• Cutting it up with Greg Lamarche [Ghettoblaster Magazine] 
  • “Graffiti made me look at letters and think about them in a totally different way. Color, composition, movement, layering and repetition all play huge parts to developing letters and the creative possibilities are endless. Although I am a purist when it comes to graff I also want to evolve and take those ideas further primarily working with paper collage.”
  Lettering Process: Frank Ortmann [The Ministry of Type] 
  • “Continuing the process theme of my last post, Jan Middendorp posted a link to this (mostly) non-digital handwriting and lettering process by Frank Ortmann of Freies Grafik Design. I’ve done a few screenshots from the video to give you an idea of it, but nothing beats watching an expert directly. I particularly enjoyed the practice work — this time spent ‘loosening up’ is (I think) a key part of any creative process, digital or not. Go and watch the whole thing, it’s good.”
  Lettercult’s Best of 2010 Lettering [Veer] 
  Why the Basis of the Universe Isn’t Matter or Energ : It’s Data [WIRED] 
  • “In his new book, The Information, science writer James Gleick documents the rising role of information in our lives and the way new technologies continue to increase its velocity, volume, and importance.”
  How hackers ruin everything with computers [Locklin on Science] 
  Data hand tools [O'Reilly Radar] 
  Letter March 
  • “One linocut letter a day in March”
  Why I Run a Flat Company [Inc] 
  • “At 37signals, however, we have a different position on ambition. We’re not big fans of what I consider “vertical” ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere “horizontal” ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management.”
  Business Intelligence vs. Infotainment [FlowingData] 
  Teradata, David McCandless, and yet another detour for analytics [Visual Business Intelligence] 
  • “Stripping away the irrelevant—McCandless’ stated goal—can only be done once you’ve found a way to display the relevant. Too many of his visualizations display information in ways that hide much that’s relevant and essential, leaving little of value for the viewer to see. McCandless rarely chooses forms of display that our eyes and brains can perceive with ease and precision. He selects what will appeal superficially to the viewer (lots of circles, swirls, and vibrant colors), not what will most effectively express what’s essential and meaningful. His displays rarely draw viewers into the data in a thoughtful way, but entertain in a way that delivers a simple message, which is often anemic when compared to the richer, subtler, and more complex stories that live in the data.”
  Scared Shitless [43 Folders] 
  Abandoned Stations 
  • A website dedicated to the documenting of abandoned NYC subway stations.
  Jason Fried: Why work doesn’t happen at work [TED] 
  • “Jason Fried has a radical theory of working: that the office isn’t a good place to do it. At TEDxMidwest, he lays out the main problems (call them the M&Ms) and offers three suggestions to make work work.”

• DIY ‘Hackers’ Tinker Everyday Things Into Treasure [NPR]
  • “In more than 70 hacker spaces in the U.S. and Canada, do-it-yourselfers are drilling, gluing, soldering and welding just about anything you can imagine. Some spaces consist of little more than a large room where they share tools and expertise, while others are equipped with expensive, computer-controlled power tools. While the focus at some hacker spaces is primarily on electronics, at others, sawdust flies and sewing machines whir as members build hybrid objects of a less technological variety. The spaces also offer learning opportunities through classes on anything from brewing beer to picking locks, and demonstrations of new contraptions.”
  A New Era for Design [The Kickstarter Blog]
  • “To the unknowing eye, quality design can seem obvious. Take the iPod: clean, simple and so ubiquitous it’s hard to imagine life before it. And that’s where the beauty is. Like Roger Federer makes tennis look easy, a good designer does the same. But easy it’s not. Designing a functional and enticing product while getting the right people on board to help manufacture and distribute it is almost impossible. Get-rich-quick schemes and infomercial-ready inventions are a dime a dozen, but excellent design is too rare.”

• Urban Open Data: 100 Million 311 Calls in New York Visualized [Information Aesthetics]
  New York Magazine: Data Done Right [Creative Review]
  Harmony [Mr. Doob]
  • “Javascript drawing tool”

It can be possibly called the next chapter in ESPO’s Love Letters project, Love Letter Syracuse. More information on ESPO’s current work can be found at First and Fifteenth.

Thank you Handselecta.

• Lightning In A Bottle [FT]
  • “That diversity shows in the kinds of technology companies New York has produced. They are not just tech-for-tech’s-sake projects. Instead, they use software to enhance other passions: parenting, crafts, gossip, gameplay, health, and so on. They use technology in clever ways, but they are fundamentally about something else. I think that quality derives from their metropolitan roots, from the scenius of a big city. It is no accident that the slogan of Meetup, the éminence grise of New York start-ups, which allows groups of people with shared interests to organise face-to-face meetings, is “using the Internet to get off the Internet”. You can’t stay at home, staring at a screen all night, when there’s so much happening on your doorstep.”
  Inside the Google Books Algorithm [The Atlantic]
  • “But what about when the company has to reach outside the web? The printed volumes represented on Google Books form a completely different kind of problem. Google’s famous algorithm can’t be deployed to search through books because they don’t link to each other in the way that webpages do. There is no perfect BookRank corollary for PageRank.”
  Impure: A New Visualization Programming Language for Non-Programmers [Information Aesthetics]
  • “Impure is a new visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information. Developed by Bestiario, a Spanish information design start-up, Impure aims to bridge the link between ‘non-programmers’ and data visualization by linking information to programmatic operators, controls and visualization methods through a new visual and modular interface.”
  The Creative Phase [AVC]
  • “When we look at our portfolio and analyze what has worked and what has not, we see a high correlation between having that “creative element” firmly ensconced into the founding team and success. The teams that are engineer heavy and creative light have not worked nearly as well as the teams that are creative heavy and engineer light.”
  Seven-Inch Record Sleeves [Flickr]
  • “A gallery of – mostly – record company sleeves (as opposed to picture covers), but with a few from record shops and the occasional homemade or hand-decorated one too. No reproductions, all originals. Not in any particular order”

• Pink Ribbon Lettering [Ministry of Type]
  • “Niels Meulman of Calligraffiti (AKA Shoe) was commissioned to customise a Mercedes-Benz B-Class by the Pink Ribbon Foundation in the Netherlands. The work consists of hundreds of women’s names, representing the Dutch women the foundation works to help, and is a product of Mercedes’ sponsorship of the foundation.”
  Free internet: The librarian’s tale [The Economist]
  • “Almost all of America’s public libraries provide free internet access. Over the past two years, hard-hit Americans have been economising by cancelling their broadband contracts at home and looking to public libraries to fill the gap. At the same time, companies and government agencies are saving money by moving job applications and services online; so a rush of new visitors is arriving at libraries just as the local governments that fund them run out of money.”
  Trap Rooms [BLDGBLOG]
  • “While finalizing my slides for tonight’s lecture at SCI-Arc, I was reading again about one of my favorite topics: trap streets, or deliberate cartographic errors introduced into a map so as to catch acts of copyright infringement by rival firms. In other words, if a competitor’s map includes your “trap street”—a geographic feature that you’ve simply invented—then you (and your lawyers) will know they nicked your data, gave it a quick redesign and tried to pass it off as their own. But this strategy of willful cartographic deception is not always limited to streets: there can be trap parks, trap ponds, trap buildings. And trap rooms. “
  Why art books won’t become e-books any time soon. [Slate Magazine]
  • “Unless you’re very dedicated, and very well-traveled, most of the art and photography you’ve seen has been on the printed page as well. Will these, too, gradually be replaced with e-books? I suspect not, and I certainly hope not, but to understand why, we need to indulge in a little metaphysics.”
  Data Hacks [Jehiah Czebotar]
  • “Data Hacks is a new library we have developed at bit.ly which is a set of command line tools to assist in data analysis.”
  The Graffiti Knitting Epidemic [The Guardian]
  • “A bunch of ‘graffiti knitters’ are on the loose in the UK – hellbent on liberating us from the forces of drabness. Maddy Costa hits the streets with a woman called Deadly Knitshade”

• Rustoleum’s New Cap and the Demise of American Spray Paint [Imprint]
  Design Ethos: A Bugle of Change [Design Observer]
  • "For too long now the ethos of graphic design — the fundamental sentiment that guides the practice of design and the activities of designers — has been understood as a link between suppliers and consumers….If we do nothing more than change a few words in the key phase — from link between supplier and consumer to bridge between information and purpose — we suggest a much broader arena of activity and imply substantially increased value."
  How to be a Data Journalist [Guardian]
  • "Data journalism trainer and writer Paul Bradshaw explains how to get started in data journalism, from getting to the data to visualising it"
  Visualizing.org
  • "Making sense of complex issues through data and design."

• Journalism in the Age of Data [Stanford]
  • “Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?”
  Ten Things I Have Learned [Milton Glaser]
• Clive Thompson on the Power of Visual Thinking [Wired]
  • “In essence, I used “visual thinking”—drawing pictures to solve a problem. And if you believe the visualization experts, a new language of pictures may be precisely what we need to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.”