The colors of your favourite books

A book: a world full of images, flavors and …colors. Can you really imagine the colors of your favorite novels? Jaz Parkinson has created color charts for different classic works of literature to visually represent the novels’ colorful worlds, building mini rainbows that correspond to the most prominent colors of each work.

via Flavorwire

See also:

• Songs as books
• On the road all around the world
• Book club for design nerds

Painting the sky

In the urban landscape we only get small glimpses of the sky; at least from the street level view-point of our every day comings and goings. Yes, one could see a fair share of sky from a high building, but it always the urban skyline that dominates the experience, not the vast horizons of the countryside.

Basically, the sky is absent from the urban landscape.

This is why sky-artist Thomas Lamadieu fills in the small sky-gaps with his strange creatures.

 

via design taxi

See also:

• The sky’s the limit
• The domin-ation of the Starry Night
• The sky turned blood red

 

How (many pixels) far is it to Mars?

If the Earth were 100 pixels wide, the Moon would be 3000 pixels away. Mars, at its closest, would be 428,000 pixels away. At the current state of space technology, it will take around 150 days to get to Mars.

Distance to Mars website, created by David Paliwoda & Jesse Williams, calculates the earth’s distance to Mars in a super cool way, in pixels.

Better to watch it on Chrome.

See also:

• Minimal Science
• Science songs
• The arrow of time

Form follows function, indeed

Apart from being my motto in design, form follows function is the coolest website I’ve seen in a long, long time. And a great example of a truly engaging experience online.

Jongmin Kim creates small interaction experiments, where the user controls what’s going on on the screen.

We are talking about colorful, fun and, sometimes, unpredictable experiences.

 

What’s even better is that you can download some of the experiments to use as a screensaver (both for mac and pc).

 

All of the experiments are built in HTML5. And for those of you who don’t talk web, this means that the website works perfectly on your computer, tablet or mobile phone.

See also:

• Colorful multiplications
• Help create a digital landscape
• What Does Music Look Like?

 

The Chinese Room

Well this thought experiment is very close to my heart.

Do you believe that Artificial Intelligence is possible? I mean not now, but theoretically in the future? Do you think that we can build a machine so intelligent that it can be considered to think as a human? I do. But John Searle does not. And here is why – and it’s only 60 sec long:

from the Open University

A poem for April

I imagine my love
breathing with the lungs of all things
and it reaches me
as poetry
of roses or dust

speaks softly to everything
and whispers its news to the universe
the way the wind and sun do
when they split nature’s breast
or pour the ink of day
on the earth’s book

Adonis from Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea (translated by Khaled Mattawa)

I need some space…

If you consider your apartment in New York tiny, or in Tokyo a closet, be ready to reconsider and to be shocked. Imagine living in a space as big as your king-size bed, or less. Meet the cubicle apartments of Hong Kong.

Apparently a single square foot of real estate in Hong Kong costs on average $1,300. As a result, whole families are constrained in 40 square feet apartments. That’s less than 4 square meters in metric!

Kitchen appliances are cramped under bunk beds and all of their belongings are stacked one on top of the other. Tenants don’t have enough space to take two steps, and any talk of ventilation or hygiene is science fiction.

These photos are part of a campaign by the  Society for Community Organization (SoCO), a Chinese human rights group as an effort to raise awareness about the inhuman living conditions city dwellers are facing.

via Inhabitat

See also:

• Behind closed windows
• A little urban living
• Where children’s dreams dwell

Say it with an illustration

Say it with a quote or illustrate one? Malaysia-based illustrator Tang Yau Hoong pairs each of his illustrations with a famous quote. As simple as that, as beautiful as these posters…

See more after the jump

Lovers asleep

How do lovers sleep?

In a project called The Sleep of the Beloved, photographer Paul Schneggenburger captures a couple’s most intimate moment: their sleep. Using long-exposure photography he creates these ethereal, haunting, black & white images, where faces and limbs are combined in a single aura.

The beloved are photographed inside Paul’s studio, from midnight to six in the morning, in black sheets, under candle-light. The project is ongoing and you can take part by contacting the photographer.

via Huffington Post

See also:

• Tilda sleeping
  
• Making sense of your dreams
  
• Where children’s dreams dwell
  

Do you have what it takes to become a teacher?

It’s the hardest job in the world; do you have what it takes? Take this 2min test and find out:

 

See also:

• The ABCs of cinema
• What kind of reader are you?
• Can you name the typeface?

Tweet the lyrics

I really don’t know how to explain this in a way that makes it justice so perhaps you should better visit tweetflight immediately. If you insist, though, here is my best try. Electro-folk (yes, this classification exists) group Brightly have released one of the most clever web-based music videos ever, for their song Preflight Nerves.

 

It is basically a lyrics video, but the words of the song are drawn (almost) real-time from tweets. Clever huh?

Taking the words / phrases out of the context of the tweet and into the song and vice-versa is very interesting; sometimes poignant, sometimes ironic, sometimes hilarious.

I am dying to create a self-referential loop by tweeting about this and appearing in the video!

See also:

• I can see my house from here
• The perfect gin ‘n’ tone
• 10 more ways to visualize lyrics
• 10 + 1 ways to visualize lyrics

Tilda sleeping

Happening now!

Visitors at the MoMA today will be surprised to see Tilda Swinton taking a nap inside a glass box.

It’s part of the Maybe installation that Tilda has been performing in Museums since 1995. Tilda just shows up and takes a nap – nobody knows when or where inside the museum, not even MoMA staff. So, if you’re around check it out now!

This is what MoMA had to say about it:

An integral part of The Maybe’s incarnation at MoMA in 2013 is that there is no published schedule for its appearance, no artist’s statement released, no museum statement beyond this brief context, no public profile or image issued. Those who find it chance upon it for themselves, live and in real—shared—time: now we see it, now we don’t.

via Gothamist

See also:

• A match made in androgynous heaven
  
• Can you name the typeface?
  
• Google puts virtual galleries back on the map
  

 

Who sang what?

Sometimes you discover online something that combines two things you love and then you realize that all that procrastination was actually worth it. So for today’s pleasure combo I present to you one three Beatles infographs, charting the instrumentation of all of their songs, in their three phases.

I consider the haircut chart a bonus:

By Pop Chart Lab

See also:

• A girl with colitis goes by…
• The Beatles, more popular than Jesus?
  
• The Beatles in the year 3126
  

DNA animated

DNA explained in a visually appealing way.

Created by Territory Studio and creative director David Sheldon-Hicks & art director William Samuel for BBC Knowledge & Learning Explainer series.

See also:

• (notes on) biology
• The DNA of a city
• How big is our universe?

Minimal science

When minimalism expresses the essence of meaning, design comes to honor the pioneering work of some of the world’s most famous scientists. From Darwin’s theory of evolution to Pythagoras’ theorem and Archimedes’ principle, Mumbai-based graphic designer Kapil Bhagat creates clever typographic posters of scientists’ names based on each genius’s breakthrough discovery.

See more after the jump

A match made in androgynous heaven

Tilda Swinton and David Bowie play a middle-aged, middle-class couple (with a twist, of course) in his new video for his song The Stars (Are Out Tonight).  Enjoy!

Words on their own

When words and letters acquires a life of their own. Ebon Heath liberates the letters from their frame, the printed page and creates laser-cut sculptures of the letters, giving them a three-dimensional existence with which viewers can actually interact.  His typography sculptures, called Stereo.type, become a magical transformation of the written word into what he describes as a “new language of physical type.”

See more after the jump

Never stop looking up

Looking at the windows and not outside a window. This is the concept behind The Windows of New York project. Graphic designer José Guizar has never stopped wandering around New York city and always looking up: at the windows of each building. And then, he decided to start recording and illustrating the city’s facades and windows.

As he says ‘The Windows of New York project is a weekly illustrated fix for an obsession that has increasingly grown in me since chance put me in this town. A product of countless steps of journey through the city streets, this is a collection of windows that somehow have caught my restless eye out from the never-ending buzz of the city. This project is part an ode to architecture and part a self-challenge to never stop looking up’.

In the project’s website, each window appears with the address (street & area), where it is located.

See more windows after the jump

Word animals

Typography once more. This time in the shape of an animal. Graphic designer Dan Fleming uses in his series ‘Word Animals’ the alphabet letters to create the form of the animal represented.

Pretty cool.  Don’t  you think?

See more after the jump

This is where post-its go to die

It is the fate of the post-it note to be dismissed very soon after it is written – whether, a reminder, a scribbled map, a love note, a cheat-sheet, a name, an address, or whatever else, its nature is by definition ephemeral. But there’s somebody collecting these used-up post-its.

Anthroposts gathers any found post-its and organizes them by color, complexity and the use of common words. With a haunting soundtrack of all their trivialities read out loud.

There is a chilling effect to this memorial to the ephemeral.