When you travel a lot for work, you need a good hard shell suitcase more than you need a big apartment. The only problem? Storing that suitcase when you're at home, a challenge in today's ever shrinking microapartments. The Néit is a hard shell suitcase that aims to solve that problem—by collapsing down flat as an ironing board when it's empty.

Now on Kickstarter, the Néit aims first and foremost to be a good piece of executive luggage. It comes in two sizes, for checked baggage and cabin respectively. Each suitcase is made from an aluminum frame and features a lightweight, durable polycarbonate shell to protect what's inside. It also features four 360-degree wheels, which can be removed or rolled up into the base. And since all luggage these days needs to be smart, the Néit is also GPS-enabled, so you can track it down when your airline invariably loses it through a slick smartphone app that also doubles as a trip planner.

There's tons of suitcases like that, though. What makes the Néit unique is that the entire frame is designed so that it can collapse down to just 30% of its full volume, allowing you to hang the empty suitcase on a door, slide it under your bed, or fit it into a handy crevice. Basically, if you have enough horizontal space for an ironing board, you have enough space for a Néit.

According to Néit founder Christian Cook, he was inspired by his team's own needs. Having previously designed an iPhone case called the Néit Card Case, Cook and his colleagues were often bouncing between manufacturers in Southeast Asia and their own tiny apartments.

"We consider ourselves to be global citizens who travel regularly. Upon arriving home from one particular adventure in South-East Asia, we realized how frustrating it was that our luggage took up so much of our precious and otherwise useable space in our apartments," he says. "The more we thought about it, the more we started to recognize that it wasn't just luggage that hasn't been adapted to modern day city-living. The Neit concept was born!"

Collapsible luggage isn't anything new, of course. Your standard duffle bag is collapsible, technically. But most collapsible luggage makes a trade-off on design: collapsibility versus protection. What interests us about Néit is they're avoiding that trade-off all together.

Currently on pre-order, the Néit is available for about $219 for a cabin bag, and $279 for a checked case, with delivery estimated by December, 2016.

The Font Brothers may be bros, but they definitely aren't Font Bronies. The Minneapolis-based type foundry is suing Hasbro for unauthorized usage of one of its typefaces in the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic materials.

The font in question is Generation B, which the Font Brothers call "a playful and offbeat" typeface inspired by the opening titles of The Parent Trap (the 1961 Hayley Mills version, not the inferior Lindsay Lohan remake). It's used not only for Hasbro's official My Little Pony website, but in toy packaging, merchandise, videos, and more.

"Defendant Hasbro has used or instructed others to use unauthorized copies of the Generation B Font in the creation of, but not limited to, all products, goods, merchandise, television and film properties, and advertising materials connected with the 'My Little Pony' product line..," the Font Brothers' claim reads. Concrete examples of the unauthorized use can be found here.

According to the Font Brothers, they were in touch with Hasbro about the unauthorized usage of Generation B before filing a lawsuit, but the My Little Pony makers refused to license the font for commercial use. They are now seeking $150,000 per infringement. Although Font Brothers say that "at present, the amount of such damages, gains, profits, and advantages cannot be fully ascertained," the use of Generation B across Hasbro's My Little Pony appears to be ubiquitous.

Lawsuits over unauthorized commercial use of typefaces are common. From 2009 to 2012, NBCUniversal was sued three separate times over unauthorized font usage. Other companies and entities that have gotten in trouble over the years for pirating fonts include Microsoft, Rick Santorum, TBS, Mixpanel, and even frickin'Harry Potter. Most of these lawsuits end in settlements.

Generally speaking, there are no conspiracies involved in how respectable companies end up misusing fonts. Oftentimes, the issue is as simple as a lapse in due diligence when a designer uses a font for professional work that he or she only has license to use individually. Still, when you're talking about a franchise as big as My Little Pony, the alleged infringement seems uncharacteristically brazen. Come on, Hasbro. What would Twilight Sparkle say about font theft?

We have reached out to Hasbro and Font Brothers for comment. We will update this story when they respond.

[via Torrentfreak]

For those of us who can't, the ability to code well enough to create entire virtual worlds almost feels god-like. In Loop, a new virtual-reality project by Stefan Wagner, anyone can become a coding guru, just by reaching out into the virtual world and changing its parameters—anything from the number of geese flying overhead, to how reflective a surface is, to even how the branches on a tree grow.

Inspired by the planet factory scene in the 2005 film adaptation of Douglas Adams'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Loop takes place in a massive virtual world which the player explores by walking on a treadmill while wearing an Oculus Rift. The player walks along a transparent path through space, above clouds and mountains, encountering scenes both natural and surreal. By reaching out and "grabbing" aspects of Loop's gameworld (a natural-feeling feat, accomplished with the aid of Leap Motion), a Matrix-style coding interface pops up, allowing the player to adjust its parameters as easily as dragging a finger.

Wagner is an interaction and motion designer living in Würzburg, Germany, who was inspired to create Loop after becoming intrigued by the way virtual reality could be used to make programming seem more tangible to non-coders. "I liked the idea that you can use something as tangible as hand gestures in order to manipulate something as abstract as source code," he says. "I like to experiment with media and technology in order to find new ways of making complex 'things' accessible to people, give them an understanding about topics hard to grasp or insights they normally might not have."

Right now, Wagner isn't sure if he will release Loop to the public. It was designed more as interactive exhibition piece, although he says that if he gets enough feedback, he might make the game available for Oculus Rift users to download. As for what he's trying to accomplish, he wants more people to understand how the digital media they consume is created. It's amazing, he says, how "easily virtual worlds and digital imagery can be manipulated and changed by... a line of code or even only one digit." And you don't need to be a coding god to do so.

[via The Creators Project]

The European Union has a refugee crisis on its hands. As upwards of half a million displaced Syrians flee to Europe to escape the horrors of war, they often find themselves sleeping in the open, with neither clothing nor shelter to shield them from the elements.

Can students help? In consultation with Médecins Sans Frontières, a group of graduates from the Royal College of Art in London has designed a coat for refugees that can transform into a sleeping bag or tent, as needed.

Called the Syrian Refugee Wearable Shelter, the coat is made out of Tyvek, the same material used on construction sites to protect workers from the elements. The inner lining of the coat, meanwhile, is mylar, a polyester-film that is commonly used as an insulating material, especially in sock and glove liners. These materials make the Syrian Refugee Wearable Shelter affordable enough to mass produce and distribute freely to refugees, the students say.

Folded as a coat, the Wearable Shelter operates like a parka, complete with a hood and interior pockets which can store papers, passports, money, and other documents. Unzip the coat, and it can be used as either a sleeping bag, or a tent through the use of accompanying kite rods. As a sleeping bag, the Wearable Shelter is big enough for a parent and his or her child to cuddle up in; as a tent, it's roomy enough to sleep four.

According to Harriet Harriss, a senior tutor in interior design and architecture at RCA who oversaw the project, the Wearable Shelter was designed to have a "likable aesthetic.""It's not a fashion garment by any stretch of the imagination, but why should we expect refugees to wear garments that don't have even a basic intrinsic appeal?" she says. "To design something without some sense of 'designerly' thoughtfulness would only exacerbate the dehumanizing conditions they are already enduring. To design well—for the wearable to have character—is to show the refugees that we care."

Right now, Harriss and the rest of her team are working on getting the first 1,000 wearable shelters to interested charities in time for summer. They have also taking donations from a rather bare-bones Kickstarter, where they are trying to raise over $400,000 to get shelters in the hands of every refugee who needs one.

Problem: many autistic kids are super sensitive to the sight, sound, and feel of their environment. So when New York-Presbyterian decided to build an early intervention center for autistic children, they needed it designed with their needs in mind.

One in 68 American children have been diagnosed with autism, according to the Center for Disease Control. Early intervention is the most effective treatment, requiring dedicated centers, but autistic children's hypersensitivity to their surroundings makes designing such facilities difficult.

To design the new Center of Autism and the Developing Brain (CADB), an outpatient early intervention center for autistic children as young as eighteen months, New York-Presbyterian turned to their long-time design partners at DaSilva Architects. Although DaSilva had never designed for autistic children before, principal Jacques Black tells me they worked to convert a ramshackle gymnasium into a comfortable environment for autistic kids. How? By paying close attention to texture, acoustics, and lighting conditions—lessons just as applicable to the rest of the world when it comes to designing autism-friendly spaces.

A Disney-Like Space To Explore

From the beginning, the space chosen for CADB by New York-Presbyterian provided unique challenges. First built in 1924, the Rogers Gymnasium "looked like an old high school gym," says Black, replete with yellow brick walls, cages over the windows, and a tendency to cavernously echo. It was kind of scary. "This was the environment where we were supposed to be building a facility for kids who are ultra-sensitive to their environments," he says. "It was a conundrum."

With the help of CADB's new director Cathy Lord, DaSilva's solution was to turn the entire inside of the gym into a colorful village. Self-contained treatment rooms, offices, and other enclosed space exist as bright little huts, houses, and pavilions, positioned among open streets, paths, and other central gathering spaces. There's an artificial sky and clouds, and the inside of the center also contains its own parks, benches, and even gardens.

Given the sensitivity many children feel to their surroundings, these kinds of familiar design elements were essential. The endless institutional hallways of many hospitals and clinics, stretching down a corridor of indistinguishable doors, can spark confusion and even terror in young patients, according to DaSilva's background research. Comparatively, CADB feels almost like a "Disney village," says Black—a smaller, more manageable version of a city with familiar details like street and parks—creating an environment where kids feel comfortable.

Keeping It Quiet

For many autistic people, acoustics can be problematic. For example, the seemingly normal hum of fluorescent lights can be extremely agitating. Same with the sound of air-conditioning or heating. Even the sound of footsteps, kids playing, or a garbage truck passing by can be distracting to some CADB patients.

To keep the center quiet, DaSilva Architects employed a number of tricks. Treatment rooms were designed to be as soundproof as possible, with absorptive carpeting to dampen clamor and sound-dampening panels on the walls. In areas where the floor couldn't be carpeted, like in areas near sinks, DaSilva used soft rubber flooring to achieve a similar effect. As for public areas, the architects specified cork flooring to deaden the sound of people walking across the floor. Black and his team even moved all of the building's air conditioners, boilers, and ventilation into a hut connected to the main building—totally eliminating their ambient sounds.

Light Like A Living Room, Not An Office

Lighting is an important consideration in any space, but for CADB's patients, it was even more critical. For some people with autism, light is a Goldilocks problem: it can't be too warm, too cold, too bright, too dim, too harsh, too artificial, or even too natural. It needs to be just right.

For CADB, DaSilva Architects made the choice to light the space with a mixture of natural and artificial sources. For the natural lighting, the former gymnasium's huge windows became an asset. "A lot of literature about autism warns against having too much natural light," Black says, but that's mostly because big ground-level windows provide plenty of distractions. The Rogers Gymnasium's windows, however, were located six feet off the ground, giving children a gentle feeling of the outdoors, without actually exposing what's happening outside.

For artificial lighting, DaSilva Architects opted against the total use of overhead lights like those you find in many office, selecting a diverse mixture of sources instead. True, there are still some overhead lights, but there's also substantial use of side lighting from a variety of sources. All of these lamps can be dimmed in case a patient reacts strongly against them. The result is a center that's lit more like a living room than an institution.

Texture Is Important

"Just like they're hyper-sensitive to sound, noise, and light, many autistic children are hyper-sensitive to the feel of physical objects, and physical input" Black says. That can be both good and bad. One child might be attracted to shiny, slippery surfaces, while another might find a slightly abrasive surface unbearable to touch.

There's no sweet spot between these two extremes, but Black says that favoring natural textiles and materials can help strike a happy medium, which is why the CADB uses materials like cork, rubber, porcelain, and wool. Another good rule of thumb is to gravitate toward materials that feel good to non-autistic people, too. Most people would rather touch a wooden surface than a metal one, or walk on a flat woven carpet than linoleum, and that's usually true of kids on the autism spectrum too.

"There's a joke that if you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person," Black says. "Each autistic person is very different: it's a whole spectrum of different conditions." That can make designing for those with autism challenging, but as the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain's new facility shows, not impossible. The trick is to be sensitive to stimulus and sensation—because the people you're designing for will be even more so.

As the 2016 presidential campaigns heat up, the country feels divided, and it turns out that's because it is—by the Girl Scouts and their annual Girl Scouts Cookie Sales. Forget about red versus blue: the true delineation is yellow versus purple, at least according to this infographic by the Los Angeles Times, which reveals that half the country doesn't get the same Girl Scout Cookies as the other half—even if those cookies have the same name.

Although a love of Girl Scout Cookies may seem ubiquitous, the cookies can be very different from state to state—or even county to county. That's because half the Girl Scout Cookies in the country are baked by ABC Bakers, located in Richmond, Virginia. The other baker is located in Louisville, Kentucky. It's called Little Brownie Bakers. These are the two baking syndicates that have cut America in twain with their thin-minted goodness.

Now, both bakers are contracted by the Girl Scouts to make up to eight varieties of cookies for local troops. Three are contractually obligated: a mint cookie (Thin Mints), a peanut butter sandwich cookie (Peanut Butter Sandwich, or Do-Si-Dos), and a shortbread cookie (Shortbread, or Trefoils). Due to popularity, both bakeries offer three other varieties of similar cookies: Caramel deLites or Samoas, Lemonade or Savannah Smiles, and Peanut Butter Patties, or Tagalongs.

Depending on where you live, the Girl Scout Cookies you get are very different. Some of the differences are broadcast by the different names of each genre of cookies: a Samoa is more caramel-y, coconut-y, and chocolatey than a Caramel deLite, for example. But even where the cookie name is the same, there are vast regional differences. A Thin Mint bought in Boston, for example, will be crunchier and more minty than one bought in New York.

If you're wondering how your Girl Scout Cookies differ from their Girl Scout Cookies, you can see more here. Oh, and if this all seems confusing? Prepare to have your mind blown: There's a third variety of Girl Scout Cookies—the kind sold year round by the Keebler elves.

Thanks to U.K. design firm Hato, the annual Pick Me Up graphic arts festival has some innovative new branding: a crowdsourced font, created through an online tool that lets anyone design and submit a letterform.

The tool, which can be found at Pick Me Up's official website, asks users to submit their name, then design a letter based on their first initial. The overall shape of the letter is taken from a sans serif glyph, and users can specify its length, density, and width, as well as dragging its shape to create different angles. After the letter is submitted, it joins an online gallery, which Pick Me Up will use to select various parts of its brand identity.

This year's Pick Me Up Festival is happening at Somerset House in London, and will address the theme of Utopia, celebrating the 500th anniversary of Thomas More's novel introducing the term to the English language. Hato's letter design tool imagines a way of creating typefaces that is purely democratic, and where anyone can contribute.

The truth is that while any type of design can be crowdsourced, the results usually suck. What makes Pick Me Up's effort more successful is that the crowd is made up entirely of either graphic designers, or graphic design enthusiasts. And the crowd's contribution is only part of the branding—not a replacement for the work of professional designers.

"The potential audience here was a huge part of the brief," says Ken Kirton, creative director at Hato. "We wanted to reach people who loved graphic art and design, but weren't artists or designers themselves. So we created this tool to be an entry point of font design." The earlier iterations were more technical, allowing users to create letters from scratch, but eventually, Hato opted for a more streamlined approach, where letters could be designed by anyone of any skill level.

So what will be done with the finished letters? Hato says that they'll be used in the Pick Me Up festival's branding materials, as well as in a digital online exhibition. And since the finished letterforms are mostly dictated by length, density, and width, Hato might even be able to make a font out of the finished glyphs, including bold, italic, and headline versions of all the letters.

To design your own letter, check out the tool here.

Terrestrially, the Golden Age of Travel may be long behind us (if it ever really existed to begin with). But when it comes to space, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab thinks the golden age of travel still lays before us. Which is why the lab has released three retro-tastic travel posters for outer space commissioned by Seattle graphic design firm Invisible Creature as an early view of the JPL's 2016 Visions of the Future calendar.

Founded over 10 years ago by brothers Don and Ryan Clark, Invisible Creature has done branding and packaging work for the Foo Fighters, Alice in Chains, Kendrick Lamar, and more. Despite their music cred, space is in the Clark brothers' blood: their grandfather was an illustrator at the Ames Research Center and, for over 30 years, helped NASA imagine what the future was going to look like. After being contacted by the Jet Propulsion Lab, the Clarks tried to channel their grandfather's spirit into a series of posters about Mars, the Saturn moon Enceladus, and the Solar System's gas giants. "We've come full circle, and that's a really cool thing," Don Clark says.

The first poster, inspired by '60s sci-fi paperback covers, is called The Grand Voyage, and celebrates the alignment of the Solar System's gas giants once every 175 years. This alignment was what NASA's Voyager program used to send two robotic probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, on a path to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all on the same trip. In Invisible Creature's poster, the Grand Voyage is a bicentennial festival, an interplanetary pilgrimage of the Solar System's gas giants that only comes around once every five generations.

The second poster celebrates Mars, and has something of the feel of a Woodstock-era Psych-Outposter, mixed with WPA-style elements that nod to farming and, perhaps, terraforming on the Red Planet. "For that one, we were trying to imagine what Mars would look like as a historic travel destination hundreds of years from now," Clark said. In other words, what would a travel poster for Mars look like when it was the Solar System's equivalent of Philadelphia: a history-steeped extraterrestrial locale where we sent our first rovers, first discovered water, first terraformed, and first settled.

The last poster is devoted to Saturn's icy moon, Enceladus, which is known among astronomy dorks for its ammonia and methane-spewing cryovolcanoes. In Invisible Creature's future, these ice volcanoes will be known as "Cold Faithful," and be visited by tourists in much the same manner as National Parks like Yosemite are today. There's a little story hinted at in this poster too. "My brother Ryan illustrated this one," says Don, "and he imagined this old NASA engineer at the end of his career, actually visiting Enceladus in a spaceship he invented." But it could just as well be the silhouette of their grandfather at the end of his NASA career as an illustrator.

If you would like to purchase a print of one of these futuristic space travel posters, they can be ordered online directly from Invisible Creature's web shop.

Go to your local fair and watch a carny spin you a cone of candy floss. You might not know it, but that's how your body is put together: the structure of cotton candy is remarkably similar to the fibrous tissue that knits together our organs and our bones. Now, a team of researchers are showing how a souped-up cotton candy machine could be the key to 3-D printing artificial organs on demand.

In a new article published in the Advanced Healthcare Materials journal, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University named Leon Bellan reports that he was able to create a gelatinous cube of artificial capillaries with a modified cotton candy machine. Not only was the cube of microfluidic channels alive, but he was able to keep it from dying for more than a week, significantly longer than most alternate methods. The technique could open the door to being able to 3-D print working artificial organs.

"Some people in the field think this approach is a little crazy," Bellan told Vanderbilt News. "But now we've shown we can use this simple technique to make microfluidic networks that mimic the three-dimensional capillary system in the human body in a cell-friendly fashion. Generally, it's not that difficult to make two-dimensional networks, but adding the third dimension is much harder; with this approach, we can make our system as three-dimensional as we like."

So why does this work? Essentially, cotton candy machines melt down sugar, squeezing them out through tiny holes in a spinning centrifuge, where they re-solidify in strands. You can think of these strands as capillaries, which are used by our bodies to distribute nutrients through our bones and organs. Scientists have tried to make such capillaries using a technique called electrospinning, but it's slow, inefficient, and low-resolution: the average capillary is about 10 microns wide, while electrospinning results in capillaries 10 times too big. Bellan's technique shrinks artificial capillaries down to three microns at their finest resolution.

"The analogies everyone uses to describe electrospun fibers are that they look like silly string, or Cheese Whiz, or cotton candy," said Bellan. "So I decided to give the cotton candy machine a try. I went to Target and bought a cotton candy machine for about $40. It turned out that it formed threads that were about one tenth the diameter of a human hair—roughly the same size as capillaries—so they could be used to make channel structures in other materials."

More work is still needed before Bellan's technique is ready for prime time, although his stated goal is to create a "basic toolbox" that will allow other researchers to create the "the artificial vasculature needed to sustain artificial livers, kidneys, bone, and other organs." But who knows? In the not too distant future, you might be more likely to see a cotton candy machine at an organ bank or a hospital than at a carnival or circus.

[via Vanderbilt News]

Back in the glory days of cyberpunk, people talked a lot about avatars: a person's representation in cyberspace. While an avatar today is just the small image attached to your Twitter account, the word used to mean something more: a dynamic, ever-mutating digital body that reflected all the data cyberspace knew about you.

This is the meaning of avatar that French digital art collective Normals is tapping into with the new iPhone app, Apparel. The idea is weird: an app that can generatively design a T-shirt for your online avatar to wear, based on Twitter data. And the results aren't exactly something you'd put on for a night out on the town. It's what fashion will look like when we all call it quits in meatspace and upload our brains to the cloud.

Apparel the app is a spin-off of Apparel the art project, Normals'previous attempt to create fashion that was "50% neoprene, 50% digital"— in other words, a garment that existed both physically and online at the same time. Here's how it works. When you download the app, Apparel asks to connect to your Twitter profile, at which point, it uses your data to algorithmically generate a 3-D mesh of what a T-shirt fitting your avatar would look like. The app has an augmented reality side too, so if you point your iPhone camera at Apparel's official website, it'll show you what your T-shirt would look like in the real world.

Not surprisingly, these shirts don't exactly translate to physical fashion super gracefully. Some of Apparel's T-shirts can look more like a bunch of animals shoved into a telepod together than viable designs, in fact. But as a sort of generative data viz about what you're putting out there online, Apparel is strangely captivating. It's fascinating watching how a few tweets can and can't change what your avatar is wearing.

Download Apparels from the iTunes App Store here.

All Images: via Normals

In my living room, I am wearing a Google Cardboard headset and drinking my coffee. But in virtual reality, I'm on the back of a giant fish, flying through a smoldering apocalypse and surrounded by the sound of weeping, while great behemoths made of human ears scissor blades at me, and pigs dressed like nuns caress the damned.

I am taking this first-person tour of heaven and hell thanks to Bosch VR, a new app for Cardboard that allows you to explore the famous surrealist triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. And while no one could possibly argue that this is the way Hieronymus Bosch's masterpiece was meant to be explored, it's certainly twisted enough that you can't help but feel the Dutch master would have grudgingly approved.

Painted in oil on oak somewhere around the turn of the 16th century, The Garden of Earthly Delights is an exploration of vice and its consequences. The left panel of the triptych depicts the Garden of Eden as God first introduces Adam to Eve; the larger central panel is a more symbolic representation of contemporaneous temptations, showing a garden teeming with lurid nudes cavorting with fantastic figures; while the nightmarish final panel represents the great kingdom of hell, and the tortures that ultimately await those who succumb to the temptations of carnal sin. You may not like religious paintings, but there are few people who actively dislike Hieronymus Bosch; his lurid, horrible imagination has captivated art lovers for over five centuries.

Created by BAFTA Award-winning creative agency BDH to celebrate the 500th anniversary of one of the world's greatest paintings, Bosch VR takes each panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights and turns it into a separate virtual ride. Each tour takes place on the back of a giant flying fish, a clever little nod to Bosch's weird obsession with piscine-mounted aeronauts, such as the ones in the top right panel of Bosch's other great triptych, The Temptation of St. Anthony. Although each tour takes the same route, you can turn to focus on the bizarre, beautiful, and monstrous sights that surround you by simply moving your head.

Bosch VR is free to download for both iOS and Google Play, although you'll need a Google Cardboard headset to experience it virtually. There's also a non-VR iPad version. The first panel of the triptych, Eden, is available for free; the other two can be unlocked through a $3.99 in-app purchase. An ingenious business model, really, considering the fact that the panel you're really here to see is the one for Hell.

If there's one complaint I'd make about Bosch VR, it's that while the app is stunning experientially, it's a bit of a disappointment educationally. Luckily, that's an oversight that is easily remedied by clicking here.

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." Those 10 simple words are branded into the mind of every Star Wars fan, and for good reason: they're perfect. They effortlessly convey what makes Star Wars as a franchise unique: its grandiose scope. While the official movies all take place within a sixty year period, the larger Star Wars universe spans untold epochs, at a truly galactic scale. The stories told in Star Wars are simple, but the universe itself, after 30 years of exploration by book, TV, comic, and video game writers? Mind-bogglingly intricate.

Assisted by Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, French data scientist and self-avowed Star Wars fan Kirell Benzi decided to try to visualize the complexity of Star Wars. For data, he used Wookiepedia, an unofficial wiki of the Star Wars expanded universe containing over 125,000 separate entries. He then cross-compiled them to highlight interesting statistics, as well as visualize them into charts.

Some key takeaways? Spread across Star Wars' vast corpus, the Expanded Universe contains 21,647 separate characters. These characters aren't all bit characters, though: 7,563 of them play an important role in the 35,000-year-long Star Wars saga. Because yes, at least as it's portrayed in games, comics, and books, Star Wars is a lot bigger a story than just the Skywalker clan. Sure, most Star Wars stories take place either during the Rebellion or the formation of the New Republic, but there's almost as many stories that take place thousands of years before Darth Vader, or after Luke Skywalker.

Star Wars is largely defined by the Force, so Benzi also explored how many Jedi and Sith there are in the universe. Jedi are most common—there are 1,367 of them, compared to 724 Sith. It's also defined by aliens, so it's a bit surprising that according to Benzi's research, 78% of all species in Star Wars are human, spread out over 640 communities and 294 planets. Using graph theory, he was even able to chart the most connected characters in Star Wars, and found that Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader was the person any other character in Star Wars was most likely to know. Not so surprising, I guess, when you consider he ended up killing half of them.

Benzi's visualizations of all this data can look chaotic at first glance. But if you think of each datapoint as a star or planet, they become nebula that afford us the best look we've ever been given of what George Lucas's galaxy far, far away would actually look like—if we could only see it first hand.

[via io9]

Quartz, the so-called future of news apps, is typing. And typing. And typing.

Like a hyperventilating tweenager venting through an interminable iMessage screed, Quartz is sending me a flurry of one sentence messages, emoji, and animated GIFs, desperately trying to engage me in a conversation about Twitter's earnings report, or the global diamond industry, or Kanye West's new album. And I do not care. I do not care. I do not care. Because I am a grown-up with a job, and the future of news apps seems to be for young people with nothing to do but answers texts. All. Day. Long.

Yesterday, Quartz—the digital-only business publication with a penchant for bold, progressive design moves—unveiled its first news app, also called Quartz. It's a news-talking chatbot wrapped up in a mock iMessage window within the app, an experiment in using a conversational UI to deliver news updates.

Here's how it works: Quartz sends you messages about new stories throughout the day that look a lot like text messages; you engage with them, or don't engage, by replying with pre-canned texts and emoji within the app. There are bells and whistles you can opt in and out of, like a end-of-day haiku at the closing bell, and you can toggle the frequency of alerts the app sends you. The idea, Quartz says, is to "put aside existing notions about news apps" and imagine what journalism would look like if it lived natively on your iPhone.

So what does iPhone-native journalism look like? Imagine if someone doused Brian Williams in a vat of stem cell goo, de-aging him to a teenager. Let's call him BrianQZ, the Jean Ralphio of news. He then somehow gets your number, and keeps sending you cold-open texts throughout the day. "This is what a Donald Trump presidency would look like," he says, squirting a close-up of the fluorescently-coiffed GOP front runner into your chat window. You select the pre-determined response, "Anything else?," but he doesn't pick up on the undercurrent of your text. Instead, he tries again. "Forget stocks and bonds—buy Kanye West sneakers instead!"

And on, and on. BrianQZ is always typing. Always pestering. Always prodding. Is this what it's like when women give their number to the wrong dude? Because oh my god, that's how Quartz's news app makes me feel. It feels creepy. How creepy? Let me put it this way. Ever gotten a message from someone, started typing a response, thought better of it, then deleted it, only to get an accusatory "I know you read that. I saw you typing" message a few minutes later? Quartz even has its own version of that. Anytime you open the app, a message immediately pops up. "Great to see you back." Aieeee! How are you even seeing me? Please don't peel off my face, Quartz!

At this point, I feel I need to make it clear that as a brand, I love Quartz. And I do admire the chutzpah of this news app. It's a unique experiment that tries to establish a whole new paradigm of what getting your news on a mobile device should look like. Quartz is hardly the only publication trying to figure out how to deliver the news to mobile readers. For example, there's NYT Now, Yahoo News Digest, and even Apple News. All of these apps are trying to solve similar problems, calibrating how frequently their users want updates—and in what form.

BrianQZ is an attempt to solve the problems of an emerging genre of UX known as "conversational interfaces," where designers adopt the metaphor of a text message or Gchat conversation to communicate with a user. In this case, it feels like a rare misstep for Quartz; the affordance of the text message is more a liability than an asset. It's slow, it's annoying, and it feels creepy compared to those other, more traditional apps.

But there's a generational divide at play here, too.

Recently, I read this great piece by BuzzFeed's Ben Rosen, in which he interviewed his 13-year-old niece about Snapchat. Here's a quote that really stuck with me:

ME: How often are you on Snapchat?

BROOKE: On a day without school? There's not a time when I'm not on it. I do it while I watch Netflix, I do it at dinner, and I do it when people around me are being awkward. That app is my life.

Not is it just Snapchat: Brooke then goes onto say she has 700 unanswered text messages from the last 24 hours alone.

It seems this is what Quartz and other companies exploring chatbots and conversational interfaces are trying to tap into: the idea of an app that a user would describe with the words "there's not a time when I'm not on it." But for me, a 36-year-old grown-up with a wife, a mortgage, a full-time job, and a relatively sturdy attention span, I just marvel at the Quartz app's inefficiency. While it is possible to limit the app's notifications, efficiency is where the app's core problem emerges. If you're actually serious about reading news (as I am, and I'm guessing you are), waiting for Quartz to squirt a story at you one fake text message at a time feels preposterously slow compared to scrolling and swiping. It's a total imposition of your time.

Quartz's news app may be a bold experiment in conversational interfaces, but it's one designed for people who think that the most exciting thing in the world is that little ellipsis bubble at the bottom of the iMessage window, people who live in delirious anticipation of the next time their iPhone buzzes in their hand. If that's you, you can download it here. But my guess, actually, is even these people will eventually uninstall the Quartz app. Because the risk of treating news like text messages from a friend is that friendship in the digital age is notoriously fickle. It's easy to annoy someone from behind a screen without realizing it—and when that happens? It's all too easy to tap block.

While making the recent Steve Jobs biopic, researchers working for Aaron Sorkin found a VHS tape containing a long-lost video of Jobs launching the NeXT workstation in 1988, the eponymous first computer of his second computer company, also called NeXT. While the Mac was for home consumers, the NeXT workstation was for education and enterprise, but as the video makes clear, there's more to NeXT's legacy than that. Unlike Apple, NeXT was founded from the ground up as a design-thinking company, with some huge design talent attached.

The first designer who teamed up with Jobs for NeXT was graphic design legend Paul Rand, who developed the NeXT brand identity, including its colorful, skewed, boxy logo. Rand was 71 at the time, and had previously designed the logos for Esquire, IBM, ABC, and UPS, among many others. After badgering IBM to make an exception for NeXT when it came to Rand's contract, Jobs approached the designer in 1986, almost three years before the first NeXT computer hit shelves and just months after leaving Apple.

When Rand flew out to Palo Alto, Jobs told him that his next computer would be a perfect cube (a shape Jobs returned to when he came back to Apple with the still-beloved PowerMac G4 Cube). So Rand pitched him a cube, tilted at a 28-degree angle. As recounted in Walter Isaacson's official Steve Jobs biography, Jobs wasn't so sure about this. He demanded tons of options to consider. Rand sneered at him. "I will solve your problem, and you will pay me," he told Jobs. "You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me."

At the end of the day, Rand had his way. Jobs payed him $100,000 to design the NeXT identity, a staggering amount for the time, especially considering the fact that the contract between the two did not allow for any back and forth: Jobs had to take what he got. When Rand finally revealed his design to Jobs, the NeXT CEO only had one complaint—he thought the yellow used in the "e" was too dark, and asked Rand to change it. Rand reportedly smashed his fist on the table and screamed at Jobs: "I've been doing this for 50 years! I know what I'm doing." Jobs ended up losing the argument. The color stayed, making Rand one of the few people in the history of the world who ever won a head-to-head argument against Jobs.

Here's a great video of Rand debuting the identity to Jobs and his NeXT team (including a young Susan Kare).

The other great designer who helped make the NeXT a reality was Hartmut Esslinger. The founder of Frog Design, Esslinger had previously worked with Jobs to conceptualize some very weird and outré designs for future Apple products, none of which ever hit the market. He also helped create the so-called "Snow White design language" of industrial design that Apple used for all of its computers starting with the Apple IIc, and continuing until 1990.

When Jobs started NeXT, Esslinger jumped ship, winding down his contract with Apple and helping Jobs realize his dream computer. Each side of the NeXT computer was to be exactly a foot long, a mathematically perfect cube that made it a nightmare to actually produce.

As Isaacson relates in Steve Jobs, most parts cast in molds have an angle that is slightly greater than 90 degrees, because the extra degrees make it much easier to get the parts out of the mold. That's the kind of compromise neither Esslinger or Jobs was willing to make for the NeXT, arguing it would ruin the "purity and perfection" of the NeXT cube. So the sides had to be produced separately, using molds that cost $650,000, at a specialty machine shop in Chicago. A manic attention to detail went even as far as the inside of the NeXT computer. Not only did all of the screws feature expensive plating, the inside of the magnesium case was a fancy matte black, even though almost no one would ever see it.

For all NeXT's design flourish, the company didn't actually sell that many computers: about 50,000 units all told. Part of the issue was the computer's price: $6,500 when it first debuted. Yet, it's misguided to call NeXT, as some sites have, "Steve Jobs's biggest failure."

NeXT's design legacy reaches beyond its hardware and logo. Do you use a Mac? OS X is a modified version of NeXTStep, the operating system Jobs created for NeXT. And because they were graphical powerhouses, NeXT computers were responsible for many of the advances in 3-D graphics that came out of the late '80s and '90s. Not only do we owe games such as Doom and Quake to NeXT computers, we also owe NeXT for empowering programmers who created revolutionary new techniques in computer graphics that are still used in computer-animated blockbusters and Oculus Rift games to this day. Apple became a design-thinking company by accident, but NeXT was one on purpose, and it revolutionized the world. If that's Steve Jobs's "biggest failure," it's a shame he didn't fail more often.

Plunging 367 feet underground beneath one of Romania's largest cities, the Salina Turda is a salt mine that dates back almost a millennium. In the 1990s, it was reinvented as a tourist attraction—and today, a subterranean theme park that features a bowling alley, an underground lake, and even a Ferris Wheel.

Capturing the inexpressible beauty of Salina Turda has defied wordsmiths for centuries, but not the lens of photographer Rich Seymour. His stunning series of the 2,000-year old salt mine is the next best thing to going to Salina Turda yourself. In Seymour's photographs, Salina Turda doesn't look so much like a theme park as it does another world—or series of worlds. Sometimes it appears as a bioluminescent alien organism; other times, an underground military base; and still others, a neon cathedral that sunk through a crack in the Earth.

Its sheer scale is part of what makes Salina Turda so hard to put into words, says Seymour. "The Salina itself feels like a huge empty hall," he explains. "For the size of the space there were relatively few people, and the sounds of the bowling, shouts, and laughter echo throughout the whole space. The place is very dark, but for an subterranean space the air quality is really quite good, it feels quite fresh inside which was definitely unexpected. There is a mixture between the old mining infrastructure, elevated walkways, staircases, as well as the more modern interventions. At times it felt genuinely quite risky, which is ironically not part of the theme park experience at all."

The project came about thanks to a grant from the Romanian Cultural Institute—not to photograph Salina Turda, but to capture Romania'a capital city, Bucharest. As research for the project, he started shooting the nearby area. "I really believe that to understand the city you have to understand the countryside that feeds into it, and therefore I started researching the Romanian landscape and sites that I found particularly interesting," he says.

According to Seymour, Salina Turda's pitch black environment made it uniquely challenging to shoot. "Salina Turda was one of the most difficult spaces I've ever had to photograph purely because of the fact that it is so dark inside," he says. "I wanted to capture the way that people were using the space, and some shots were even taken from on a boat to get particularly interesting angles."

Prints of Seymour's Salina Turda series are available for purchase directly from the artist.

Twenty years ago, you found a doctor by asking a friend or another doctor for a recommendation. Today, at least one in two Internet users searches for his next doctor online. It's convenient, sure, but it also depersonalizes an important, deeply intimate decision. How do you make such an abstract interaction seem more human?

First founded in 2007, Zocdoc is one of the oldest sites on the web for finding and scheduling doctor's appointments online. Its logo, though, was hardly personal. In fact, it was a bit of a joke: an $80 logo that literally looked like "ZocDoc" typed in Helvetica in a word processor. (It has since been restylized without the capital 'D') "We got what we paid for," laughs Richard Fine, Zocdoc's vice president of marketing. Six hundred employees and millions of patients later, and that $80 logo is looking more and more like an 80-cent logo. That's why today, the OpenTable of doctor's appointments is unveiling a new identity. Designed by international brand consultancy Wolff Olins, the new Zocdoc aims to break ranks with the anonymous, dehumanizing health care industry by giving it a friendly face.

Center-focus in the new Zocdoc identity is Zee, an anthropomorphic logo that combines the letter "Z" with a human face. Placed upon a yellow background, Zee is Zocdoc's official logo, but it can also be used in other branding contexts: for example, as a friendly face on a Zocdoc welcome page, an editable avatar for a user's Zocdoc profile page, or as an animated mascot for a Zocdoc ad. Wolff Olins's creative director Lisa Smith describes Zee as just as much a "playful friend" as a logo. "Zee was designed to be emotive and human, expressing different facial expressions," she says. "Something as simple as a wink is something every human can respond to."

Designing a logo that users could identify with was important, says Zocdoc's Fine, because patients often feel as if they are faceless within the health care system. "People aren't just patients when they're sitting in a doctor's office in a paper gown," he says. "They're patients when they are talking to an insurance company on the phone, or scheduling an MRI" ... or even searching Zocdoc for a new primary care physician. Zocdoc, he says, is all about making patients feel humanized in different contexts, when they're not actually face-to-face with a doctor. And Zee is a reflection of that.

Zocdoc extends that sense of warmth to the color scheme, which is dominated by a sunny yellow: think something similar to McDonald's golden arches, or the color of Snapchat's icon. What makes it such a compelling choice is that yellow is a color that basically just doesn't exist in health industry branding, where blues and greens dominate. "Health care is inherently a conservative industry, and blue is the most conservative brand color," Fine says.

The animated Zee logo might not be to everyone's taste. To my eyes, it has a European feel, almost like a French cartoon character, which may be too abstract for some. Even so, the new Zocdoc identity is a breath of fresh air in the health care space. Consider what that abstract yellow face represents—the patient, for a change, and not the doctor. That's rare in health care websites, which put smiling doctors and nurses on every page, doing their best to humanize them, while treating their patients as perpetually faceless. Zocdoc's new identity might not be for everyone, and some might fault it in the details. But at least it's human.

All Images: via Zocdoc

Last week, Sir Paul McCartney announced that he was putting a capstone on his almost 50-year musical career with one of his most "challenging" projects yet: writing jingles for 10 Valentine's Day themed Skype emojis.

But you know who wasn't exactly impressed? 13-year-old Mercer Henderson of San Francisco, who had already been composing soundtracks for emoji in her spare time. In fact, she had no idea who Paul McCartney even was. "At first, I did not know who he was," Mercer admits. "But then my mom [Lisa Mercer, a marketing executive at Salesforce] explained he's this famous, old singer. I have heard of the band, just not him."

Either way, she's not worried that she and the ex-Beatle are working on the same problem. Besides, Mercer's app, Audiots, has way more emoji and way more sounds than McCartney's. Plus, she has a secret weapon: she's a kid. She's living this.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The idea behind her app, Audiots, is simple. Instead of blowing someone a kissy face emoji, imagine if you also heard the sound of the kiss landing. A chicken emoji would arrive with the sounds of chicken clucking. If you send a poo emoji, imagine a wet, explosive disc—well, you get the idea. With the Audiots app installed, you don't just send emoji, you send soundmoji.

You might be tempted to dismiss this. "Not exactly a mind-blowing idea for an app," you might say. But again, Mercer is far from the only person trying to add sounds to the emoji that have so quickly become part of our collective lexicon. How many times did you beat Paul McCartney and Microsoft to market when you were 13? Zero? Exactly.

Not that Mercer did it alone. She had help from her mom, Lisa, in creating her app company, 4Girls Tech. She was also helped by her uncle, Bob Edwards, a sound engineer for Lucasarts (and, by extension, Star Wars). Next up, Mercer wants to see if she can get more sound packs into Audiots. She says she's eye-ing Ellen DeGeneres and Taylor Swift for potential collaborators. She also wants to team up with Adidas, and brands like the S.P.C.A., so that every time someone downloads a dog Audiot, $1 gets donated to neglected pups.

But no partnership with Paul McCartney? Again, Mercer says she's not entirely clear who he is. Still, she's willing to entertain offers. "He can buy my company if he wants," she concedes. "But I would want to be the one to pick the emojis because he's not a kid. "

Download Audiots here.

There are many reasons to go to Tokyo: the food, the shopping, the museums, the culture, and, if you're a design nerd like us, the signage. Japanese signage is in a class all its own: an onslaught of abstract shapes, typography, and colors palettes, evident everywhere from the stations of Shinjuku to the shops of Shibuya.

Now, Brooklyn-based designer Kendall Henderson has created a poster-sized tribute to Tokyo's signage. Called "For the love of Tokyo," he's offering an A1-sized, limited-edition print that highlights signage design in the Japanese capitol, as well as some slick mini A6 notebooks based off the same.

What makes Japan's signage so special, according to Henderson, isn't just the wonderful, unexpected colors or the strangely idiosyncratic symbols at play. A big part of it is just letting go, and washing away in the information overload: Japan loves signage, and so practically every street corner contains a dizzying array of signs and symbols.

"It is such a different place with so much to look at. Often times too much to look at," Henderson says. "As a graphic designer I was drawn to certain details during my visit [to Japan] such as color, shape, and Japanese typography." The illustrations Henderson developed after his visit try to reduce these elements to iconic elements of Tokyo signage: the shapes, colors, and type. The palette of the poster was inspired by Sanzo Wada's A Dictionary of Color Combinations, a book of 348 color combinations published by Seigenesha (which actually looks like it would make for a good addition to any graphic design lover's wishlist in its own right).

The result, Henderson hopes, is a "snapshot of the city, for those who have memories there, or for those who just aspire to visit." If you'd like to buy the poster, it's available for $40 as a limited-edition print. The notebooks, meanwhile, will run you $10.

A neglected field in Croaker, Virginia, is the site of a modern-day Eastern Island, not made up of stone Fiji gods, but 20-foot-tall Presidential busts, each one weighing between 11,000 and 20,000 pounds. There are 43 of them—they were created before President Obama's election—all in varying states of disrepair. Noses cracked off. Skulls caved in. Faces peeling off.

From George Washington to George W. Bush, photographer David Ogden has photographed all of Croaker's stone President busts. But even more interesting than Ogden's photographs of the Ozymandias-style visages is the story of how these busts came to be in a field to begin with.

As explained in this excellent article at Smithsonian.com, the busts were originally created in 2004 by Williamsburg-area sculptor named David Adickes, who was inspired to create the statuary after driving past Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. His rationale: Why should Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt be the only presidents given the Rushmore treatment? So Adickes teamed up with a local landowner named Everette "Haley" Newman to create President's Park, a tourist attraction just outside of Williamsburg that aimed to give every president—even lesser ones like Martin Van Buren, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Millard Fillmore—the opportunity to be immortalized as a giant granite bust.

President's Park opened in 2004 and closed just six years later after going into foreclosure. The busts were going to be destroyed, but a local man named Howard Hankins, who helped build President's Park, didn't think it was right that the noble countenances of America's presidents should be demolished with bulldozers. So he paid $50,000 dollars to laboriously move the 43 sculptures to his family farm in nearby Croaker using cranes and flatbed trucks. Most of the damage that has occurred to the busts happened during this move, although there are some exceptions: Ronald Reagan, for example, has been disfigured by a lightning strike.

Unfortunately, you can't actually go see the presidential busts for yourself, at least not legally. Hankins's farm is officially closed to visitors, with the occasional exception made for eager photographers like Ogden.

But if you do get to see them, Ogden tells me, the experience can be breathtakingly eerie. "When I first saw these 43 heads in person, I couldn't move. I think my camera even slipped out of my hand," he said. "You don't watch them. They're the ones watching you!"

All Photos: David Ogden

When David Bowie died on January 10, 2016, the Internet mourned. If you were sitting in Cubo, an Italian multimedia center located in Bologna, you could have watched it happen, as thousands of tweets per minute with the #ripdavidbowie hashtag were parsed for meaning, then visualized as a somber light and sound show representing the Internet's emotional pulse played out in an outdoor garden.

This powerful Twitter brain is called Amygdala, and it was created by Italian digital arts studio fuse. Its name is a reference to the the human brain's own amygdala, two almond-shaped nuclei that process memory and help generate emotional reactions. Fuse's project tries to tap into the Twittersphere's synthetic amygdala, visualizing the emotional content of tweets and then storing them into memory, where they are archived.

In Amygdala, about 30 tweets per second are examined in real time using a database of over 5,000 lexical terms. The tweets are then assigned weights for how much happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise, fear, or anger they are expressing, not unlike other visualization projects that seek to analyze the "mood" of a vast group of users. But once the emotion behind the tweet has been properly weighted, Amygdala visualizes in real time in the physical world, in an ever-changing installation that flickers to life and darkens alongside trending topics and major news events.

In Cubo's outdoor media garden, the tweet is pushed to a circular arrangement of 41 columns. There, it plays as an ephemeral blast of sound and light from a specific column, according to where it falls on the wheel of emotions. Then, it makes its way back inside the Cubo center, where the tweet is processed by one of 12 video walls, divided across the six emotions Amygdala tracks. These screens represent memory, with each tweet becoming part of an on-going long-term visualization of Twitter's emotional make-up since Amygdala was first turned on.

It's a heady project, one that fuse's designers tell me they hope will not just help us understand Twitter better, but maybe even illuminate patterns that will allow them to predict surges of feeling on Twitter before they happen.

It's also meant to be a bit of a warning to people about what they share on Twitter.

"We see the web as a place where we are all connected, but at the same time we think people should be more aware about the accessibility of sensible information about private lives and emotions," says fuse's Filippo Aldovini. "The fact we used these datas to create an installation means that private companies can do the same for their interests."