The last time we wrote about the designers behind the Polish firm panGenerator, they had visualized the deaths of World War II as a cascade of bullet shells. In collaboration with Disney, their latest project is decidedly more family-friendly: Mickeyphon, a robotic Mickey Mouse head, which resamples the people dancing and playing around it to create an endlessly mutating children's song.
In appearance, the Mickeyphon looks like a Star Wars imperial droid wearing a set of Mickey Mouse ears. Although black when turned off, the Mickeyphon's front panel comes to life when powered on, revealing a vivid LED equalizer that pulses with colored lights as it sings. PanGenerator calls these animated patterns faces: there are four in all, and they display randomly. The faces are meant to give Mickeyphon a playful personality, especially since it is programmed to rotate and sing to whomever is making noise around it.
Mickeyphon's songs are little electronic ditties of panGenerator's devising, composed to sound like silly children's songs. What makes Mickeyphon so fun for kids is that it actually incorporates the sounds they make into its songs. When Mickeyphon picks up a noise around it—a cough, a giggle, the sound of someone talking—it automatically records it, then uses it to replace a sample in the song. Each song has three samples that can be replaced, with the Mickeyphon cycling between them in order according to the sounds it hears. The result is a weirdly abstract Mickey Mouse robot that never sings the same song twice.
According to panGenerator's Krzysztof Goliński, Disney originally approached the Polish new media designers back in October, giving them free reign to use their audio-visual chops to make something interactive inspired by the company's properties. Before panGenerator even had an idea on what they were going to make, they started by reducing the classic design of Mickey Mouse down to its simplest possible representation—three conjoined black orbs—then built out from there.
Although some adults have called the Mickeyphon "terrifying," Goliński swears kids love it. Maybe a little too much, even. Upon debuting at Warsaw's Ethnographic Museum, Goliński says the scene was utter bedlam. "The opening had so many children and small kids running around the sculpture, screaming and trying to get it to repeat them," he remembers. Best experienced in small groups, then. No one install this near a Chuck E. Cheese.
The Northeast has experienced a remarkably mild winter this year: one so eerily topsy-turvy that, on Christmas, New York City was warmer than Los Angeles. The unseasonably warm weather is partially due to El Niño, as well as an unusually strong polar vortex. But no matter where you are in the country, you should expect winters to get much warmer over the next hundred years... and the summers, too.
Climate Central has put together a couple of simple—yet horrifying—maps that show exactly where the temperatures in every American city are headed by 2100 if climate change continues at its current rate. One is for winter, while the other map is for summer, but no matter which map you look at, it's all bad news.
In the winter map, you type in where you live, and the map draws a straight line to the U.S. city which currently has winters most similar to those your own city will experience in 2100. For example, I live in Boston, which currently experiences 115 nights below freezing every year. By 2100, though, Boston will only have 53 nights below freezing every years, making our winters much like those of Marietta, Georgia today. In turn, the winters in Marietta, Georgia, will feel more like San Antonio 85 years from now.
The summer map is just as sobering. By 2100, Boston's average temperature on a summer day will go from 79 to 89 degrees Fahrenheit, making our summers the equivalent of a muggy summer day on Miami Beach—sans all the palm tress.
To create these maps, Climate Central used data from DayMet to calculate 1,001 American cities' average winter temperatures, and PRISM for their summer temperatures. They then compared these temperatures to what is forecast for these same areas in 2100 according to the UN's RCP8.5 scenario, a model which predicts what will happen to the Earth's temperatures if we don't cut back on CO2 emissions at all.
So if there's a silver lining here, it's this: it's not too late to do something if you don't want your snowy winter hometown to turn into a muggy swamp in the next 85 years. Though even by the UN's most optimistic estimates, the heat's getting turned up on the planet by 2100. So enjoy the weather while it lasts—it won't be here for long.
In a statement posted on its official website Tuesday, the Lego Group explains it will no longer ask the "thematic purpose" of projects by persons or organizations making very large orders of bricks. Lego says that this was previously done so that the company's core mission—to inspire children through creative play—was not muddied by seeming to support the specific agendas of individuals or corporations.
Unfortunately, at least in the case of Ai, this policy had the opposite outcome: By refusing to sell the artist bulk bricks because of the perceived political nature of his planned installation at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria, Lego was accused of censorship. Ai pointed out that while Lego would not sell him bricks for use in his works critical of the Chinese government, the company had inked a $300 million deal with China for a new Legoland in Shanghai, implying that Lego was willing to support the agenda of the Chinese government, but not those who would criticize it through art.
In a statement to Co.Design at the time, Lego explained its motives for denying Ai his bricks, saying that it universally refrained from making bulk sales of bricks "where we are made aware that there is a political context." But Lego's new policy is essentially: "Don't ask, don't tell." The company says that it will no longer ask the purpose of bulk orders, because "those guidelines could result in misunderstandings or be perceived as inconsistent." Instead, Lego will simply ask that artists make it clear that Lego does not sponsor or endorse their work.
Few games are more surreal than Monopoly, inspired, as it seemingly is, by a Roaring '20s plutocrat's mescaline-fueled bender through Atlantic City. But which is weirder: the American version, or Japan's? In the former, you're an anthropomorphic top hat riding the railroad, sure, but in the latter? You're a whale on a skateboard, ruthlessly trying to wrest the city's porcelain doll markets with a deer, a painted snail, and a Lucky Cat.
To be fair, this isn't the stock Japanese version of Monopoly. Instead, it's a limited edition "Traditional Japanese Arts & Crafts Edition." Only 5,000 copies are being released to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Nakagawa Masashichi Shoten, a brand that promoted traditional arts and creates and operates several retail stores in Japan.
That's probably why this version of Monopoly feels like a Miyazaki film. Everything in it is inspired by the Japanese arts. So, as Spoon & Tamago explains:
Instead of Atlantic Avenue you'll own a Daruma doll business. Instead of Illinois Avenue you'll own the Nanbu Ironware craft of making teapots. Instead of the railroads you'll control Hato-guruma (Dove Cart), an enduring folk art made of a woven two-wheeled bird. By collecting these handmade toys, you'll discover that they originated in Nagano and are associated with industrious effort because they appealingly depict they way a dove pecks at food while walking.
There are other fascinating updates. For example, instead of Community Chest cards, you have cards named after Marco Polo's moniker for Japan, Zipanugu cards ("Your kutani porcelain exhibit was a success. Collect 150E!"). Instead of Chance cards, you apparently have Future Cards ("You have gained an apprentice! Advance to Go!"). The middle of the board features a pattern of interlocking diamonds that is found on traditional textiles, with pieces missing that represent the islands of Japan.
After once nearly ruining our marriage over an ill-advised game of Monopoly, my wife and I have sworn off ever owning another set. But if we did, this would be the one we'd buy. It's available for sale here for around $46.
Every subway system feels like its own self-contained world, but what if those worlds were linked? The World Metro Map takes the subway systems of 214 cities across five continents, and unifies them into a single map, so that taking the L-train is just as likely to drop you off in Tokyo or Mumbai as it is in Williamsburg.
Designed by the New York-based collective ArtCodeData, the World Metro Map is a digital collage that ties together 791 subway lines and 11,924 stations into one sprawling megastructure of public transportation. The map's style is based on the diagram of the Tokyo Metro System, but contains stations from countless others. Although it looks like a nervous system of rainbow spaghetti, there's logic to the way the World Metro Map is laid out, with the oldest subway systems connecting in the middle and newer ones at the outskirts of the map.
According to the map's designer, Gerardo Cid, the germ of the idea for the World Metro Map came from Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys's New Babylon project, a vision of an anti-capitalist "world wide city of the future" which would literally hover over the Earth, and be home to a new species of humans, homo ludens, or "men at play." Cid says New Babylon, while not realistic, fascinated him because it linked mobility and free transit with creative freedom.
The World Metro Map is an attempt to explore some of those ideas on a smaller, more familiar scale. "We chose the subway because it's an element with similar characteristics in every big city around the world," says Cid. "It's something someone living in Tokyo, Mexico City or New York or Istanbul can relate to. A map is just a way to say we are all sharing a parallel experience, [so] why don't we connect it?"
In keeping with New Babylon's utopian ideas on how free transit can help save the world, the World Metro Map is now available from Kickstarter, with proceeds going to Open Accessibility, a non-profit that aims to facilitate travel for people living with disabilities. Because you just know a huge chunk of the World Metro Map's 11,000+ subway stations aren't wheelchair accessible. Order a print here.
If Escher had worked for 3M, he may have designed something like this. The Block Memo is actually Japanese design studio Nendo's answer to the bank of Post-it notes on your desk: a three-sided block of sticky notes that can be peeled off from every side, and looks almost like an optical illusion when viewed from above.
Although as rectangular as any other block of notes, the Block Memo is actually made up of three different types of stickies. One face is taken up by large, square notes; on an adjoining side, half of this area is made up of medium sticky rectangles. On a third side, half of this area is devoted to even smaller sticky notes. Though it looks cubic from the top, the final side is made up of inverted shapes that let it sit on any desk with one corner pointing to the sky, like a 3-D tetromino.
The Block Memo is being sold in Japan for around $21, alongside another Nendo stationery design, a pair of notebooks called U-Note and Sa-Note. Intuitive, artistic designers can adopt the U-Note, which with pages that gradually fade from lined to unlined. Logical, left-brained thinkers can adopt the Sa-Note notebook, which has extra lines per page. Those are also available in Japan, for around $4 each.
Cheerily nuzzled above the "7" key like a pear-shaped pill bug, the ampersand is perhaps the most intriguing character on the keyboard. While all letters and punctuation marks look similar enough in abstract, the ampersand feels unique, like a shape-shifter that could transform at a moment's notice. For type designers and aficionados both, it isn't so much a character as it is a character, "usually a tirelessly entertaining one, perhaps an uncle with too many tricks," as Simon Garfield wrote in his 2012 book, Just My Type.
No wonder the ampersand attracts such endless fascination. There are coloring books about ampersands, ampersand-a-day Tumblr blogs, and a whole cottage industry of t-shirt makers working in ampersands. Perhaps the most epic undertaking of ampersand-ian tribute came in 2010, when over 400 different designers came together to create an entire font made up of nothing but distinctive and unrepeated ampersands. The project speaks to the ampersand's individuality: a font of nothing but ampersands is easy to imagine in a way that a font of only lower case "j"s could never be.
But if an ampersand feels like it can be anything, what makes an ampersand an ampersand? Where does it come from? And why, exactly, do type designers love it so much more than other characters?
Ampersand design may seem infinitely variable, but no matter how stylized or abstracted, every ampersand is, at heart, an et—or Latin for "and." Some typefaces (especially handwritten-style ones) make this more obvious: it doesn't take too much squinting to see an "et" in the ampersands of Trebuchet MS, Garamond Italic, Casalon Italic, or even Papyrus. But you can see the Latin DNA of "et" even in an Arial, Helvetica, or Times New Roman ampersand, where the "e" has become a half-closed figure eight, forming the cross of a "t" with its bottom descender. And if you've ever handwritten an ampersand, chances are you've done so by drawing a loopy cursive "E," bisected lengthwise by a straight line: another stylized "et."
The first known ampersand was scrawled on a wall in 1st-century Pompeii by an anonymous graffiti artist practicing his Roman cursive. It is related, but not identical to, a rival mark created during the same time period by Marcus Tiro, a former slave of Cicero who proposed what is known as the Tironian et (or "⁊") as part of one of the world's first shorthand system. Although the Tironian "et" eventually fell out of favor—except, bizarrely, in Ireland, where it is still used in Gaelic signage today—the Latin "et" continued to gain popularity, perhaps because it wasn't tied to a larger shorthand system that scribes needed to learn in full.
Instead, by the 8th century, they had stylized the Latin "et" into a symbol that looks very much like a modern ampersand. But it would take another thousand years for the ampersand to get its modern name.
Technically, the word ampersand is a mondegreen—meaning a jumble of words that is routinely misheard—created from the phrase "and per se &," itself a meaningless word salad which only makes sense in historical context.
In the 19th century, the ampersand was recognized as the 27th letter of the alphabet, right after "Z," and taught as such to British schoolchildren. At the time, it was common to refer to letters that could also be interpreted as words as per se letters: e.g. per se"A" (as opposed to article "A"), and per se"I" (as opposed to pronoun "I.") Since it stood for "and," the ampersand was the third of these per se letters, so when school children recited their ABCs, they ended it: "...W, X, Y, Z, and per se and." Get a couple generations of kids slurring "and per se and," and you get the word ampersand.
Even if it isn't today, the fact that the ampersand was once considered the 27th letter might be why it looks so uniquely at home in the middle of other letters, as is the case with AT&T, H&M, A&W, and so on. In fact, in the business world, the ampersand has uncommon status. It's the typographical equivalent of a wedding ring, used to mark permanent partnerships, like Marks & Spencer, Johnson & Johnson, Barnes & Noble, and Ben & Jerry's.
Although his own partnership by ampersand flared out, Jonathan Hoefler (now of Hoefler & Co.) still loves the character. Speaking to Wired, Hoefler tried to sum up his love for the ampersand, which he says he's been known to draw "to excess.""It's always an opportunity for adventure," he says. "Even the most conservative typefaces can give sanctuary to a whimsical ampersand or two."
Hoefler's not alone in finding the ampersand adventurous. The character's ability to be "whimsical" even in otherwise staid fonts is one that is called out by many type designers as its unique quality. "The ampersand is the one glyph where type designers are able to let loose and be a little more creative," says Jeremiah Shoaf, a freelance designer and the editor of Typewolf, a popular blog about typefaces which uses a Baskerville ampersand for its logo. That's because ampersands are usually only used for display type—the large or eye-catching type used in headlines, signage, and advertisements—so the character can be more ornate, even in fonts that are primarily designed for text. A good example of this effect in action are the ampersands of Kings Caslon, Bookmania, Didot Italic, and Cochin Italic, all of which really cut loose and be more flamboyant than their associated typefaces.
But it's in keeping with the kitchen sink nature of ampersands that while some designers love them for their whimsy, others see only order. In an email, famed type designer Erik Spiekermann suggests the reason he loves ampersands is because their shape appeals to the mathematical bent of his orderly German mind. "I like designing them because I like designing figures, and the ampersand is like an 8 with bits added," he says. In addition to the many ampersands he has designed for his popular typefaces, Spiekermann has an unusual way of drawing ampersands in his day-to-day correspondence, where the character looks like a stylized @ symbol. He describes the fluidity of what people expect an ampersand to look like as affording designers a lot of opportunity to play around.
At the end of the day, it's incredibly difficult to succinctly define the ampersand—which is, of course, exactly what makes it so interesting. It can be almost anything you want it to be. But in an email about his fascination with the ampersand, Tobias Frere-Jones (formerly wedded by an ampersand in Hoefler & Frere-Jones, now of Frere Jones Type) comes closest. He writes:
In the history of our alphabet, the ampersand is a dinosaur.
It should have gone extinct a long time ago, but has survived nonetheless. We use it so frequently that it's easy to forget its origin as two letters entangled, spelling out a word in Latin. The written forms of Latin had scores of contractions and other marks for abbreviation. All of those marks died alongside the Latin language itself, except for the ampersand. (And much less prominently, the "Rx" symbol we now take to signify pharmaceuticals.)
Visually, the ampersand is a loner. Thanks to its convoluted development, it has no relatives among any of the letters. And it has a strange brief to satisfy, operating on the same scale as letters but never being mistaken for one. So the type designer is left to wing it, right from the start. It's tempting to think that the top bowl will find guidance in the figure eight, or that the diagonals can cribbed off the K or X. It never works out that way.
Usually, letters help to form one another, by setting precedents and providing contexts. But the ampersand doesn't receive any of that support. That makes it hard to draw, because so many different shapes might look plausible at first. But it also opens an unusually large window for experimentation and risk. It's how the designer can put on a fireworks show in this one shape, especially in seriffed italics.
In the end, the ampersand is a beautiful and uncooperative creature, one we're lucky to have inherited.
If there is any way to summarize the ampersand, that should be it: the beautiful and uncooperative dinosaur who lives on in your fonts. May the ampersand never go extinct, and never be fully tamed.
Video games and subway maps don't seem to have much in common, but for Washington, D.C.-based graphic designer Matthew Stevenson, the connection between the two is obvious: both are ways to explore other worlds. That's why, in his art, Stevenson mashes both up. As part of his NES Subway Maps project, he transforms the maps of old-school Nintendo games like Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and Metroid into pastiches of the London Underground, Lisbon Subway, or Tokyo Metro.
Stevenson's first game/subway map mash-up was basically inspired by a pun. "I started with the D.C. Metro map since it was the city I was most familiar with," Stevenson says. "Metroid was one of my first NES games back in 1987 and I remember my brother and I getting seriously frustrated by the maze-like quality of the game world. Metro, Metroid: the idea practically formed itself."
After completing his D.C. Metroid map, Stevenson wanted to keep going, saying it "scratches [his] nostalgia itch" in a way that his day-job as a creative director for D.C.-based branding agency Fathom Creative does not. He's since created maps for Maniac Mansion (based on Moscow's Transit System), Dragon Warrior (based on the Lisbon Subway), The Legend of Zelda (London Underground) and Zelda II (Tokyo Transit System), and Final Fantasy (the New York City subway).
According to Stevenson, the best game maps for his art are non-linear in nature, just like subway systems. Super Mario Bros. wouldn't make a good game map because it's basically just a single line: World 1-1, World 1-2, and so on. There are no branches, no real skipping around. A game like The Legend of Zelda, though, allows a player to make all sorts of choices about where he will go, and how he will get there—just like riding a train. Stevenson creates his maps by diagramming those non-linear gameplay paths using the borrowed aesthetic, including the colors, the lines, and the typography, of real-world metro maps.
Oddly enough, Stevenson has found himself wrestling with some of the same conundrums real subway map designers face as they diagram public transportation system: how much can you abstract while still making a system seem like it connects to the already familiar?
"One of the things I learned as a designer through this series is that sometimes simplifying a visual system doesn't necessarily make it easier to use," Stevenson says. "I found myself staring at the finished Moscow Maniac Mansion map saying to myself, 'I know it's visually simpler, but why does it seem unfamiliar now?'" He reckons that simplifying information can sometimes throw our brains off as much as making it more complex. Whether you're trying to diagram the Metroid-filled caverns of the planet Zebes, or the Tokyo subway system, a good designer needs to find balance between the abstract and the complex.
Stevenson's NES Subway Maps are available for purchase as prints for $13.50 apiece here.
Two years ago, a young medical student named Faii Ong was asked to help care for a 103-year old patient who kept losing weight. "No one knew what was going on," Ong told me recently. "No one knew why she was doing so poorly. Did we miss something big, like cancer?"
It turned out they hadn't missed anything big: they'd missed something small. Taking his lunch in the cafeteria one day, Ong happened to see his patient struggling to eat soup with a spoon. "Her hand kept trembling, and so the soup spilled all down her front." Because of essential tremors caused by Parkinson's, the 103-year-old was losing weight simply because she could not get food to her mouth without spilling.
In the time since the encounter, Ong has invented a device that could help his patient, as well as millions of other Parkinson's patients and tremor sufferers around the world. His invention, the GyroGlove, straps gyroscopic stabilizers on the back of a patient's hand, promising to vastly help people with hand tremors use simple tools with accuracy.
Like other devices designed for patients with Parkinson's, the GyroGlove works by trying to stabilize the erratic tremors that are one of the major symptoms of the disease. It uses a mechanical gyroscope to dampen the tremors in a wearer's hand. Although smaller, this gyroscope is not significantly different than the control movement gyroscope used on the International Space Station, which allows it to turn in space without firing jets. By constantly spinning at thousands of RPMs, the gyroscope helps the GyroGlove constantly rebalance a wearer's trembling hands, all in real-time.
It's a simple solution, but it works. According to Ong's company, GyroGear, the GyroGlove can help reduce hand tremors by up to 90%. It doesn't feel entirely natural—testers apparently equate the sensation of wearing a GyroGlove with using their hands submerged in thick liquid—but it works without requiring a doctor to fine-tune the device to each individual patient, or a bulky design that might further stigmatize those already embarrassed by their tremors. Ong even says that the GyroGear could someday be appropriated by professions where a steadier hand could be useful, like surgery.
Ong doesn't know what happened to his 103-year-old patient, but he wishes he could go back in time and give her a GyroGlove. The stakes for that original use case—Parkinson's and tremor-sufferers—are huge. Worldwide, there are approximately 10 million Parkinson's patients, and an additional 200 million people with essential tremor. The GyroGlove could make a dramatic impact on quality of life for many of these patients. And unlike products like the Liftware spoon or the ArcPen, the GyroGlove isn't a proprietary solution using just one tool. By wearing the GyroGlove, everything becomes easier for those with tremors—not just writing a letter or using a spoon.
If the GyroGlove does prove a success with users, Ong doesn't intend on stopping with hands. He imagines adapting the GyroGlove's technology to help address tremors in other parts of the body: for example, restless leg syndrome. The first step, though, is to ship the GyroGlove. Although an exact launch date is still to be decided, the GyroGlove is scheduled to go on sale early next year, at a price ranging from $550 to $850. A Kickstarter will launch later this year, most likely in September. You can sign up for the GyroGlove's waiting list here.
Imagine a version of Russian Roulette played with a cat that had dynamite up its butt, then add in some Uno for good measure. That's Exploding Kittens in a nutshell, a card game designed by Microsoft's Elan Lee and Shane Small, with art from The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman. When it launched on Kickstarter last year, it became the site's most-funded game ever. Now, it's coming to iPhone, but the App Store version of Exploding Kittens isn't just a port. It's a whole new experience.
Exploding Kittens for iPhone was developed in partnership with Substantial, a design firm based in Seattle and San Francisco which has helped companies like Google, Amazon, Starbucks, and more design and realize their apps. Looking over Substantial's clients list, you'd be forgiven for thinking the designers were a little straight-laced to help build a game as profane and as crazy as Exploding Kittens. But the pedigree is there, if you look for it: Substantial also made a game called Dungeon Highway that helped prove it had the chops to port Exploding Kittens to iOS.
Except a direct port of Exploding Kittens isn't what Substantial, or the game's original creators, wanted to do. Substantial's Mike Judge (no relation), lead developer of Exploding Kittens for iOS, doesn't mince words about what he thinks of most physical-to-digital game adaptations. "Straight ports are usually shit," he says. He points to the Magic: The Gathering games as exactly the kind of thing Substantial was trying to avoid with Exploding Kittens: "a crappy clone of an awesome game that just doesn't work right when it's brought into the digital world."
So Exploding Kittens on iOS isn't a direct translation of the analog card game. It mixes things up, offering both existing Exploding Kittens fans and newcomers a new thing to explore. In some ways, in fact, it feels more like a sequel to Exploding Kittens released on a different platform than a direct port. Some things are missing, but a lot more things are new. There are new cards, new mechanics, new art (courtesy of The Oatmeal's Inman), and sounds and voices (again, mostly designed by Inman from a shack in his backyard mysteriously called the "Elf House").
Take the selection of cards. In the physical version of Exploding Kittens, there are nine different types of cards, each of which do different things: shuffle the deck, defuse a kitten that's about to explode, and so on. On iOS, Exploding Kittens loses at least one card type, the "Nope!" card, which exists in the analog game to prevent a player from using the card he just drew, effectively rewinding time. Complicating matters, "Nope!" cards can be played on other "Nope!" cards, and it can be played at any time, not just a player's turn.
From a pacing perspective, this mechanism was just too cumbersome for the iOS version of Exploding Kittens. In its place are new types of cards. When played, "Annoying Diarrhea" cards freeze a card in your opponent's hand; while "Slap!" cards force your opponent to take any of your stored-up turns, or Cat Butt cards that—well—turn all of your opponent's cards into cat butts. Exploding Kittens on iPhone is full of such weird additions, with more available as in-app purchases.
There's some other neat new features exclusive to iPhone, too. Exploding Kittens has always had a Blackjack-like card counting element to it. Since the game ends if you draw a cat you can't defuse, and every turn ends with you drawing a new card, how many TNT kitties remain in a rapidly diminishing deck is always a strategic element players need to consider. Unfortunately, some players just suck at math, so the iPhone version gives them an easy-to-read meter, showing from 0% to 100% how likely the next card they draw is to blow up in their hands.
No matter how much has changed in coming to iPhone, though, one thing remains the same: Exploding Kittens is meant to be played with friends. "The joy of this game is all in screwing over your friends, and being vicious to people next to you in this funny, light-hearted way," Judge says. Digitally, Exploding Kittens still makes you play with people in the same room, with up to five people each playing against each other from their individual iPhones. Cleverly, you don't even need Internet access or a data plan for this to work. Instead, it uses a local mesh network to communicate to local iPhones over WiFi and Bluetooth, similar to messaging apps used by both Occupy Wall Street and cheating high school students.
So even if you're on a camping trip, stationed on a submarine, or aboard the ISS you can still play the digital version of Exploding Kittens with your friends. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go spray my wife with cat diarrhea.
What's a novel without its words? Just punctuation. But when you take those lines of commas, periods, exclamation points, and quotes, then arrange them in a big spiral, you can still tell something of the character of the original work: the endlessly curious and expository quality of Ishmael's narrative in Moby Dick, for example, or the titular wonder of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Between the Words by Chicago-based designer Nicholas Rougeux is a series of posters that takes the text of classic novels like Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, The Christmas Carol, Peter Pan, The Time Machine, and more, then strips them of all their words until they are mere swirling vortices of punctuation. The project was inspired by Stefanie Posavec's Writing without Words data visualizations, which colorfully chart the structure—but not the actual prose—of many classic novels.
After admiring Posavec's work, Rougeux says he wanted to try his own take on visualizing literature. "After experimenting with a few ideas," he says, "I ended up accidentally removing all the letters in some text and saw that the punctuation let behind was interesting in its own right." The spiral pattern of his finished posters was just the most visually compelling way of densely fitting a large volume of text on a single poster.
The posters do indeed reveal patterns. Broken up by chapters, in several of Rougeux's punctuation vortexes, you can see how an author slips between dialogue and narrative sections, just by how often quotes pop up. "The double quotes adds a lot of density in dialogue where longer narrative sections are mostly strings of periods, commas, semicolons, and so on," he says.
Some books seem like they'd be almost identifiable by their punctuation. Alice in Wonderland, for example, has an abundance of exclamation marks ("Off with their heads!"). Peter Pan uses a lot of commas, reflecting the breathless "and then, and then, and then" way children tell stories about their dreams. And Moby Dick can be identified by its huge number of em-dashes, which are used by Herman Melville throughout the novel to cite his sources on the habits of whalers and leviathans throughout the book.
Unlike Ishmael, when it comes to his punctuation posters, Rougeux hasn't yet landed his typographic white whale: James Joyce's Ulysses, known for its idiosyncratic (and, sometimes, wholly nonexistent) use of punctuation. But Rougeux says the modernist tome is the next to be visualized. The rest of his posters can be purchased as prints for around $28 each here.
Drones. They crash. A lot. Right now, they're only as good as their pilots, which often means "not very." As for so-called autonomous drones, they're fine in well-documented open spaces, but have a tendency to cataclysmically fail when you throw unexpected obstacles at them. And that's a problem, because if Jeff Bezos is ever going to make a drone delivery to your doorstep, it's going to need to know how to dodge a bird or an oncoming frisbee without blowing up.
MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) thinks it has a couple of killer algorithms that could help. One is an algorithm that helps automated drones detect and navigate complicated "forests" full of obstacles; the other is a sophisticated software library of pre-canned flight maneuvers that drones can endlessly string together to pull off the kind of aerodynamic acrobatics for which you'd usually need an Iceman or Maverick.
"Over the last few years, there's been massive growth in the development of drones, with lots of companies and startups investing in them, like Amazon" says Anirudha Majumdar, a PhD student at CSAIL who developed one of the algorithms. "The problem with these systems, though, is they lack guarantees on a drone's behavior, and therefore, its safety. And unexpected wind gust, or sudden obstacle, can make a drone go down." Being able to guarantee that a drone that goes into the air stays in the air is the biggest thing standing in the way of drones going truly mainstream.
To tackle the problem, CSAIL split it in two parts: to avoid colliding with objects, an autonomous drone first needs advanced detection methods to make sense of the world around it. Second, it needs the skills to actually dodge the obstacles it identifies, in a way that guarantees the safety of the drone and anyone near it.
The first task was handled by an algorithm created by recent master's graduate Benoit Landry to tackle drones' inherent sampling problems. Unlike most collision-detection algorithms, Landry's solution works by scanning not for obstacles, but for zones of free space. "Rather than plan paths based on the number of obstacles in the environment, it's much more manageable to look at the inverse: the segments of space that are 'free' for the drone to travel through," he says. "Using free-space segments is a more 'glass-half-full' approach that works far better for drones in small, cluttered spaces."
Using motion-capture optical sensors, Landry's algorithm can calculate regions of free space in a busy obstacle course. But to optimally drive a drone through them, you need Majumdar's algorithm, which chooses flight maneuvers based upon a drone's current position, its destination, and variables like the surrounding environment and windspeed. Each of these flight maneuvers is pre-programmed and relatively short—maybe just a few seconds long—but by stringing them together, Majumdar's software makes it possible for a drone to safely navigate large distances, as long as it has enough data about what surrounds its flight path to choose a maneuver.
Right now, both Majumdar and Landry's algorithms are computationally expensive. Landry's might allow a drone to navigate a complicated obstacle course without mishap, but it needs to think about how it's going to it for 10 minutes first. As for Majumdar's, it can make flight decisions in just 0.02 seconds, which is almost real-time. Still, for now, it only has about 40 moves to choose from—because searching through a larger library slows the algorithm down.
Thanks to both Moore's Law and refinement, though, these two promising algorithms will probably get a lot faster in relatively short order. And according to Majumdar, both have possible applications that run the gamut from drone-delivered pizza to autonomous search-and-rescue UAVs that navigate burning buildings and collapsed tunnels for survivors. Even for your run-of-the-mill UAVs that depend on human pilots, these algorithms could help a system's software know when to "take the wheel." Eventually, this technology could end drone crashes for good—at least the ones that aren't caused by human error.
What if guns were as vulnerable beneath their blue steel shells as the humans or animals they're designed to kill? In his (literally) visceral Anatomy of War sculptures, artist Noah Scalin imagines firearms that have been clinically vivisected to reveal a realistic set of internal organs underneath—all as a way of drawing attention to the human toll of the gun debate.
Made of polymer, clay, acrylic and enamel, Scalin's anatomical weapons include a Smith & Wesson .45 with its skin stripped off and an AK-47 filled with pulsing viscera. They're almost like Visible Man kits for semi-automatic weapons. In Scalin's sculptures, underneath every gun's barrel, trigger, or stock, sits an esophagus, liver, or heart. They aren't machines; they're organisms.
Well, organisms except for one crucial organ: Scalin pointedly leaves the brain out of his sculptures, a concerted attempt to emphasize the brainlessness of guns. Weapons, Scalin reminds us, have no will or agency themselves. That's not to say anything as trite as "guns don't kill people," because they do. But it's human brains that are ultimately responsible for using them.
According to Scalin, his Anatomy of War weapons are meant to try to ground the ongoing gun debate. "Too often the discussion around guns in America gets wrapped up in emotional terms around the 2nd Amendment," Scalin says. "The idea behind The Anatomy of War series is to bring the discussion back to the individual human level." And even if they don't influence anyone's ideas about gun control, at least Scalin's sculptures have a viable second life as props in a future David Cronenberg film.
You can see more of Noah Scalin's sculptural work here.
The guys at Brooklyn's Pop Chart Lab's already put out the most comprehensive beer infographic on the planet, but you'd die of alcohol poisoning if you tried to drink your way through it, even in a year. Inspired by the annoyingly repetitive school bus tune, Pop Chart's latest is a lot more manageable. The 99 Bottles of Craft Beer on the Wall chart is a scratch-off checklist of almost 100 craft beers.
The 99 Bottles of Craft Beer chart is split between ales and lagers, the two main categories of the beer family tree. Then, it further divides into sub-categories, depending on where different beer types fall on the yeast-and-malt spectrum: stouts, lambics, porters, weissbiers, bocks, pilsners, and the like. As for the brands chosen, the Pop Chart Lab's Rachel Mansfield tells me the methodology wasn't any more stringent than what they liked to drink. Specific beers included on the chart include Pliny the Elder, the chile-spiced Ghost Face Killah, Tröegs Mad Elf, Porterhouse Oyster Stout, and Southern Tier Pumking.
In that sense, the 99 Bottles Of Craft Beer On The Wall Chart is a checklist of all the beers Pop Chart thinks you should try. When you do guzzle one, you're meant to take a coin and scratch off the gilt foil from the beer, "emptying" the bottle while retaining the label. You don't have to be a seasoned booze-hound like me to think that's pretty cute. It's available to order now from Pop Chart Lab's website for $35.
When Max Younger was a kid, his dad Dan was always on crutches. A serious childhood injury meant that his father was constantly in-and-out of the hospital, getting surgeries and knee replacements. "They caused irritation, bruising, and nerve damage in his hands," Max remembers. "He was never one to complain, but you could see it, and if you asked, he'd tell you."
After decades of watching his father limp around the house, Younger—an industrial design student working at Hallmark—started noodling in his spare time on a design that would help his father deal with the wrist and arm pain that come from extended crutch use. Then Max got a call—his father had a staph infection. The leg had to be amputated. Dan would be on crutches for the rest of his life. So Max teamed up with his wife, Liliana, to found Mobility Designed, a company that wants to bring crutch design into the Space Age with its first product, the M+D Crutch.
As Max sees it, crutch design hasn't much changed since the Civil War. They're just sticks you shove under your arms that require you to put all your body weight on your wrists and armpits to get around. The design has endured, but not because of its merit. In fact, it has loads of issues, including pain and bruising under the armpits, and can result in nerve damage to those areas, too. Forearm crutches, more common in Europe, don't bruise the armpits, but they can still hurt the wrists, and they also require the use of your hands, which makes other every-day tasks challenging. The M+D Crutch is designed to address all of these issues.
In appearance, it almost looks like something designed by Aperture Science, the futuristic science lab with the Apple-like aesthetic from Valve Software's Portal games. It's built so that all of your weight rests on your elbows, not your armpits or your wrists. "It was challenging to design not using the arm pits because they are such an easy a place to use: that's why we pick kids up that way," Younger says. "But as most of us know as adults, its not as fun being picked up by your armpits." After exploring some other concepts, including "exoskeleton belt/suspension systems," Younger settled on the elbows... a part of the body most of us lean on all the time without pain. "It just made sense," he says.
When you wear the M+D Crutch, you strap it into a foam-lined arm cradle. You can hold the crutch's handle if you want, but it works fine even in hands-free mode, so that you can walk around with the crutches while, say, holding a bag or looking at your phone. A button under the arm cradle also allows you to lift your arms while still keeping your weight on the crutches. Interchangeable feet not only help absorb shock, but can be swapped out according to varying weather conditions and terrain.
Ultimately, the biggest testament to the superior design of the M+D Crutch is probably the man it was built for, Max's father Dan Younger. "With Max's crutches, my wrists and shoulders aren't as fatigued," he says. "Every day tasks are much easier. I can walk farther and easier without getting tired."
Unfortunately, after a failed Kickstarter campaign, Dan is still one of the only people who has a set of M+D Crutches for himself, but Younger says the company has bounced back, and will be selling its crutches through its website starting this summer, probably for around $300 a crutch.
"We believe the world needs better crutches, because millions of people rely on them every day to go about their lives," says Mobility Designed's Liliana Younger. "Why are we still relying on our armpits, when elbows make so much more sense?"
Update: a previous version of this article said that the M+D Crutch will cost around $100. It will actually cost closer to $300.
After a while, all State of the Union addresses start to sound alike. But how alike are they really? To find out, data analysis company Civis Analytics looked at every State of the Union address starting in 1790 to create visualizations that show what the key eras of political rhetoric are in U.S. history, as well as what topic each president made his pet.
To chart similarity across all States of the Union, Civis developed a pair of matrices that show how similar every SOTU was to one another: the darker the square, the more alike the addresses that meet on X- and Y-axis are to one another. Not surprisingly, addresses that are closest in time tend to be the most similar. When you pull back, though, the matrices reveal various turning points in U.S. history where the political rhetoric suddenly shifted: the Great Depression, or 9/11, for example. It also allows you to see how similar the speeches of different presidents are to one another, revealing similarities between both Democratic and Republican candidates.
In the first matrix, Civis provides an overview of every State of the Union since George Washington's first address in 1790. Each cell on the matrix represents a single year, which is why each box is so small: there's 225 speeches to fit in. When you pull back, though, you see some important takeaways. First of all, before 1815, State of the Union addresses tended to be very different from one another, even in consecutive years: a sign, perhaps, that the nascent SOTU's unspoken rules were slowly being formalized. By 1815, though, the art of writing State of the Union addresses stabilizes, at which point, the matrix reveals that, at least in terms of addresses, American history can be split into three important eras: 1815 to 1912 (pre-World War I), 1923 to 1932 (Coolidge and Hoover), 1946 to 2016 (post-World War II). Each of these eras is represented in the matrix by a dark, self-contained block.
The second matrix takes a deeper focus on the post-World War II era to show how similar the text of U.S. presidents' speeches are to one another. What's surprising here is that while we tend to think of presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama as being wildly different from one another, they were actually very similar, at least in terms of what they talk about in their State of the Union addresses. Same with George Bush and Bill Clinton. In fact, these last four presidents are all more alike each other than any other president since Truman, from a data science perspective.
Drilling down, though, there are differences, which help pinpoint the different presidential eras. Bill Clinton tended to talk more about families and family values than other presidents. Not so shockingly, George W. Bush mentioned terrorism far more than any other president. Carter was big on talking about energy. Every candidate since Carter has talked about jobs during the State of the Union, but no one has beat the drum harder about them than Obama. Surprisingly? Ronald Reagan didn't talk about jobs all too much, despite being Mr. Free Market Economy President himself.
So what can we expect the State of the Union to look like in 2017? Civis Analytics doesn't provide any predictions, but I think we can all assume that if either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders is elected, the similarity matrix of the State of the Union is likely to shift pretty dramatically. Cruz, Rubio, or Hilary? Probably not so much. Read Civis's full data study here.
While studying together at the Bartlett School of Architecture, masters students Francesca Camilleri, Nadia Doukhi, Alvaro Lopez Rodriguez and Roman Strukov all agreed that 3-D printing was the future of their chosen trade. But as 3-D printers are being used in architecture today, that future looked pretty stagnant: instead of using them create entirely new types of architecture in situ, 3-D printers were being used to craft nothing more than glorified bricks, a dollop at a time.
So the quartet formed Amalgamma, a team devoted to pushing the boundaries of 3-D printed architecture. As part of their first project, called Fossilized, they have come with a technique which uses robot arms to 3-D print large-scale concrete structures that borrow the structure of the Earth's tectonic plates, resulting in meticulously detailed and shockingly ornamental designs.
According to Amalgamma, the biggest barrier to entry when it comes to using 3-D printing in architecture is the size of the 3-D printer itself. If you want to print an entire building at once, you'd need a 3-D printer that is larger than the proposed structure. Needless to say, that's a big ask, so the designers of most so-called 3-D printed buildings take a modular approach, producing smaller pieces of the proposed building and then putting them together like Lego on-site.
Team Amalgamma thinks this is boring, arguing that many current examples of architectural-scale 3-D printing are "extremely revolutionary and advanced from a tech standpoint," but little more than "stagnant construction assemblies" in reality.
To move beyond the confines of conventional architecture that just happens to be made in a printer bed, the group used a computer-controlled robot arm to print out designs in layers—which allows structures to be much bigger than anything that could fit in, say, a MakerBot printer. It's not a wholly unique approach; this is the same idea that Dutch designer Joris Laarman is pursuing to 3-D print a steel bridge in Amsterdam.
But Amalgamma wanted to do more than print out structures that were bigger than conventional 3-D printed objects. The team wanted to create an entirely new aesthetic that extended directly from the way it was produced. Using the robot arm, the designers extruded 2-D layers of concrete over and over again over a period of six to ten hours. Unlike most 3-D printers, which only end up producing glorified blocks, Amalgamma's technique made each layer of concrete a little different, a little squigglier than the last, resulting in structures that look like they were assembled from tectonic cross-sections. These stylized pieces resemble fragments snapped off of an underground stalactite cathedral—dazzlingly ornate and stylized, and definitely unlike anything conventional building techniques could produce.
So far, the designers have printed out a column, table, and vase using this technique. Given a big enough robot arm, though, they could create even bigger structures: in the video above, the team previews a wriggling spaceship of a building that looks like something straight out of H.R. Giger's set designs for Alien. But first, the team plans to experiment with making 3-D printed windows out of translucent concrete—yup, there is such a thing!
The ultimate goal is to challenge other architects to think beyond the brick, and get back to the fundamental question that makes 3-D printing so exciting: if you could 3-D print any shape or object imaginable, what would you make?
The pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's classic novella, The Little Prince, contain a magnificent drawing of a floating moon, overgrown by baobab trees. That image—or maybe the floating plant islands in James Cameron's Avatar—is what comes to mind when I look at the Air Bonsai, a hovering mini moon with a bonsai tree growing out of it. But the Air Bonsai isn't fantasy or science-fiction: it's on Kickstarter.
Invented by Hoshinchu, a small company out of Kyushu, Japan, the Air Bonsai comes in two parts. There's the "little star," an orb made out of a piece of sponge just 2.3-inches in diameter, and the "energy base," a white porcelain pedestal over which the little star floats and slowly rotates at a height of about an inch. By transplanting your favorite bonsai, flower, or houseplant onto the sponge, you can make it the sole inhabitant of its own tiny, semi-contained world.
Although it looks like a Hollywood special effect, there's nothing too technologically breathtaking about how the Air Bonsai achieves its anti-gravity effect. Ever struggled trying to push two magnets together? The same basic idea is at work here. It's called magnetic levitation, and it's the way everything from Bluetooth speakers to Japan's maglev trains work. The magnet analogy is a little simplistic—magnetic levitation requires electricity and constant fine tuning to prevent the magnets from drifting out of alignment—but it's easy to understand science, not magic. Just keep in mind if you pull the cord out of the base, your little bonsai planet's going to go rolling across the floor.
Just because the technology driving the Air Bonsai is commonplace doesn't mean it isn't breathtaking, though, as proven by the fact that this hovering little plant kit has already blown through its original crowdfunding goal of $80,000 with 35 days still left to go. Those who wish to purchase an Air Bonsai for themselves can pay $200 for a basic set. Just remember: although the Air Bonsai looks awesome in close-ups, it's actually a lot smaller than it looks. Set your expectations accordingly.
Doctors might get even better at detecting tumors in breast cancer patients early, thanks to pressure-sensitive rubber gloves that supercharge their sense of touch. But the sensors that power those gloves could be useful in all kinds of non-medical scenarios, too.
Getting a regular exam from your doctor is still one of the most effective ways of catching the signs of breast cancer early, but it's easy to miss the telltale hardness of a tumor when a rubber surgical glove is involved. That's why a team of researchers led by Dr. Sungwon Lee and Professor Takao Someya of the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Engineering has developed a new type of pressure sensor which is thin and resilient enough to fit into a glove.
Pressure sensors flexible enough to mold themselves to the contours of a human hand have been available for awhile now, but they can't handle bending, twisting, or wrinkling while still giving accurate measurements. Using organic transistors made of carbon nanontubes, graphene, carbon, and oxygen, the University of Tokyo team was able to address this problem, creating a transparent sensor just 8 micrometers thick—one-fifth the thickness of a human hair—that can measure pressure in 144 places at once. In conjunction with the right software, these sensors could be used in standard surgical gloves to help doctors detect tumors by touch alone.
But according to the team, this same technology has just as much potential for implantable and wearable devices. Sadly, they didn't go as far as to name them, but it's easy to imagine the possibilities. Just a few uses that come to mind include a smart tattoo that could also function as a touchpad, touch sensitive clothing that can go through the wash, or pressure-sensing VR gloves as thin as the ones you use to do the dishes that can detect how you're moving your fingers. Saving lives might be just the start for this technology.
The full paper on the University of Tokyo's transparent, bend-proof pressure sensor can be found here.
You've probably never heard of Chris Costello, but there's a good chance you hate him. Outside of Comic Sans creator Vincent Connare, Costello is perhaps the most vilified man in all font design. Costello, you see, is the father of Papyrus, a calligraphic typeface he first created in 1982.
Sometimes called "the other most hated font in the world", Papyrus is the typeface that font comedians move onto when their Comic Sans jokebook gets a little dog-eared. Like Connare's font, Papyrus is famous for being misused, especially on things like signs, business cards, and letterheads. Multiplewebsitesexist just to ridicule it. It has become a punchline on television shows and featured in video games like the 2015 indie RPG, Undertale (which stars an eponymous skeleton who only speaks in Papyrus word balloons).
So what does Costello think of having designed the "other most hated font" in the world? "There have definitely been days I wish I never sold the rights," he laughs, acknowledging the font definitely has its share of critics. He says he never dreamed Papyrus would end up installed on over a billion computers around the world. If he did, he probably would have asked for more than the equivalent of $2,500 today for it.
Born in Kingston, New York, in the 1960s, the son of a professional sign painter, Costello was connected to both computers and lettering at an early age. "My father painted signs for IBM," he says. "Starting in elementary school, he'd get me to help him paint his signs, or illustrate brochures. That was what started my interest in typography and fonts."
When Costello left high school, he moved onto the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, where he majored in advertising and design. After graduating, he was hired for an entry-level staff illustrator position at an ad agency. It was here, at the tender age of 23, that Costello designed Papyrus almost by accident.
The original doodles that became Papyrus.
"There was a lot of downtime at this agency between projects," Costello remembers. "So I did a lot of playing around, illustrating and lettering things, just doing my own work."
One day in 1983, Costello was doodling with a calligraphy pen on a pile of parchment paper, when he dashed off some spindly capital letters with rough edges and high horizontal strokes. According to Costello, he was inspired in his doodling by his own personal search for peace with God. "I was thinking a lot about the Middle East, then, and Biblical Times, so I was drawing a lot of ligatures and letters with hairline arrangements," he says.
Something about the characters he had drawn spoke to him, so over the period of a few days, he worked on the letters, until he'd come up with an entire Roman alphabet in all caps. Costello was pleased enough with the finished design, which he christened Papyrus, to see if it could be turned into a font: his very first typeface.
So he sent it out to some of the big and small names in type distribution at the time. "Everyone rejected it," he laughs. Except for one company: a small British company called Letraset that may have originated Lorum Ipsum text.
Founded in 1959, Letraset sold vinyl sheets covered in lettering which could be transferred to art just by rubbing. If you were a kid during the '70s and 1980s, in fact, you might already be familiar with Letraset's action transfer system: you could buy a cheap action transfer set for Star Wars, Scooby-Doo, Marvel, and more, and transfer the colorful vinyl decals of your favorite characters on a pre-illustrated cardboard set. Letraset's typeface sheets were the same thing, except aimed at commercial artists and designers instead of kids. It was an easy way to mockup typography in the days before desktop publishing.
Vintage vinyl transfer lettering sheets featuring Papyrus.
To make Papyrus work with their system, Letraset asked Costello to make some changes. They wanted the characters thicker, and also lower-case versions of all the letters, to make it more marketable. For the next year, Costello worked in his spare time, creating large blow-ups of his Papyrus letters as 4-inch-tall characters. And when everything was said and done, Costello signed away all the rights to Papyrus, in exchange for a check for 750 pounds: the equivalent of about $2,500 today.
"At the time, I was 23 years old, and I was excited. I felt like I'd just signed a record deal, " Costello says. "Knowing what I know now, of course, I would never have signed it, but it seemed like good money at the time."
Although it first appeared in Letraset's catalog in 1984, Papyrus wasn't an immediate success. In fact, for almost 15 years, the whole world pretty much ignored Papyrus. Costello moved on, designing other calligraphic fonts like Blackstone and Mirage. He got married, had kids, and established a career as a graphic designer, doing lettering and other work for publishers like Simon & Schuster and Random House. Meanwhile, the rise of desktop publishing made Letraset's vinyl transfers increasingly obsolete, so the company began licensing its typefaces out as PostScript fonts for desktop publishing starting in the mid-1990s. Then, quite suddenly, it exploded. "I only realized Papyrus had somehow gotten big when it started getting haters," Costello says. But where did those haters come from?
Letraset's catalog, promoting Papyrus in 1984.
As with Comic Sans, Papyrus owes its popularity to Microsoft. Both typefaces came as pre-installed on Microsoft Office starting with Office '97. It was originally licensed by Microsoft in the mid-'90s by late type director Robert Norton, who chose it to extend the design breadth of Microsoft's desktop publishing software, Publisher. According to Microsoft spokeswoman Ronnie Martin (who emailed me in Papyrus), Papyrus gets installed with any version of Office that includes Publisher to this day—which therefore includes most installations of Office.
That means that, as of 2012, Papyrus is on the machines of at least a billion people. And that's just on the Windows side: Papyrus has also been a default system font on OS X since 2003, which puts it on at least 120 million Macs, and probably more.
Today, at least one in seven people on the planet has access to Papyrus on his or her computer, a fact that boggles Costello's mind. "When I originally designed it, I imagined this very narrow context for its use," he says. "These days, though, everyone uses it for everything," from the logos of heavy metal bands to the flyer for your local church's bake sale. Costello says he thinks it appeals to people who like an artsy and vaguely earthy aesthetic. Sometimes, they use it appropriately: for example, Papyrus works just fine for yoga studios, stores selling craft arts, New Age stores, and in Christian contexts. But just as often as not, people use Papyrus in comically unsuitable ways. "I never intended Papyrus to be used for mortgage companies and construction logos," Costello says.
Today, Costello lives outside of Boston with his wife and two daughters. Although Papyrus is his most famous creation, some of his lesser known designs touch millions of people daily too: as an AIP Artist with the United States Mint, there's a good chance you've got a quarter he designed jangling around in your pocket. He has also designed at least one congressional medal, countless book covers, and four other typefaces less well known than Papyrus—each of which has made Costello more money than the $2,500 inflation-adjusted dollars he made from creating one of the world's most overexposed fonts.
So how much is Papyrus worth? "I couldn't even estimate," Costello says. Neither could (or would) Monotype, the current owner of Papyrus, which refused to give any figures on Papyrus for this story. But if Costello had earned just 1/10th of a penny in royalties for every copy of Papyrus shipped on Microsoft Office over the last two decades, he would be a millionaire. It's distinctly possible that Costello lost out on a million bucks to become the designer of one of the world's most despised fonts.
Not that Costello thinks of it that way. "I'm not embarrassed," he says. Because the thing about being the designer of one of the world's most overused fonts is that there's just as many people out there who love it as hate it. Otherwise, it wouldn't be overused. So Papyrus may never have made Costello a lot of money, but whether revulsion or adoration, it has generated passion in the hearts of millions of people around the globe: something arguably harder to earn in the design world than mere money. And it's not like Costello didn't get anything out of Papyrus. "Telling people I created Papyrus is always a good topic for humorous conversation," he says. "It always gets a laugh." How can you put a price on that?
