For the love of words
January 18, 2013 § 1 Comment
And not your basic, everyday words. Words that sound beautiful. Words that describe complex feelings or situations. Ancient words and neologisms. Words that exist for the benefit of word-lovers. Otherwordly is a tumblr that collects the most particular words from languages around the world. Here is a small anthology.
The usual suspects
October 23, 2012 § Leave a comment
Are you familiar with law enforcement composite sketch software? You know, the software the police uses to create portraits of suspects based on eye-witness descriptions? Well, Brian Joseph Davis had the brilliant idea of using such software with literary descriptions of book characters. Some of the most iconic protagonists are there, from Jesus to Humbert Humbert, and from Jane Eyre to Holly Golightly.
Daisy Buchanan, The Great Gatsby
A casting director’s dream, right?
Captain Ahab, Moby Dick
Unfortunately The Composites tumblr is closing down (but a book is coming out). Just my luck to discover something fun once it is about to end…
via freeweird
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Sound advice
April 11, 2012 § 2 Comments
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 makeThe End by The Beatles
Now I’ll just sit and wait. In the meanwhile…
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Erased words
February 7, 2012 § Leave a comment
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
Don’t give up on facebook just yet
May 3, 2011 § 2 Comments
The first email of the day said this:
That’s all Folks!
I am deleting my facebook account (at least for the moment) because I am bored of it.[goes on to give me us – all of his facebook friends- his new contact details].
And he’s not the first to do so. Infact, the number of my facebook friends is on a downward slope, at least for the last six months. People are getting fed up with Facebook. Has it simply run its course, like Friendster and myspace before it? Are people tired of all the overexposure? Are the original Facebook users maturing into Twitter users? Or is it simply because our Facebook newsfeeds usually look like this:
There are those, though, that are not ready to give up without a fight. Yo Zuck! Implement this is a tumblr blog with ideas on how to improve Facebook. It includes realistic, common sense suggestions that would indeed improve user experience. For example this one would be really helpful to me since my Japanese friends have the weird habit of writing in, well, japanese:
Newsfeed illustration via Thought Catalog. Link to Yo Zuck! via freeweird.
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Clever words
April 29, 2011 § 4 Comments
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 « Read the rest of this entry »
Cinemagraphs: the art of the animated gif
April 21, 2011 § 4 Comments
Remember the early days of the web, before Flash and JavaScript, when the animated gif was the only thing that could move in a webpage (and more often than not to a displeasing effect)? Those days are long gone, and the gif has been de-throned and for good reason: most of them were not only crude, but utterly ugly as well, by definition bordering on the kitsch side. But the gifs you are about to see are a completely different story.
Fashion (and not only) photographer Jamie Beck creates these amazing animated gifs with the help of web designer Kevin Burg. 
These gifs walk the fine line between photography and video, belonging to neither. They are studies on a scene. You might even miss the motion completely if you are not careful enough. But, even if minimal, this motion is heavy with emotion and fluent with meaning.
The artistic duo calls their animated gif cinemagraphs and explain: “There’s something magical* about a still photograph — a captured moment in time — that can simultaneously exist outside the fraction of a second the shutter captures.”
You can find all of Jamie’s animated gifs in her tumblr: from me to you. Not only that, but you can also find all of her fashion photography (New York Fashion Week, anyone?), her own styling and street fashion photography (I love her vintage style; it is actually her on the portrait above), her food blogging, her series on NYC and other cities and A LOT more.
*[Speaking of magic, this minimal flickering inside the photograph is exactly how I always imagined the Daily Prophet.]
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Read it elsewhere
April 20, 2011 § Leave a comment
Check them out:
- A dramatic reading of Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook, complete with a beret and (e)spanish accent (video) – kottke
- Is the cupcake dead? – Johnson Banks
- John Lennon’s bitter letter to Linda McCartney – flavorwire]
- Do you know how much power your appliances use? (interactive infograph) – GE visualization
- The evolution of web design – mashable
- He’s an actor, he’s a writer, he’s a musician: download Hugh Laurie’s new blues track for free – pop culture brain
- What if Barbie was real-size – msnbc
- The latest tumblr to take the world by storm – hipster animals
- If logos were honest – buzzfeed
From behind
April 19, 2011 § 1 Comment
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 « Read the rest of this entry »
Read it elsewhere
April 13, 2011 § Leave a comment
Slim pickings:
- It’s true what they say, there is a tumblr for everything – fugly android interfaces
- What kind of twitter user are you? (infograph) – daily infographic
- I assure you that a post with the title “Unspeakable Bodily Fluids and Genitalia: A Short, Revolting Intro to the Finest Metaphors in British Food Criticism” is a good read – GOOD.is
- Bringing the bling to Anakin: Darth Vader’s helmet gets the artist treatment – total film
- These post stamps for the 50 years of the Royal Shakespeare Company are amazing – creative review
The streets are sad
April 7, 2011 § 2 Comments
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
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If you watch it backwards
March 28, 2011 § 1 Comment
Can you imagine how would things turn up if all the stories you know in life and fiction would start from the end and end up in their beginning? Ifyouwatchitbackwards is a tumblr site which points out the opposite path that life and fiction can take.
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Focusing on usability traits instead of faults
March 10, 2011 § 4 Comments
At last, some positivity!
Little Big Details is a tumblr blog focusing on those little things in apps and websites that make a big difference. I am the first one to admit guilt on whining about usability issues. Because there are a lot of them around. But once you get into that mood, it is easy to overlook all the amazing little user interface functionalities that make our life easier and, yes, more fun.
So, I raise my hat to Little Big Details and its fresh air of positivity.
Shiro to Kuro means Black and White
March 9, 2011 § 3 Comments
With tumblr-like, curator websites being the fad in the internet at the moment, you see a lot of content and concept recycling out there. But once in a while you come across something either truly original, or truly beautiful. Shirotokuro lies in the latter category. In its own words it is “a curated gallery of exquisite design, illustration and photography distilled to it’s purest monochromatic elements of black and white”. It sure is.
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it's a small web 