This project from UCLA lets you overlay historical maps of any one of about twenty cities onto contemporary satellite photos of that same city, all in a Google Maps-based interface. It makes for a fascinating comparative exercise, and doubles as a good reminder that as authoritative as information graphics might seem to be — many of these maps were canonical in their day — they can still be quite subjective and even misleading, especially with the benefit of historical hindsight.

You can play with Hypercities over here.

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Sculptor Alan Wolfson created this “core sample of a city street. As though you took a street, dug it up, and lifted it straight off the earth.” Roughly a two foot cube, this model reproduces in beautiful miniaturized detail everything from the air conditioning unit installed above the entrance to a pizza parlor to the interior of the pizza parlor itself to the subway station directly beneath it.

This sculpture will be on display in June in New York at the Museum of Arts and Design’s exhibition “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities” but you can see close-ups at the sculptor’s Web site.

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Ad Age reports that after disappointing sales of the titles it launched soon after last year’s debut of the iPad, Condé Nast is slowing down and reassessing their app strategy on a publication by publication basis. Some choice quotes include this one from an unidentified publisher:

“They’re not all doing all that well, so why rush to get them all on there?”

President Bob Sauerberg said:

“There hasn’t been any fundamental shift in our plans, commitment or enthusiasm regarding apps… From the onset, our strategy has remained fluid and responsive to the marketplace. Given our industry lead, with digital editions from eight of our titles on the iPad and more on the way in addition to a good deal of learning under our belt, we are increasing our focus on distribution and sales efforts that will encourage scale.”

First, that’s corporate spin for “Our products were not very good and no one wanted them.” Second, an increased focus on distribution and sales is fine, but what the company really needs to double-down on is its user experience strategy — which was terrible. That’s the real root of why these apps are not “doing all that well.” Working even harder to distribute and sell bad products is a waste of energy.

Read the full article here.

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British designer Jamie Wieck from the studio Airside compiled this list of useful wisdom for design students about to enter the workforce. Most of them are fairly straightforward if not obvious, but there are some useful nuggets in there (e.g., “Don’t get drunk at professional events.” If only someone had mentioned that…), and I enjoyed reading through them.

The whole list is also very digestible thanks to its uniquely 21st Century formatting: each tip is no longer than 140 characters. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that advice intended to inform a decades-long career has to be boiled down to tweet length, I’ll leave that to readers to judge. You can zip through all fifty here.

As a related aside: I wrote a post late last year called “Students Don’t Do as I Have Done.” It covers some similar ground, and some folks have told me they found it helpful. You might want to check it out here.

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The vaunted creator of Sim City and Spore predicts that video games are poised to break into new levels of diversity and ubiquity, and will become regarded as meaningful works of art in and of themselves — he calls it a “Gambrian explosion,” a play on the Cambrian explosion. Venture Beat published notes on the talk here.

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Spotted on Behance: a stunning hybrid of woodtype fonts and fat magazine fonts from Barcelona type designer Octavio Pardo.

View the project page, including several more specimens over at Behance. Be sure to check out the screen grab of one of the letters in vector form. Pretty impressive.

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This is a small, simple and limited idea, but it’s executed so cleverly that I can’t help but be impressed: hypothetical illustrations of what the back of some iconic Web sites might look like if they did indeed have a back. The first one, an illustration of reverse side of Google is fine, but they get much more clever very quickly. For instance, here’s the back of YouTube:

See all of them — there aren’t many, but they’re all good — over here.

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It’s really difficult to resist linking to the many gimmicky infographics that have become popular on the Internet over the past couple of years, especially as the form seems to be getting ever more popular, and especially as the work produced within this meme gets better and better at tapping into our most defenseless childlike whims.

A case in point is this “taxonomic tree of over 100 wondrous powers and abilities, with over 200 superheroes and supervillains as examples thereof.” It applies a deadpan seriousness to an inherently silly topic — a comprehensive catalog of the various super-powers that comic book characters have adopted over the years — making it irresistible to those of us who enjoy nurturing our pre-adolescent whims using the language of, well, of modern capitalism, really.

You can view the poster at full size and even buy yourself a copy over at Pop Chart Lab. Upon closer inspection, you may agree with me that it’s nicely designed and wittily executed and a very enjoyable bit of ephemera that will be easily forgotten before the weekend is out.

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