A handful of simple, beautifully designed and helpful primers on great typography — free for download.

A reporter from Manhattan’s upper crust weekly interviewed me last week for this short article about my recent departure from The New York Times. Its contents will be mostly familiar to most readers of this blog, but then again Observer readers probably don’t read this blog.

Photographer Peter Belanger took a picture of Apple’s new iPhone 4 with another iPhone 4. He also restricted himself to using only the output of the camera, with no retouching or Photoshop trickery, techniques almost invariably employed when shooting with more capable and more professional cameras. The result is impressive, though speaking from personal experience I find the camera inside the iPhone 4 to be challenging to control: if you have just the right shooting circumstances — or an aggressively managed lighting environment as Belanger does — it can of course produce remarkable images. But given more realistic and random lighting situations, I’ve only been able to produce mediocre pictures.

The director of the excellent documentaries about design “Helvetica” and “Objectified” plans to complete his trilogy with a film about the design of cities. Alissa Walker writes:

“While ‘Urbanized’ will feature the signature superstar architects and city planners and politicians and commercial developers, Hustwit says he will also feature non-designers who have had a role in shaping their communities. ‘People take it for granted that they have to wait in traffic or that a certain part of the city will always be run-down,’ he says, noting that it’s those empowered citizens who often originate ‘really creative, modest but brilliant solutions.’ Hustwit stresses that ‘Urbanized’ will focus on getting people to understand that they can change their cities themselves.”

Read the full Fast Company exclusive here, or follow Hustwit’s progress over at the official site for the film.

This project has been up for quite a while but I’m only coming across it now: Tyler Thompson undertakes a hypothetical redesign of flight boarding passes. His original proposal is quite interesting, but what’s even better is the round-robin of alternative designs proposed by readers. Some of them are quite smart. My favorite is this “human boarding pass” from Graphicology.

See the whole lot of them here.

There’s bad news for those of you who like to actually have conversations with your movie-going companions. At least one company is looking to monetize your free time, especially if you get to the theater early to secure good seats.

“Screenvision, which sells and programs in-cinema advertising, wants to spice up the preshow experience. Last week, the company unveiled its plans for a redesigned 20-minute ‘advertainment’ block to marketers in a private presentation in New York. Consumers — Screenvision says it reaches 45 million moviegoers a month — will start to see it at local cinemas in September.”

For me, the central lesson of this age of modern media is that anything can be advertised anywhere, and it’s no use fighting it. Still, the pre-show advertising reel — the ads that come before the trailers — have always struck me as an invasion of privacy. The time that I spend before the trailers belongs to me; the only reason I get to the theater early is because I have to work around the theater’s inability to guarantee me a good seat. To have that time intruded upon by loud, obnoxious advertising is infuriating.

Clothing label Stüssy put together a compilation CD highlighting the music of this legendary dancehall and ragga record label, and wound up producing an accompany book celebrating the sublimely irrepressible cover art of its records, as well. This interview with the label’s longtime designer, Tony McDermott, is a real treat.

Every once in a while, as if to tauntingly remind us that America still suffers from a dearth of truly brilliant comedic television, the BBC releases on these shores DVD versions of one of its seemingly endless supply of genius-grade television comedies. The last one I recall was the engagingly unhinged “The Mighty Boosh.” This time it’s the thoroughly uncanny, bone-dry and deadpan wit of “Look Around You.” Modeled after the educational films that prepared my generation for, er, taking tests about the films we watched in class, these pitch perfect fake documentaries are gems of absurdist humor. Read about the release here or buy the DVDs here.

Just like the name says. And by the way, your bookshelves are not an impressive enough display of your wealth and intellectual depth.

New York Yankees third basemen Alex Rodriguez is just three long balls away from hitting a milestone of six hundred career home runs. SeatGeek, which forecasts the value of seats at sporting events and concerts, used trajectory data from A-Rod’s previous home runs to calculate the probable landing area of no. 600 — not just the seating section within Yankee Stadium where the ball is likely to fall, but the actual seat that gives some lucky fan the best possible chance for catching the ball. See all the gory detail behind their math here.