art

A font designed after San Francisco's light rail departure signage. The essay also gives a look at the signs themselves and why they were designed that way.

The signs were designed for sufficiency: fixed segments, fixed grid, and no extras. Characters were created only as destinations required them, while other characters, like the Q, X, and much of the punctuation, were never programmed into the signs.

Discovered via Tom Scott's Weekly Newsletter.

A visually appealing map of screenshots from small websites created by Nathan Rooy, I was surprised to find mine in there as well. Their blog post covers how they grouped the screenshots using self-organizing maps, a follow-up post was promised on how the websites were found.

Discovered via Andreas' link dump.

Shuetsu Sato, a security guard at Shinjuku Station, creatively used duct tape to direct passenger through the station for years. The pictures included in the article show how these impressive signs look in the wild.

Discovered via Tom Scott's Weekly Newsletter.

Jamie Zawinski shares the original artwork comissioned for mozilla.org.

As I explained in some detail in my 2016 article "They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo", I commissioned this artwork from Shepard Fairey to use as the branding of the newly-founded mozilla.org and our open source release of the Netscape source code, which eventually became Firefox. This happened in March 1998.

The YouTube algorithm has done it again, another great recommendation. This time it's from a Singaporean "guerilla wayfinder" designing and installing signs for the benefit of others. The act is noble, and the storytelling is great.

A technical overview of processing images captured from a line camera. The images in question are incredible scans of trains and trams as they pass the camera. The author, Daniel Lawrence Lu, also looks two other photographers using line cameras in their post.

Discovered through Tom Scott's newsletter.

Get creative, look at clouds and draw what you see. You can also view what others have drawn over clouds uploaded to the site.

Discovered via Stefan Judis' newsletter.

Scans of 1980s Japanese station passes that are aesthetically pleasing, discovered via Nicolas Magand While reverse image searching the second ticket I found a fun story about a visit to the Horyuji Temple.

I also came across some more fantastically designed commemorative tickets for railway lines from the 50s-70s.

Ready for a hit of crotcheted nostalgia? Nicole Nikolich created large crotchet pieces depicting Minesweeper, Neopets, Solitaire and the Sims which are currently on exhibit at The Delaware Contemporary until 25 May 2025.

Discovered via Ben Daubney.