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

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

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

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
  

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

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

The state of social media

The end of yet another year: ideal time for reviews. 2012 was the year where social media have fully established their presence and have become a way of life, according to an infographic by The SEO Company and Nowsourcing.

via Mashable

See also:

• Data never sleeps
• The Bermuda Triangle of Productivity
• I can be googled, therefore I am

And the Oscar goes to …

We are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars

or

I can resist everything but temptation.

One of the wittiest spirit of literature is also the most quoted. The Guardian gathered Oscar Wilde’s top 50 epigrams in just one infographic:

via The Guardian

See also:

• In literature / hidden haikus I have found / unexpectedly
• What should I read?
• I shall not live in vain

A girl’s hidden treasure

Or, more accurately three girls’ treasures. Three tortured souls, three great artists. What were their favorite objects, their magic talismans? Bett Norris illustrated the (imaginary) most precious possessions of Sylvia Plath:

Frida Kahlo:

and Edith Piaf:

Flowers and death being the common denominator…

You can find these treasures on Bett Norris’ Etsy shop

See also:

• I shall not live in vain
• James Joyce Pornography
• The Man in the Black Coat

Those damn pigeons

Print by the lovely Etsy shop OliverandLyvia via istanbul loves Athens (Athens loves Istanbul back)

See also:

• Never le’ go…
• Etsy finds: Claudia Varosio’s movie posters
• Prose before Hos

10 more ways to visualize lyrics

Our first post on illustrated lyrics is one of our most popular ones, ever. It seems you share our obsession, hurrah! It is due time, then, to share some more visualizations that struck us as interesting and funny. Some interior design there, too. Again this list contains songs we love for the most part. So, for your viewing pleasure, here come 10 more ways to visualize lyrics:

1. The literal interpretation

Set fire to the rain by Adele (source)

2. The eye-chart

3 little birds by Bob Marley (source)

3. The equation

Every day is like Sunday by Morrissey (source)

4. The upholstered armchair

Perfect day by Lou Reed (source)

5. The stencil

Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (source)

6. The cross-stitch

Please, please, please let me get what I want by The Smiths (source)

7. The street-sign

Stop! In the name of love by Diana Ross & the Supremes (source)

8. The word-match

Mambo no 5 by Lou Vega (source)

9. The staircase

Hello, I love you by The Doors (source)

10. The door-sign

Push it by Salt-n-Pepa (source)

See also:

• 10 + 1 ways to visualize lyrics
• A girl with colitis goes by…
• Where is my pictogram?

In every cry of every Man

A few days before the opening ceremony of the 30th Olympic Games in London, Alex Robinson remembers William Blake and his poem London, published in Songs of Experience in 1794, to portray Olympic city’s face.

See also:

• The sky turned blood red
• There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
• The Man in the Black Coat

The hardly spoken words

The difficult words, the unusual words: all these words that are rarely spoken and whose meaning we cannot even imagine. Designers James and Michael Fizgarald, the illustration duo from Ireland, also known as The Project Twins, have ‘gathered’ all these words that are rarely spoken and managed to visually explain them.

Acersecomic: a person whose hair has never been cut.

Zugzwang: a position in which any decision or move will result in problems.

Do you know any of them? See more peculiar words after the jump.

Alice in the Subway

Would you imagine Alice taking the subway to wander around Wonderland? Perhaps not, but this transit map identifies the key locations of Lewis Carroll’s inspiration.

Well, if you don’t know where you want to get to, it doesn’t matter which way you go as the Cat would say…

See also:

• The drugs of Alice in Wonderland
• The strings of the NYC subway
• Strings of words
• The dark side of a fairy tale

Some of my best friends are records

by Grant Snider

Folding buildings

Folding paper to create the lines of a building, without using any pen or pencil, color or shading. That is the concept behind Simon Schubert’s project entitled ‘Papierarbeiten’, meaning “paper work” in German, in which he creates complex architectural ‘drawings’ with the use of just one piece of paper and nothing else.

Pretty amazing, don’t you think? See more after the jump

Inspiring words

A man’s wisdom in just one sentence. Clearly spoken and beautifully designed by Max Temkin, who in his project entitled Maxistentialism creates a set of Philosophy posters inspired by some of the most influential philosophers.

See more after the jump

Minimal haircut posters

Can you recognise a person from his haircut? Well yes, if we are talking about the most recognizable haircuts on the world, virtual or not.

Check out the Copyrighted Famous Hairs minimal poster series by Portuguese graphic designer Patricia Povoa.

See more after the jump

Sound advice

Lyrics to live by is a tumblr dedicated in finding good advice in song lyrics, ranging from classic rock to hip-hop. 

You can even submit lyrics and I did so!  My choice?

And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make

The End by The Beatles

Now I’ll just sit and wait. In the meanwhile…

See also:

• A girl with colitis goes by…
• 10 + 1 ways to visualize lyrics
• The lyrics on the wall