Erased words

Just erase: words, commas, sentences to reveal the true emotion and find poetry. Newspaper Blackout, a Tumblr blog of Austin-based artist and writer Austin Kleon (included in TIME magazine’s list of the  30 Must-See Tumblr Blogs) creates”blackout poetry” just by blacking out unwanted text with a permanent marker and revealing new and shorter versions of poetic expression.

See more after the jump

Book club for design nerds

What do designers do after they read a book? Do they discuss about it as regular bibliophiles? Do they write fun fiction as regular nerds? Nope, they each create a book cover and post it on the book cover club, for your enjoyment:

via Lost at E minor 

See also:

• Food for inspiration
• The first ever designed album cover
• People are open books: the Human Library project

In 60 seconds

Every 60 seconds, 168 million emails are sent, more than 13,000 iPhone applications are downloaded, over 600,000 search queries are made,  more than 98,000 tweets and more than 1,500 blog posts are published.Pretty amazing, don’t you think?

via TechPages

See also:

• The universe of social networks
• The internet in 2015
• I am socially stoned
• It started with the occasional profile update and now you are hooked: social media addiction

Cut. The last image

The film ends and you end up with the last impression, the last image of a movie. Wherethelovelythingsare blog collected the final frames of well known movies. Can you recognise them?

via kottke

See also:

• Clockbusters: the movie quiz
• See the object, guess the movie
• A brief history of title design

The desktop wallpaper project

The fantastic the fox is black design blog plays host to a great little project: the desktop wallpaper project.

They invite illustrators, graphic designers and artists to create unique desktop wallpapers.

Each wallpaper is available for various screen resolutions, including, of course, iPhone, iPad and PSP screens.

Love it!

See also:

• Illustrated cities
• Nothing is impossible
• Origami social icons

365 six word stories

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

According to urban myth that is the reply Ernest Hemingway gave when he was challenged to write a story in just six words.

In 2010 two creatives, Van Horgen, writer, and Anne Ulku, designer, felt up to the challenged. They launched six word story everyday blog and did exactly that: they posted one six word story for every single day of the year.

Once 2010 came to an end, they opened up the project to everybody on sixwordstoryeveryday.com.

Admittedly, these are great story openers rather than stories in themselves, but very interesting, still.

via quipsologies

See also:

• The Man in the Black Coat
• I shall not live in vain
• The lyrics on the wall
• 69 love illustrations…

London tube sticker commentary

Whatever you call it, subway, tube or metro, you can’t deny that long comuting trips can get pretty boring. And if you are anything like me, you end up counting stops by checking the map obsessively. Well, if you’re riding the central line in London you’re in for a surprise. Witty remarks have replaced some of the stations. And, of course, there is a tumblr about it: stickers on the central line.

See also:

• The strings of the NYC subway
• Cinemagraphs: the art of the animated gif
• The streets are sad

Clever words

What happens when the Saussurian signifier and signified meet up in the form of a word? Beautiful typography.

Typeplay is a tumblr blog, which plays with words and their meanings creating typographically meaningful words and whose goal is to reach a million words.

See more words after the jump

Nothing is impossible

Well, it seems that some things are impossible. Impossible Art Ideas blog is an archive of impossible art ideas, created by Jason Lazarus in order to collect art ideas that are impossible to materialize. Everyone can submit a crazy idea and Lazarus will then select a few to visualize into a slideshow, wallpaper or even to create text clouds.

What is yours?

From behind

Can you imagine how Twitter and Facebook would look like from behind? I am sure you can’t. Designers Jeff Lam and Josephine Yatar present in their blog Back of a Webpage a different and very creative ‘back view’ of most of our favourite websites. 

See more after the jump

Attention please!

via Care daily

The streets are sad

Sad stuff on the street is not only amazing in its own right, but it also has a cute back story (which I’ll let you find out by yourselves).  

Broken, dirty, lost or abandoned objects lying on the streets. That’s what it’s all about. And all the thoughts and feelings that go along with it.

via good.is

See also:

• Filling up the gaps
• Dogs left in cars
• Larger-than-life people in candid shots

Larger-than-life people in candid shots

We’ve seen innumerable photos of them in every imaginable setting. Publicity shots and paparazzi shots. But the shots featured in This is not porn have the rare quality of capturing the real person. Carrie Fisher and her stand double sunbathing in their iconic Princess Leia bikinis. Salvator Dalí skipping rope. Dustin Hoffman goofing behind Sir Lawrence Olivier’s back. Hunter S. Thomson, John Cusack, Johnny Depp and an inflatable doll.

Be sure to visit This is not porn‘s archives.

See also:

• Color outside the line
• Classic photographs: the LEGO edition
• Naked in the city

Read it elsewhere

Jeff Koons gets the video game treatment, Time Zones get analyzed and religion falls out of fashion:

• Jeff Koons Must Die, the video game – Hunter Jonakin via boingboing
• What if Angry Birds were an action movie directed by Michael Bay (video) – the curious brain
• The fascinating and often absurd convention of Time Zones – BBC
• Rare Beatles photos – npr
• Since Radiohead published a newspaper (The Universal Sigh), Guardian writers are challenging them at their game, by covering Creep – Guardian
• Are symmetrical faces more beautiful? – toxel via holykaw
• 50% of tweets come from 0,05% of users – mashable
• Is religion falling out of fashion? – Discovery news
• Sex is no accident (MTV’s safe sex campaign) – buzzfeed
• This blogger asks his favorite authors to sign their books. The twist? Instead for dedications he asks for insults – insulted by authors via flavorwire
• Read it horizontally, read it vertically; the genius of Lewis Caroll – i love charts

Peanuts: the existentialist edition

Whoever is behind 3eanuts had a brilliant idea. First came the observation: “Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense”. Then the execution: just omit the last panel of the comic strip and sink in a bleak, black and white world, filled with…

…desperation…

…loneliness…

…doubt…

A true existentialist masterpiece.

See also:

• The drugs of Alice in Wonderland
• Being (in a) John Malkovich (nightmare)
• The Wire, the Victorian novel

A Ming cupcake

I love contrasts. Of color, of texture, of style. And a contrast of style is what first caught my eye in Ming Makes Cupcakes. That and my weak spot for cupcakes, that is. But back to the point: I just love the contrast between the luscious maximalism of the cupcakes and the severe minimalism of the layout. Oh the conflict, the tension!

But I want to give (more) credit where credit is due. The recipes themselves are great, with some twists and surprises (flourless chocolate cupcakes anyone? Sour cream fig cupcakes? Port wine and cherry chocolate? Beet chocolate?). I plan to start trying them ASAP.

Oh, and a last note on usability: although every recipe (image & text) is an image, the blog has a text only version where you can read and copy/paste text from. Nothing to complain about.

69 love illustrations…

…inspired by The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs. This is what you can find in How Fucking Romantic, a great little blog. It was launched by a bunch of London-based illustrators, comic-artists and writers who wanted, well to illustrate all of the 69 Love Songs. But the project is open and anyone can submit an illustration.

To paraphrase my favorite song by The Magnetic Fields (even if not from the 69 Love Songs): Please stop dancing in my heart / I can seem to make it art.

See more illustrations and listen to my favorite song after the jump.

“Pun,ctu.a’tion?”

Punctuation is a hot topic among it’s a small web authors. The debate usually focuses on commas. I‘m a comma minimalist whereas elina is a comma maximalist. When, in not-so-rare moments of self-doubt, we ask each other’s opinion about a phrase we end up arguing. When we do edit a post together I keep deleting commas and she keeps adding them behind my back. What unites us, though, is the deep belief in the importance of proper punctuation.

I don’t know whether our friend A. knew about all this, but she did hit bull’s-eye when she sent us the link to the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks. It’s a hilarious collection of signs, menus and every other sort of publication that contain, well, unnecessary quotation marks, usually to ironic effect. Like this one:

Or this one:Or that one:If you’re into this kind of stuff, you can also check Apostrophe Catastrophes, a similar blog focusing on the misuse of the apostrophe.

See also:

• The incredible shrinking sentence and other wonders of the english language in the year 2011
• Write like Kafka
• Kindle your writings

Read it elsewhere

Blogs, stamps, philosophers, libraries, Google Earth and what’s-his-name:

• A brief history of blogging – web designer depot
• The end of the stamp. From April Denmark will start replacing postage stamps with mobile text messages – quipsologies
• I have a Philosophy degree. I’m in good company – Raymont’s Lists
• Japanese librarians document the damage after the earthquake and tsunami – togetter
• Qaddafi. Qazzafi. Qadhdhafi. Qaththafi. Gadhdhafi. Khadafy. Gazafy. Hizzafizzle. Schlebaffi. LOLdaffy – boingboing
• This music video by Lux Repeat, directed by Bartholomäus Traubeck, is made entirely by Google Earth images – fastcodesign

Minimal design, maximal inspiration

We’ve recently published a lot of posts about posters we loved and we praised every single one of them. So, this time, I can’t find enough words to express how much I really love this minimal movie poster series by BrickHut. You see, they hit me hard both conceptually and aesthetically. To the point of creative envy. I just find them so inspired.

See more posters after the jump