Google Plus Photos now offers a new form of auto-awesome, their service best known for adding snow to winter photos, sparkles to Christmas tree lights, and turning successive photos into animated gifs. This one is called “Smile” and it truly lives up to its name. Read more
For the past few months, I’ve been meeting with my friend, Brandon, to hone my skills at writing for theater. It’s fascinating to learn the business behind the curtain and I’m surprised at how fulfilling and enjoyable it can be to distill stories down to dialogue and extrapolate lyrics from presenting a character with a realization, desire, or emotional transition. A song, as Sondheim says, must be based on one succinct “want” from a character and is different from a poem in that it relies on music to buoy it up. A poem, on the other hand, suffers when sung. Read more
271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book
In 1692 an artist known only as “A. Boogert” sat down to write a book in Dutch about mixing watercolors. Not only would he begin the book with a bit about the use of color in painting, but would go on to explain how to create certain hues and change the tone by adding one, two, or three parts of water. The premise sounds simple enough, but the final product is almost unfathomable in its detail and scope.
Spanning nearly 800 completely handwritten (and painted) pages, Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau (Treaty of colors used to paint water), was probably the most comprehensive guide to paint and color of its time. According to Medieval book historianErik Kwakkel who translated part of the introduction, the color book was intended as an educational guide. The irony being there was only a single copy that was probably seen by very few eyes.
It’s hard not to compare the hundreds of pages of color to its contemporary equivalent, the Pantone Color Guide, which wouldn’t be published for the first time until 1963.
The book is currently kept at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France.
(via This is Colossal)
Perched at the window of his Cessna 172, photographer Klaus Leidorf crisscrosses the skies above Germany while capturing images of farms, cities, industrial sites, and whatever else he discovers along his flight path, a process he refers to as “aerial archaeology.” Collectively the photos present a fascinating study of landscapes transformed by the hands of people—sometimes beautiful, sometimes frightening. Since the late 1980s Leidorf has shot thousands upon thousands of aerial photographs and currently relies on the image-stabilization technology in his Canon EOS 5D Mark III which is able to capture the detail of single tennis ball as it flies across a court. You can explore over a decade of Leidorf’s photography at much greater reslution over on Flickr. All images courtesy the artist.
(via This Is Colossal)
If you’re looking for a free newsletter tool for your installation of WordPress and have less than 2,000 subscribers, the WPNewsman plug-in is fairly nice. They allow you to style your newsletters, entering shortcodes for post-specific content, as well as the post entries and separators. Once finished, you have the option of selecting by author, category, and date range, and creating a newsletter to use excerpts, fancy excerpts (which includes html), and full post content. Unfortunately, the full post content turns HTML into text and removes paragraph breaks, leaving one giant mass of text and html code, commingled. Read more
A while ago, I posted the link to The Vendor-Client Relationship, in Real-world Situations. It raised a bit of awareness to the hypocrisy of the design industry, where clients and contractors over-expect liberties from creatives. I firmly believe this is inherently an industry problem, not one that plagues specific people or firms. Read more