-founder Larry Page assumed the role of CEO but it’s safe to say that we now have a sense of what his vision of Google looks like. Apparently design is a key part of it.

The search giant’s recently launched, high profile social networking bid Google+ debuted with an unexpectedly thoughtful (though admittedly derivative) design, and evinces an attention to the finer details of typography, spacing and visual hierarchy that was previously absent across the vast majority of Google’s products. Similarly, the company has made additional refinements to its iconic home page that reflect a newfound respect for the intangible — the changes have been minor, but they’ve felt less beholden to the brutally analytical decision-making that has guided Google product design and aesthetics in the past.

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Pop Pilgrims and Primers

If you’re a fan of popular culture and you’re not regularly checking out the copious wares that The A.V. Club is turning out at a furious, daily pace, then you’re missing out. This (mostly) non-satirical sister publication to the satirical newspaper The Onion brings a smart, intensive, critical focus to television, film, music, books, games and all manner of pop culture, and it generates what is probably the most consistently high quality and wide-ranging coverage of its kind out there. Many people are familiar with The A.V. Club as an insert within the print edition of The Onion, but the publication produces significantly more content on its Web site. You could explore it for hours, or you could subscribe to its RSS feed and find yourself inundated with great stuff on a daily basis, like I do.

Here are two examples. First, the site recently published this fantastic Robert Altman primer, which goes into extensive yet expedient detail on the legendary director’s ouevre, including lots of embedded video clips of his movie trailers. For anyone unfamiliar with this master filmmaker’s work, this is probably the most efficient, thorough and enjoyable crash course you could ask for. Even for someone like me who’s seen most but not all of his films, this was enlightening.

Example two: The A.V. Club’s recently inaugurated Pop Pilgrims video podcast is a great idea very entertainingly executed: A.V. Club hosts travel around the continental United States (in a sponsored Fiat, apparently) logging video essays on real world locations made famous by pop cultural milestones. The first episode, which won me over to the series immediately, took a look at the actual building that stood in for Nakatomi Plaza in the 1988 action masterpiece “Die Hard.” I mean, come on, that’s brilliant. Subsequent installments visited the diner from “Reservoir Dogs,” the Initech building from “Office Space,” the hotel from “The Shining,” the headquarters of Fantagraphics Comics, and others. See them all here.

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The Illuminated Mixtapes

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Designer Adam Parks has been assembling these mixtapes and producing terrific, illustrated covers for each one since 2007.

The Illuminated Mixtapes

There are twenty mixtapes so far, so there’s lots to listen to. The whole presentation is exquisite.

Also related: Designers.mx is a similar project from Blake Allen and Josh Sullivan, where selected designers are invited to create, design and publish mixes of their own.

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Consolidating Email Updates

By 11:00a this morning there were already over a dozen examples of what email professionals call bacn (pronounced like bacon) in my inbox. Bacn is the euphemistic term for subscribed email, automated mailings that a user has opted into, as opposed to the more commonly known spam, which is generally, but not always, unsolicited email. It’s not as valued as personal email written by real humans, but it’s better than junk mail.

Bacn includes newsletters, alerts, daily deals and assorted marketing messages from companies that I’ve transacted with in some form before. Most of these messages I ignore and some I will peruse occasionally, but the bacn that I pay the most attention to is the kind that updates me on activity from my social networks; notifications automatically generated when someone has liked or favorited one of my posts, when someone has tagged me in a photo or mentioned me in a tweet, when someone has added me to a group or list, etc.

Basically, the stuff that’s about me specifically is what interests me. But even then, the volume of these emails is too much to handle. I’ve already turned off bacn-generating settings in Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare and others — and those are the networks that I actually use.

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