Category: links and bookmarks

Our Otl Aicher inspired passport cover is ideal to hold your passport plus up to three bank cards or rail tickets. Available in Dark Blue for you traditionalists and Bright Orange for those who want a completely non- traditional connotation free colour (unless you are Dutch of course)

The pictogram system, designed by Gerhard Joksch under the supervision of Design Commissioner Otl Aicher, originally for the Munich Olympic Games, was intended to be easily understandable and accessible to every visitor, irrespective of their native language. The visual identity for the Munich Olympics and the pictogram system has endured way beyond the 1972 Games. It is now considered a benchmark in visual identity and graphic design.

I already own the card wallet version, but I am sorely tempted by this passport cover.

I have feelings about these things. For me, where I’m from, at my age, those pictograms still signal promise and a new future.

Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.

I will say that I’ve been really slack on LTD, and notemaking in general, this year so far.

On Creating THE AUTHORITY With Bryan Hitch

MISTER MAMMOTH, Matt Kindt & Jean-Denis Pendanx

FASSBINDER THOUSANDS OF MIRRORS, Ian Penman

The City Is Ribbed For Your Pleasure

On Routines

PIRANESI, Susanna Clarke

Cover Design, 3may23

• INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS SAY U.S. HAS RETRIEVED CRAFT OF NON-HUMAN ORIGIN – it’s that time again, I guess. This link actually showed up on Politico
• ‘Dealing with kidnappers is easy!’ A hostage negotiator reveals the secrets that can transform your life – fairly desperate headline from the Guardian lifestyle section there
• Chapels of the Plain | World Heritage Journeys of Europe

At the weekend I discovered that the Google Trends real-time visualiser is still up. I remember when this launched – I have a feeling it was an experiment back then, possibly out of Google Labs. Each of these windows changes every three seconds or so. I like to imagine something like this with headlines and RSS as close to an ideal informational environment. I wish something like that existed. I find this very pleasant to spend time with. It’s the glinting light on the surface of the river of what the world is talking about.

Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.

God, My New Phone Is Boring

Apparently We Just Give Up And Call It Magic Now

On The Speaking Of Names: TOURS OF THE BLACK CLOCK, Steve Erickson

SUCCESSION 403

Swim Against The Current: NOVELIST AS A VOCATION, Haruki Murakami

One Hell Closes, Another One Opens

CARNAGE: Web Of Carnage

Audiobooks Without Audible, Books Without Amazon

SUCCESSION 402

That’s how we came to start a school called HOME. When people ask us what kind of school it is, the first answer has always been, ‘It’s a school that starts from the conversations that happen around our kitchen table.’ It matters that it’s the kitchen table, because these are the conversations that happen in the room where the cooking and the washing up get done. ‘When people start to wake up to the assumption of separability,’ I remember Vanessa Machado de Oliveira telling us one time around that table, ‘there’s this desire to rush out the door of the house modernity built, into the garden, to feel connected to all the beauty of the living world.’ But there’s something missing here, she went on: a willingness to feel our connection with what is going on in all the other rooms of the house of modernity; not least where the dirty work is being done, who is doing it, and the ways it has been kept out of sight.

And as I write this, I think again of Eno’s definition of culture and see it from another angle. For in some sense, all human cultures are riffs on the same theme: living and dying, eating and getting eaten, the feast and the funeral. Comedy and tragedy cycling like night and day. For a while, we rolled out street lamps and sat in front of screens at all hours and the stars hid themselves, like animals retreating into the forest from our noise. We outsourced the growing and making of food and kept the dying out of sight lest any of these things spoil our appetites. But when the street lamps start to go out – as they did in many European cities this winter – we find the old rhythm still there, however much damage we have inherited, and so we have to find a way of adding our variations to all the others that humans have come up with in all the times and places where we have been human together.

Superb little essay by Dougald Hine in his newsletter.