Typefaces are all about expressing personality traits, whether it's honesty, sophistication, or immaturity. Here to put the face in typeface is Giovanni Isnenghi who has recombined glyphs and symbols of classic typefaces into portrait-like pictures.
In Isnenghi's hands, Bodoni becomes a sophisticated, martini-chugging dowager; Myriad Pro, a surly, raspberrying upstart. Johnston Underground, used on the London Underground, becomes a stodgy, bowler-wearing Brit, complete with umbrella and monocle. Garamond is an angry sulker with sacks under his eyes. As for much-reviled Comic Sans? Critics will love Isnenghi's interpretation here as an idiotic Milhousian figure about to get shot in the face with an arrow.
I'm not sure I think of Garamond as being quite so grumpy, or Myriad Pro so punkish. But that's the great thing about typefaces: their personalities can be molded to suit the design.
Emoji are a great way to express yourself. Through Simulating the World, the latest interactive web toy by artist Nicky Case, they're more than just cute stickers. They become a tool for thinking about systems, illuminating how everything from forest fires to flu pandemics start, or spread out of control.
Simulating the World is a time-lapsed grid that is semi-randomly populated with whatever emoji you choose, according to certain user-defined rules: what happens when an emoji spawns to another emoji that is different, for example. It doesn't sound like much, but used intelligently, this emoji grid is enough to simulate, if not predict, how all sorts of systems work: how a bolt of lightning can decimate a forest during a drought year, for example, or how neighborhoods can desegregate over time.
"All complex systems have things in common," says Case, explaining why his simulator can be used to explore so many different things. "So in a way... Financial crises are like forest fires. Terrorist groups are like termite colonies. Pandemics are like a GIF people won't stop spreading... you can learn a few core lessons about all systems from any system."
Simulating the World is a sequel of sorts to a previous project by Case, called Parable of the Polygons, an array of triangles and squares that simulate major social problems, like discrimination and diversity. "After I released Parable, everyone wanted to add another 'race' of shapes, or have a wider range of 'shapism,' or model other social/economic institutions," Case says. "At the time, all they could do was fiddle with a couple sliders. But it got me thinking, what if people could edit everything in a simulation, without needing to touch the code? What if everyone could easily read and write in complex systems?"
What made Simulating the World possible from a technical perspective was emoji, which Case calls a "comprehensive, standardized art pack that comes pre-installed on everyone's computers and phones." By using emoji as symbols, Case realized that his sim could be applied to nearly any complex system, without any custom programming or art.
Although Simulating the World is a surprisingly deep delve into the logic behind complex systems, one thing Case wants to stress is that simulating the world through emoji is not the same as predicting it. "If there's one thing that chaos theory predicts, it's that you can't predict very much or very far," Case points out. "The world is too chaotic for that, and simulations can only help marginally."
But that's not to say that such emoji simulations are useless. For example, creating a sim of how emoji bank robbers and emoji police officers interact might not help us predict a crime wave, but could help us prevent one by giving us a better understanding of how they begin. "That's how artificial societies can change our real societies," says Case. "Sims can give us a deep understanding of the game."
Four hundred years after it was first published, Miguel de Cervantes'Don Quixote is still commonly hailed as one of the finest novels ever written. Now the adventures of the feeble-brained hidalgo who think he's a knight and his squat, trusty companion Sancho Panza have finally been collected into the mega-volume of graphic design porn they deserve.
Published by the always brilliant minds at Visual Editions, who previously gave the surreal hypertext of Tristram Shandythis jaw-dropping makeover, this latest version of Don Quixote uses design to explore the meta-fictional nature of the text.
Much of Don Quixote's effect lies in the juxtaposition of the way the chivalry-mad title character sees the world, and the way it actually is. The most famous example is Quixote fighting windmills he imagines to be giants. In the Visual Editions version, Quixote's unique viewpoint of the world is separated from the rest of the text with sky blue fonts, footing the errant knight's every word firmly in the clouds.
For all its age, Don Quixote is also a surprisingly modern-feeling book, one that still manages to surprise and excite literary scholars centuries later. To reflect that freshness, Visual Editions commissioned pictures of modern-day La Mancha from UK photographer Jacob Robinson. It's enough to make you wonder what Don Quixote would see if he could trot on his mule down the streets of 21st-century Spain. Where would he find his giants now?
Designed by Fraser Muggeridge, Visual Editions'Don Quixote is available for purchase for around $50 here.
This week in Las Vegas, thousands of new gadgets will see the light of day as part of CES, the annual Consumer Electronics Show. But a year or two from now, many of them, maybe most of them, will be nothing but trash: plastic shells filled with perfectly good electronic components, bulldozed into some landfill somewhere. And why? Perceived—or, perhaps, planned—obsolescence. This sort of wastefulness is the day-to-day fact of the consumer gadget business, and it's not too much to say it's almost apocalyptic in scope: when it comes to global climate change, there's a link between the poisonous smokestacks of Shenzhen, and observable effects like California's drought.
Ammunition is now putting design thinking to the task of addressing both problems. They've teamed up with Nascent to help design an innovative new platform of modular electronics which can easily bring almost any gadget to market within weeks, and which are as reusable as Lego. To prove the concept works, Ammunition used Nascent to create the Droppler, a little plinth of porcelain that sits by your sink and keeps track of your water usage with sound alone.
Founded by Baback Elmieh, Nascent is an attempt to cut down on the time it takes to bring consumer electronics to market, while also trying to eliminate waste. The core component of Nascent's platform is Nascent Objects, a series of Ammunition-designed electronic modules spanning the bulk of common gadget functionality. Conceptually, it's similar to Project Ara, Google's plan to make modular smartphones, but applied to consumer electronics: there's a CPU module, a camera module, a microphone module, a Bluetooth module, and so on. By tying these modules together with Nascent's software platform, you can easily turn them into practically any gadget.
Shapes is the other half of Nascent. Essentially, a Shape is a housing, which ties a collection of Objects together into a discrete gadget. Shapes are printed directly by Nascent, and contain all of the circuitry needed for Objects to communicate with each other when assembled. All together, Nascent addresses the "sweet spot," says Ammunition VP of product design Victoria Slaker, between maker and manufacturer: making it possible to design and even manufacture thousands of polished, consumer-grade gadgets within weeks, not months or years.
This brings us to the Droppler, Ammunition's water-monitoring gadget designed using Nascent Objects and housed in a porcelain Nascent Shape. Containing not much more than a microphone, a CPU, and an LED display, Droppler is meant to sit by your sink, eavesdropping on how much water it hears you using and then estimating where it thinks you are against your allowance. Unlike other water meters, it doesn't require a plumber to install. All you do is put it in your bathroom and Droppler does the rest.
Slaker is open about the fact that, like the Tim Cook-backed Nebia shower head, Droppler is yet another Silicon Valley solution to California's drought problem. But Nebia is another six months away from being delivered to early Kickstarter backers; water saving gadgets inspired by California's drought unveiled at this year's CES, meanwhile, could be another year or two away. Droppler, Slaker says, was designed within weeks. Meanwhile, Droppler, available for preorder on Indiegogo for $99 now, will be shipping to backers within weeks, and the entire design process only took a few weeks too. Which means, using Nascent, designers can quickly solve real-world problems with their gadgets, and get them to market in time to make a difference.
And as a bonus, if California's water problems somehow end up being solved, you don't have to throw it away. You can break the Droppler down and recombine its components into another gadget. Indiegogo backers will get kits to convert the Droppler into either a streaming video camera or Wi-Fi AirPlay speakers, but the whole idea of Nascent is that the Objects themselves are reusable. So by breaking down products into their Objects, consumers can use them like Lego to build entirely new gadgets, the plans for which they can download from a Thingiverse-like library.
Or that's the plan, at any rate. First, Nascent needs to take off, and people need to start using the platform to make things and ship them to customers. Once these gadgets are out there in the marketplace, DIY makers can break them down, and reuse their modules to potentially brainstorm a whole new generation of gadgets. That's why Ammunition partner Matt Rolandson says that he thinks Nascent, and products like Droppler, are "clearly the future we're headed for." After all, if design is going to be democratized, what could be more natural than democratizing manufacturing as well?
Ask Miss Columbia: humans, with all their subjective standards of good looks, are just crap at judging beauty contests. But will artificial intelligences be any better at it? That's what Beauty.AI, a new beauty pageant exclusively judged by robots, aims to find out.
From the perspective of pageant participants, Beauty.AI is pretty simple. You download an app for either Android or iOS and take a selfie. You can't wear make-up, glasses, or have a beard—nothing can obscure your face, in other words—but otherwise, there are few rules. You upload your picture, and wait for an AI to declare you Miss (or Mister) Robot Universe.
Where things get more interesting is on the robot side of things. That's because what Beauty.AI really is is a clever way to find the best way for identifying medical issues with just a photograph, backed by partners such as NVIDIA and Microsoft.
As the founders of Beauty.AI note, beauty is mostly subjective—the eye of the beholder and all that jazz—but if it's tied to anything, it's tied to visible health. That makes "beauty" an interesting metric to study for biogerontologists and data scientists, who think machine learning could be used to scan people for illnesses, just by looking at their selfies.
We believe that in the nearest future, machines will be able to get a lot of vital medical information about people's health by just processing their photos. Learning to estimate people's attractiveness is the first small but crucial step to this future, because healthy people look more attractive despite their age and nationality. This step enables us to build the base for developing future algorithms for appearance estimation.
That's why Beauty.AI is opening up its judging panel to any AI that aims to analyze human attractiveness, as well as a large pool of human applicants. If you can find a neural network that's good at estimating beauty, the potential applications are limitless: imagine if Instagram could detect the early signs of cancer. This "beauty pageant" conceit kills two birds with one stone.
You can take part in the the Beauty.AI contest by downloading the app here.
Concrete has been critical to the colonization of our own planet. The Romans and Egyptians built their empires upon it, and when their formula for concrete was lost, humanity invented it all over again in the 14th century. Today, over 2 billion tons of concrete are produced every year, and by 2050, that's expected to quadruple.
When we finally start colonizing other planets like Mars, we're going to need concrete to make buildings and infrastructure. But concrete needs water, and Mars doesn't have any. How do we make it, then? A team of researchers at Northwestern think they have the answer: by heating sulfur up to 240 degrees Celsius until it liquefies, and using that instead.
On Earth, concrete a composite material made up of multiple ingredients (called an aggregate) such as limestone, granite, sand, and other crushed rocks, which are bonded together with cement. Confusingly, we often use "cement" and "concrete" as synonyms for one another, but chemically, water is the cement that holds concrete together. When concrete is mixed with water, it not only becomes malleable, it reacts chemically so that it forms a hard, durable, solid matrix when it dries.
The aggregate part of concrete is easy enough to find on Mars, but water's a big problem. However, Mars has tons of sulfur, maybe as much as 17% of the entire planet. That's why Northwestern's researchers think that sulfur is going to be the key to the Red Planet's big construction boom. But researchers have tried to make sulfur concrete before: in fact, in the 1970s, material scientists explored the possibility of using sulfur concrete to build bases on the moon. The problem with that idea? In a vacuum, sulfur doesn't become a liquid. It goes straight from solid to gas, making sulfur concrete impossible to make on planets without an atmosphere.
But Mars has an atmosphere. It's not a vacuum like the moon. And as the Northwestern team discovered, it's sufficient to make sulfur concrete. By using simulated Martian soil consisting of silicon dioxide, aluminum oxide, iron oxide, titanium dioxide, and mixing this aggregate 50/50 with molten sulfur, they were able to make blocks of quasi-Martian concrete. And it's strong: two-and-a-half times as strong as the concrete most commonly used on Earth.
There's another advantage of Martian concrete over Earth concrete, too. On Earth, concrete production is the third biggest contributor of CO2 emissions, largely because of how much concrete we use. And recycling concrete doesn't help curb that production, because while we're tearing down concrete structures all the time, it's time-consuming and resource-intensive to reuse. But on Mars, the concrete could literally just be re-heated until the sulfur melts, and the entire concrete block becomes malleable again. That means any Martian concrete will be almost infinitely reusable, without taking the same toll on Mars as it took on Earth.
Of course, we're many years away from Martian colonies. But if the Northwest team is right, when Mars's answer to Bjarke Ingels or Zaha Hadid finally breaks ground on the Red Planet, they may be working with a superior version of the same material we use on Earth. Martian architecture will be out of this world.
Because they are strong, light, and heat-resistant, ceramics are an incredibly important material for aerospace applications, such as hypersonic jets and space shuttles. That's why 3-D printing ceramics could be useful for companies designing aerospace precision parts like Boeing, Space X, and NASA. Except for one problem: 3-D printed ceramics aren't tough enough to go to space. But a new material design innovation may have just put that problem in the past.
A Malibu, California-based team at HRL Laboratories just announced a new process for 3-D printing ceramics which can resist temperatures up to 1,700 degrees Celsius, or 3,092 degrees Fahrenheit. That's about the temperature experienced by the hottest parts of a NASA space shuttle re-entering Earth's atmosphere after a mission, and a temperature at which most metals turn molten. Amazingly, though, HRL's ceramics may be able to get even hotter without deforming: 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit is just the upper limit on what the researchers were able to test.
3-D printed ceramics aren't anything new, but they tend to stink compared to the real thing. It all has to do with the nature of the 3-D printing process, in which little dabs of base material are melted down and deposited, layer by layer. The problem is that ceramics that are heat-sensitive enough to melt down for 3-D printing printing are, by definition, going to be too heat-sensitive to send into outer space without re-melting.
So how'd HRL get around that problem? The team created a type of ceramic which contains a chemical that polymerizes—in other words, permanently bonds—when exposed to UV light. When it's squirted out of the nozzle of a 3-D printer it can easily be melted, but after being baked with UV lamps it hardens, and becomes much less susceptible to heat. Not only can this technique be used to print a staggeringly complex array array of 3-D shapes, but HRL says the resulting ceramics were extremely tough, heat-resistant, and had no surface pores or cracks, even down to sizes only picked up by electron microscopes.
Using this technique, aerospace engineers can now easily 3-D print any weird spaceship part they can think of out of super-strong, lightweight, heat-resistant ceramics. Who knows? The next Space Shuttle might end up being partly contracted from Makerbot.
Humanity has filled space with a staggering number of satellites in the 60-odd years since Sputnik, with the United States Space Surveillance Network currently tracking more than 8,000 man-made orbiting objects. But how many of those satellites are spy satellites? No one's entirely sure, but this infographic from Lapham's Quarterly is a great primer on what we do know about the all-seeing eyes above us.
Published as part of Lapham's Quarterly's newest 'Spies' issue, the 'All-Seeing Eyes' infographic shows an overview of the known government spy satellites still up in the sky. Not so surprisingly, the United States has the most spy satellites (83), while Russia has 50 and China has 36. But none of this information is up to date: for example, most satellites launched since the Corona Program, which ended in 1972, are still classified information in America. The latest confirmed information we have on America's spy satellite program is from 1990, when the United States claimed that its new stealth satellite, Misty, "burned up on re-entry," something which has since been disproven.
In addition to information about what satellites are out there, the chart is a good primer on how spy satellites work. Orbits, for example. When you think of satellites, you probably think of them in sun-synchronous orbits, which roughly cover a straight line around the Earth, passing the same places every day. But there are other kind of orbits which are much more useful for spy satellites, like the Molniya Orbit—an elliptic orbit that spy satellites can take to keep the Northern Hemisphere in view 22 hours a day. That's important, because most of the key geo-political players are all operating in that theater.
It's fascinating stuff. If this chart gets your whistle wet to learn more about international intrigue, check out Lapham's Quarterly's current 'Spies' issue here.
The moiré effect is an optical illusion that makes static objects look like they're constantly in flux. You see it pretty often used in video and printing, but a new work by British artist Conrad Shawcross applies the moiré effect to architecture. His piece The Optic Cloak will be a 160-foot-tall moiré-sheathed monument covering a power plant chimney, creating a surface that appears to be constantly shifting.
Shawcross's glittering monument is designed to draw attention to the sustainable mission of the plant it's part of: the new Greenwich Peninsula Low Carbon Energy Center, which aims to provide power to homes and businesses in southeast London through the use of efficient, environmentally-friendly boilers (hence the chimney, or flue).
The piece, which was created in collaboration with CF Møller Architects and is slated for completion in April 2016, will be constructed from aluminum cladding with triangular perforated panels that fold across the surface of the tower in intricate geometric patterns. Because the perforations in these massive panels are overlaid at different angles to another, the uneven surface of the Optic Cloak will appear to swim, almost as if it was moving.
Wiki Commons
Although the Optic Cloak will be hard to miss when completed, Shawcross says his inspiration for the tower was actually camouflage: in particular, dazzle camo, a type of camouflage used in World War I and II meant to obscure a ship's range, speed, and heading from the enemy with bold, contrasting patterns.
"I wanted to create a response that celebrates the commission's function as a part of the Energy Center's flue, rather than trying to hide it," Shawcross says in the Optic Cloak's press release. "I started to research the history of camouflage as I was intrigued by its seemingly paradoxical nature—often it makes the object or animal it's disguising more visually arresting."
Instead of trying to hide the least attractive part of a power plant—the chimney—the Optic Cloak draws attention to it, so people can see for themselves the conspicuous lack of carbon coming out of it. It's a wonderful idea that uses camouflage not for obfuscation, but for transparency.
The Optic Cloak is due to be completed in April, 2016. You can read more about the Greenwich Peninsula Energy Center project here.
Spreadsheets are absolute. You enter some variables, and a spreadsheet outputs an absolute number, according to whatever logic has been programmed into it. But here's the problem: While spreadsheets like Excel are tools of certainty, we use them to manage uncertain things, like our stock portfolios, our home finances, and so on. Things where there's no right answer, just a range of probable best answers.
Guesstimate is a new kind of spreadsheet created by software engineer Ozzie Gooen. It doesn't try to be absolute. Instead, it's a spreadsheet designed from the ground-up to take uncertainty into account, allowing you to easily create spreadsheets that can tell you everything from the best times to sell your stock options, to how long it's going to take to get your screaming toddler ready for preschool.
Say you want to run some calculations on the projected sales of a new product in order to forecast your profit over three months. In Excel or Google Sheets, you'd start by estimating how many units you think you'd sell: say, 1,000 units. Then you'd run calculations from there. The problem is, that 1,000 unit estimate you're basing the rest of your spreadsheet on is just a guess. You could just as easily sell 900 units, in which case, your whole budget is wrong.
With Guesstimate, you don't have to make a hard guess on exactly how many units you'd sell. Instead, you enter a range of units you expect to sell, like '[500,1500]'. Then all the math that is done on this cell will be based on the full range. "If you use this to calculate your expected profit, you'll see its range as well, not with some arbitrary definition of a 'worst case', but with the actual lowest 1% and 5% percentiles," explains Gooen. "There's almost no extra work needed but you get a much better answer."
Why is this a big deal? Mainly, because when you use a spreadsheet to make predictions, the answers it spits out can be misleading—because they're based on hidden assumptions. "Popular spreadsheets encourage you to think in exact numbers, in averages instead of distributions," says Gooen. "It's really hard to indicate uncertainty. This can be fine when the data comes from historic tables, but often it's just gut judgements. And in a spreadsheet, your gut judgements will look exactly like real data."
Considering the caution many feel in the aftershocks of the Great Recession, Guesstimate seems like the way spreadsheets should work, but don't. We may never know if the last financial meltdown could have been lessened if just one made-up number in a Wall Street spreadsheet somewhere had been flagged as uncertain. But for the next one, thanks to spreadsheet software like Guesstimate, a single wrong assumption is much less likely to bring down the entire house of cards.
Ever needed to hammer in a nail one-handed? Without a nailgun, it's almost impossible, but this cool German hammer has been designed to make it easy to do that—and it's so clever, you'll wonder why they bother designing hammers any other way.
It's called a Latthammer, or a German carpenter's roofing hammer. It features a square head for greater precision, and a fiddler-crab-like claw for making it easier to pry up nails. But what's really smart about the Latthammer is the cross-shaped groove at the top of the hammer, which works as a sort of one-hand nail guidance system to make this possible:
The Latthammer works by holding the nail in place in the groove with a powerful magnet. You just hit the hammer once to fix the nail into a piece of wood, then hit the nail again to drive it in. It's designed to make it simple for roofers to hammer nails overhead, but it's not hard to imagine how useful this would be at home. Think of all the bruised thumbnails you could save!
The Latthammer is designed by Picard, a 160-year-old German hammer company. Sadly, Latthammers don't seem to be available at an affordable price in the United States: on Amazon, they cost $165 apiece.
The man who fell to Earth has fallen back. On Sunday, David Bowie—the glamorous, gender-bending rock icon whose 50-year career immortalized him in the realms of music, film, art, and fashion—died after losing an 18-month battle with cancer at the age of 69.
This week, there is no shortage of touching obituaries written to the transcendent artist whose alter egos included Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Jareth, and more. By way of tribute to Bowie's timeless fashion sense, we decided to look back at the many iconic costumes he wore over the years, from The Man Who Sold The World to his last album, Blackstar—along with the fashion designers with whom he collaborated.
Mercury Records
The Man Dress— Mr. Fish's Man Dress, designed by British fashion designer Michael Fish, was one of Bowie's earliest attempts at exploring gender-bending and exploiting his androgynous appearance. Bowie posed in the Man Dress on the cover of the U.K. release of The Man Who Sold The World, and wore it extensively on his first promotional tour to the United States in 1971.
RCA
The "Life On Mars" Suit— Designed by Freddie Burretti, Bowie's go-to fashion designer (as well as lover and protege) between 1970 and 1974, this turquoise "ice-blue" suit was featured in the music video for "Life On Mars" from the album Heroes in May, 1973. You can watch the video here.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Ziggy Stardust— Another creation by Freddie Burretti, this quilted two-piece suit was designed in 1972 for Bowie's Ziggy Stardust tour. Looking alien, Asian, and somehow superhuman at once, it perfectly emphasized Bowie's glam rock sensibilities.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Aladdin Sane knit bodysuit— Kansai Yamamoto was one of the leaders in Japanese contemporary fashion during the 1970s and 1980s, and was particularly known for his avant-garde kimono designs. Bowie wore a few of Yamamoto's kimonos, but this bodysuit knit for his Aladdin Sane tour is perhaps the duo's most iconic collaboration.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The "Space Oddity" space suit— With its flared shoulder pads, cherry platform boots, and sparkled jacket and pants, this was one of Bowie's first "space suits" for the early days of the 1972-73 Ziggy Stardust tour. Partially inspired by the aesthetic of the gangs from Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, Bowie often sang "Space Oddity" in this costume. It was likely designed by Kansai Yamamoto.
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Tokyo Pop— Bowie's vinyl "Tokyo Pop" bodysuit was another of the many costumes designed by Kensai Yamamoto for the Aladdin Sane tour in 1973.
Gijsbert Hanekroot/Getty Images
The Eyepatch— David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust eyepatch is one of his most iconic looks, but its creation was actually an accident. According to Bowie himself, he wore the eyepatch for the first time during an interview simply because of a bout of conjunctivitis he came down with shortly before an interview. He looked so good in it, he decided to go full-on space pirate with the rest of his outfit.
RCA
The Blue Clown— Bowie ushered in 1980 by taking his glam rock fashion stylings and going fully operatic with them. The Blue Clown, or Pierrot, was an outfit made for Bowie by costume designer Natasha Korniloff for his "Ashes to Ashes" video, and was also used on the cover of Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps).
Phil Dent/Getty Images
The Serious Moonlight suit— David Bowie's New Wave era resulted in the Serious Moonlight tour, which followed the commercial success of his 1983 track, "Let's Dance." For that tour—his most successful ever—Bowie abandoned the rapid-fire costume changes that he'd become known for in the 1970s, but his resulting look—a cool blue suit—is no less iconic.
The Goblin King— What mention of David Bowie's iconic looks would be complete without mention of his turn as Jareth, the evil Goblin King from Jim Henson's Labyrinth? Fantasy designer Brian Froud designed Jareth's look in the film, saying he drew on inspirations such as Marlon Brando in The Wild One and vivid scenes from Brothers Grimm fairy tales, like the knight "with the worms of death eating through his armor."
Virgin Records
The Union Jack coat— Designed by famed British designer Alexander McQueen, Bowie wore this leather Union Jack coat on the cover of his 1997 album, Eart HL I NG. Perhaps not so coincidentally, that same year McQueen won the British Designer of the Year award.
Dave Benett/Contributor
Purple as a Prince— Even in 2002, performing at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, David Bowie was keeping a sharp fashion sense in this Prince-like purple tux.
David Bowie/Columbia Records
Dead Spaceman— Released just days ago, it might be too early to call Bowie's last costume iconic, but his appearance in his last ever music video, Lazarus, as a dead spaceman lying in a coffin, is just too poignant not to include.
What would a wedding chapel floating on the ocean look like? The AntiRoom II is probably the closest answer to that question: a floating pavilion that looks like a sacred place for mermaids and mermen to intertwine.
Designed by architects Elena Chiavi, Ahmad El Mad, and Matteo Goldoni, the AntiRoom II is a floating pavilion on the sea of Malta. Construction and materials are simple: The structure is made of wood and overlaid with diaphanous shrouds,creating a small enclosed pool at its center. The only way to get to it is by water—according to the designers, the small, self-enclosed nature of the pavilion is meant to be juxtaposed with the comparative massiveness of nearby Malta.
"Islands have always had a great cultural significance," the designers write. "Our reinterpretation of islands is a thought on refuge space, where one can lie on them and feel at home . . . [the] Antiroom II is a physical symbol to welcome and accept anyone. All cultures without exceptions."
The pavilion was designed at the Europe Architecture Students Assembly, where hundreds of students and designers convene in a different country every year. You can swim out to visit the AntiRoom II pavilion for yourself from nearby Valetta, a coastal town in Malta. But you might have to fight the seagulls for it.
Reading on a screen at night is probably killing your sleep: Research shows that using a tablet, smartphone, or laptop for a couple of hours before bed can cause you to lose as much as an hour's worth of sleep per night. With its next major software update to iOS 9 Apple is looking to solve the problem, automatically adjusting the color of the light coming from your iPhone or iPad's screen when it's dark out so you fall asleep more easily.
The feature is called Night Shift, and it's part of the forthcoming iOS 9.3 update to Apple's mobile operating system. Here's what it does, according to Apple:
Many studies have shown that exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep. Night Shift uses your iOS device's clock and geolocation to determine when it's sunset in your location. Then it automatically shifts the colors in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum, making it easier on your eyes. In the morning, it returns the display to its regular settings.
This isn't just breathless marketing—it's science. The human sleep cycle is uniquely sensitive at night to the blue light that is emitted by most screens, with the American Medical Association recommending that those with sleep disorders minimize their time with screens before bedtime, or using dim red lighting to minimize the effect. That's because as it gets darker, our eyes expect to see warmer light: for example, the reddish light of a candle, a fire, or a sunset, as opposed to the blue light of daytime.
Night Shift will automatically make your iPhone or iPad screen warmer or cooler according to what time of day it is. It sounds a lot like F.lux, a popular app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Which is, in all probability, not a coincidence: a couple months ago, F.lux released its software for iPhone and iPad, only to be forced by Apple to pull it from distribution just days later.
That was a bit of a dick move, but as a long-time F.lux user, it's hard to care too much—as long as we're getting the same functionality built right into iOS. The truth is, once you get used to screens that automatically adjust their color temperature at night, it's impossible to go back. You start sleeping better, and any screen that doesn't have such software installed looks blinding and disorienting after sundown.
This seemingly small feature could be one of Apple's most impactful UX improvements ever, single-handedly improving the sleep of millions of people per year. It's hard to imagine a similar change that could make such a big a difference in the day-to-day health and happiness of users. Plus, where Apple goes, the competition tends to follow. How soon before Android, Microsoft, and other OS makers follow suit?
We can't wait for iOS 9.3 to be officially released. In the meantime, try F.lux if you want to see just how big an impact the temperature of your screen makes to your sleep cycle.
From Google's Roboto to Apple's San Francisco, there's no shortage of typefaces optimized for interface design. For better or worse, though, those typefaces tend to be pretty bland. Christian Schwartz, of the small New York-based type foundry Commercial Type, thinks it's time interface typefaces got a little more flavor. His company's latest typeface, Action Condensed, is the raspberry to Roboto's plain vanilla.
Action Condensed feels a lot more dynamic than other interface typefaces. But despite its vigorous and energetic feel, the sans serif is designed to be readable at relatively low resolutions and be just as good as Roboto and San Francisco for use in interfaces. For example, it features four weights with three separate grades (think: boldness) per weight. Despite this, characters in every grade have exactly the same width.
Why is that important? It means that a bolder grade will take up the same amount of room on-screen as lighter grades. That's useful in interface design, because it allows you to change the state of a clickable or tappable text button, without the size of that button getting bigger or smaller. Imagine hovering over a clickable headline in Action Condensed with your mouse: the headline would get bolder, but it wouldn't actually get bigger, disrupting the flow of the typography around it.
It doesn't sound like a big deal, but making characters of the same width—regardless of their grades—is a tricky problem, says Schwartz. "There's a staggering number of tricks utilized in this typeface to keep weight and spacing consistent," he says.
It would have been very difficult to manage for some designers, but Action Condensed was designed for Commercial Type by the legendary Erik van Blokland—a veteran Dutch designer whose past typefaces include Trixie, the font famously used in the X-Files logo, as well as Eames Century Modern, a series of typefaces honoring the aesthetic of Charles and Ray Eames. Without the bag full of typography tricks Van Blokland brought to the table along with his decades of experiences, says Schwartz, Action Condensed might have been just as bland as the fonts it's meant to replace.
Why would a designer use Action Condensed instead of Roboto or San Francisco? Schwartz explains: "It brings a richness and personality to interface design that just hasn't been there anymore. Why should all interface typefaces look generic and neutral?" Other interface typefaces have a "very quiet voice," he says. "We think it's time for something more assertive."
From iOS to Material Design, the legacy of International Typographic Style is everywhere in digital design. That's pretty impressive, considering the fact that the 1950s-era Swiss design trend was never meant to be animated—let alone adapted to modern devices. It was for static posters, book covers, pamphlets, wayfinding, and magazines. It just so happens that the principles of International Typographic Style, like unusual color combinations, abstract geometric patterns, and bold typography, work really well in digital motion.
As if to show what International Style designers like Josef Müller-Brockmann, Armin Hofmann, and Hans Neuberg would have been doing if they had been designing in the iPhone age, Jon Yablonski took a series of classic International Style prints and recreated them as animations in CSS. What's so striking about these recreations is how effortlessly they seem to come to life, almost as if they had originally been designed this way.
Animated, Müller-Brockmann's Akari poster becomes a swirling ring of colors; his 1955 poster for Zürich Tonhalle morphs into an abstract traffic intersection of criss-crossing polygons; Neuberg's Konstructive Grafik poster from 1958 takes on the feel of a Saul Bass credits sequence. In motion, any one of these posters looks like the loading screen of an award-winning modern app.
If it doesn't show that International Style was a design movement ahead of its time, it certainly shows that the principles of good graphic design are timeless.
Most kids get their first exposure to architecture through building blocks, whether they're Lego bricks or simple wooden cubes. But in architecture, squares and rectangles aren't the strongest, simplest, or most stable of shapes: triangles are. Instead of giving our kids bricks, then, shouldn't we be teaching them to build with triangles?
Tokyo architecture firm Kengo Kuma and Associates—the designers who replaced Zaha Hadid on Japan's 2020 Olympic Stadium—think it's time for the next generation of neonate architects to embrace the triangle. Teaming up with Japanese forest conservation group More Trees, the firm has released Tsumiki: a set of non-traditional "building blocks" that the architects bill as Japanese Lego.
Yet that's something of a misnomer. Outside of being able to build things with them, there's little similarity between Tsumiki and Lego in either shape, material, or construction. Each Tsumiki block is a triangular wedge of cedar, with notches in its legs that allow them to fit together. Tsumiki's unique angular shape allows for structures that would actually be much more difficult to achieve with rectangular blocks. You can still use Tsumiki to construct simple cubic buildings, but the system can just as easily make structures that would be inelegant or rickety to construct with Lego, such as arches, temples, bridges, and more.
They aren't colorful or flashy, so it's possible Tsumiki blocks might not quite capture some kids' imagination the way that Lego does. They will, however, intuitively teach kids all about tangent and radial trussing—exactly the kind of deep lesson on architecture you'd expect from the the makers of Tokyo's next Olympic stadium. Available in packs of 13, you can purchase a set of Tsumiki for around $74. Consider it a down payment on your kid's future career as an architect.
An energy-saving light bulb containing LEDs uses up to 80% less energy and lasts up to 25 times as long as a traditional incandescent bulb. There's just one problem: many people think that the quality of light coming from an LED bulb feels less natural. A new innovation from MIT might help consumers get the best of both worlds, bringing the incandescent bulb closer in line with the energy efficiency of LED lights while maintaining its homey glow.
Incandescent bulbs work by using electricity to heat up a thin tungsten filament—that little hair of metal you see inside every bulb—to more than 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The problem with this approach is that most of that electricity is wasted as heat, which is why a 60 watt incandescent light bulb emits the same amount of light as a 12 watt LED. LEDs, on the other hand, don't use filaments at all. They directly translate electricity into light by moving electrons through a transistor, essentially cutting out the middleman.
So how do you make an incandescent bulb as efficient as an LED? Basically, you bounce the wasted heat back at the filament, so it stays hotter with less electricity. MIT's design uses photonic crystals to reflect heat-carrying infrared light back at the filament, while allowing visible light through. MIT's design uses 90 layers of these crystals to cut down on waste, while also boasting a special folded filament which has been designed from the ground-up to optimally absorb infrared light.
While not ready for retail yet, MIT's new incandescent technology triples the efficiency of a normal incandescent bulb... and the team thinks it might still be able to eke another 40% efficiency from the design with some tinkering. That could be enough to make incandescent bulbs popular again, at least when it comes to energy efficiency. One aspect of LEDs remain unmatched, though: their extreme longevity compared to incandescent bulbs (thin metal filaments heated to 5,000 degrees tend to have short life expectancies). If MIT has solved the life expectancy problem of incandescents, it's not saying so.
You can read MIT's paper on their new approach to incandescent bulbs here.
Designers earning top dollar work in UX, know how to code, and live in California. And—surprise—they're men. Those are some of the main takeaways from O'Reilly Media's 2016 Design Salary and Tools Survey.
Although it would be foolish to put too much weight on a survey with just 324 respondents, especially from a company largely known for publishing technical writing and software how-tos, O'Reilly's poll provides a snapshot of the design profession that mirrors other overviews we've seen. The full report is gigantic, collecting data from an anonymous online survey of O'Reilly Media's readership. For your convenience, here are some of the key points.
• The median income of designers responding to the survey was $91,000. When measuring only U.S. respondents, though, that median salary shoots up to $99,000.
• Designers in California earn the most, with a median salary of $128,000, followed by those in the Mid-Atlantic ($118,000), and then the Northeast (a little north of $100,000).
• Salaries aren't quite as high for the rest of the world. English-speaking countries seemingly pay their designers the most, with Canada and the UK/Ireland leading the pack, followed by Asia, than Latin America. However, O'Reilly cautions that this international pay gap is probably a "quirk of the sample," with the discrepancy between U.S. and European salaries "greater than what would be expected given national per capita income."
• One of the most valuable skills you can learn as a designer is coding. Even with just a little expertise in coding, the average salary of a designer shot up $16,000.
• The worst paid designers? Graphic designers, who reported much lower earnings than most other respondents: a comparatively piddling median income of $49,000.
• Shocker! Women designers are paid significantly less than men: about $14,000 less per year, on average. O'Reilly claims that "about half of the $14K difference in the sample is attributable to the fact that a larger share of the sample's men held higher positions," but controlling for that fact, the designer gender gap results in women making around $6,000 less per year than men. There's no silver lining to this statistic—really, there isn't—though the gender gap is on par with the professional average in other fields.
• Although O'Reilly cautions that it may be another quirk of its sample, the survey found that UI designers, on average, earned less than UX designers. In addition, respondents who listed "manager" in their title tended to make $10,000 more, on average, than those who listed "directors," although O'Reilly believes this was "likely influenced by more than half the managers working at companies with more than 10,000 employees while more than half the directors worked at companies with fewer than 100."
• Experience is more important than age. Those under 30 earned around $71,000, on average, compared to $116,000 for those 36 to 50, and $94,000 for those over 50. If you had over 10 years of experience in your role, though, the median income shoots up to $114,000, compared to just $74,000 for the less-experienced.
• OS X is the most popular operating system for designers, with 88% of O'Reilly's sample using Mac.
• 42% of all designers spend between four and eight hours in meetings per week, with 26% spending nine to 20 hours per week and 5% spending 20 hours or more per week in meeting rooms.
Check out O'Reilly Media's full 2016 Design Salary and Tools Survey here.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have a heart attack when they find a burmese python in their living room, and those who only start panicking when their python is missing. Housebroken, a series of photographs collected into a book by Minneapolis-based Areca Roe, focuses on the latter: individuals who choose to share their life with strange and exotic pets like snakes, parrots, and pigs.
Roe says she originally started photographing exotic pets because she wanted to explore the mystery of the symbiotic relationship between humans and animals in a domestic setting.
Medusa (Green Tree Snake)
"I wanted to photograph pets that were a bit more unusual, some of them wild-looking or wild-seeming, because these kinds of relationships were more mysterious to me," she says. "What does each party to the relationship, owner and pet, get out of it? It's not as clear and established as our relationships with cats and dogs. Their wildness served as an intriguing counterpoint to their domestic environs, so I was also inspired by that visual and conceptual clash."
Wendy and Gabby (Finches)
For the past few years, Roe has been driving around Wisconsin and Minnesota, traveling to the houses of exotic pet enthusiasts to photograph their furry (or slithery) friends. Some of the pets she finds out about through social media; others she reads about and cold contacts. The many odd reptiles she has photographed were mostly sourced from the member list of the Minnesota Herpetological Society, a group of avid reptile and amphibian lovers. She has photographed domesticated chickens, pot-bellied pigs, angora rabbits, wild finches, wide-eyed marsupials, and many more, including, of course, more cold-blooded reptiles than you can count.
What are the weirdest animals Roe has encountered? "A few I had never heard of, such as sugar gliders, which are sweet and smart little marsupials," she says. "The oddest thing about the pot-bellied pig I photographed was how normal he seemed—exactly like a dog. He was social, cuddly, responsive to commands, and slept in the bed with the owners." Some pets weren't quite so cute, though. "The most intimidating one was perhaps a giant albino Burmese python. She was huge, and it was daunting to be a few feet from this powerful snake that could likely kill me if she felt the need."
Dozer (Pot-bellied pig)
What kind of person decides to share their life with an exotic pet? Roe says most are just like any other pet owner. "I think I expected some of them to be motivated more by the status symbol of having an exotic animal, but in every case the owner seemed to be honestly fascinated by their creatures, and have much affection for them," she says.
That's not to say, though, that a few of them weren't—uh—a little weird: one woman kept as many as 50 reptiles in her room. "Every room excepting the bathroom and kitchen had stacks of terrariums and cages," Roe remembers. "They dominated the whole house, including a big basement filled with the creatures. Her power costs were formidable since she had to have heat lamps on many of the cold-blooded reptiles."
You can purchase a copy of Housebroke directly from Roe's Etsy site for $22.
