LegiStyles

Four new, free themes for NetNewsWire from the apparently sleepless — not to mention abundantly talented — AisleOne proprietor, Antonio Carusone. “Much attention has been paid to the design and typography of the styles to improve legibility and readability, and to enhance the overall reading experience.” It’s true; they’re beautiful.

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New Tumblr Theme Garden

The Tumblr staff have “just pushed a newly designed Theme Garden, and we’re working on approving the backlog of (several hundred!) theme submissions.” As each day passes, Tumblr can make a more and more compelling case that it’s the true blogging platform for the masses.

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New Yorker: Sasha Frere-Jones on Mic In Tracks

“Back in the Victorian age of the Web, some people were sharing private moments with the world without knowing it.” The curious phenomenon of accidentally recorded audio tracks that migrated onto the Web via early file-sharing services, and their resurgence. The Internet still seems so young that it’s fascinating to consider that in a little more than a decade it’s already accreted hidden lore like this.

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Design for Democracy Proposal: Clear Communications Design for Government

A submission from AIGA’s design and public policy group to the Change.gov Citizen’s Briefing Book, the goal of which is to compile the most popular idea submissions for the new administration. “Government must invest in quality graphic design and clear language for all its public communications. We need simple forms, easy-to-use Web sites, quality telephone support, and good signs and communications at public buildings.” It’s also worth browsing through the briefing book’s list of most popular ideas.

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Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto for New U2 Album Cover

With only a few exceptions, the Irish band’s album covers have been aesthetically bereft, in spite of their now iconic statuses. And after their last album, they were definitely in a can’t-do-any-worse position. But the cover art for their forthcoming release “No Line on the Horizon” is more than just an improvement. It’s a genuinely artful image from the photographer Hiroshi Sugimi, apparently from his “Seascapes” series.

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Mark Hurst: How the Kindle Changes the Reading Experience

Canny observation about how a given medium can alter or even transform the experience of content. I similarly caution designers who assume that one day digital media will provide the same presentation fidelity as the printed page; even if we could create truly digital replica of say a newspaper, the experience would be substantially different from a printed newspaper.

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Google Quick Search Box for Mac

Woke up very early this morning to spot that Nicholas Jitkoff, the genius developer behind Quicksilver, and some colleagues at Google have released what is apparently a new incarnation of that indispensable search utility for the Mac. At first blush, Quick Search Box is not as aesthetically stunning as Quicksilver (some might argue that as a Google app it’s probably not allowed to be) nor in this developer preview does it seem as feature-complete. Still, it’s almost certainly going to get much, much better. Also see the blog post announcement.

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Eye Magazine: I Braved Designer Scorn to Champion the Kings of Californian Airbrush

Is the commercial airbrush look, once so dominant in the nineteen-seventies and eighties but then quickly discarded as nearly irredeemable, set for a comeback? Norman Hathaway thinks it might be. In this blog post, he gives a brief overview of his forthcoming book “Overspray: Riding High with the Kings of California Airbrush Art,” which looks closely at the work of four giants of the style and the ideas — or lack thereof — underlying their works.

Hathaway notes plausibly if perhaps defensively: “These pictures weren’t beating you over the head with cleverness or conceptualism. Many airbrush illustrations are simply about objects, free of environments or situations included to support a hokey angle or narrative. There’s usually no puzzle to solve, or plot to follow: perhaps that’s why many are quick to brand the work as empty or frivolous.”

For my part, I very much grew up with this visual vocabulary and was surprised to realize that I had neatly swept it under the rug for so long that I had almost completely forgotten about it. Looking at this work is very much like looking at photos from high school (provided one is of a certain age, of course). The work is exquisitely embarrassing, and yet I can’t deny a certain fondness for it. For those like me whose interest is piqued by this leading edge of nostalgic kitsch, Hathaway has more writing on the subject at the book’s eponymous blog.

Overspray
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