Here’s a great article on the birth of Field Notes, the pocket-sized journal company started up by two designers in Chicago:
The form factor of Field Notes comes directly from the agricultural Midwest. They’re based off of promotional notebooks distributed by seed and farm-equipment that Draplin began collecting on drives through the Midwest[.]
I use a Moleskine for my everyday notebook but I use a large-format Field Notes journal for work.
Browsing through Spotify’s podcast listings I stumbled across a great one: Stay Free: The Story of the Clash, narrated by none other than Chuck D. of Public Enemy. A fascinating subject, produced expertly by the BBC, and narrated by a man who is probably more punk than I’d ever really realized. My only gripe is that it’s not available on my current podcast app (Overcast, highly recommended).
Lifestyle Overland is a blog written by a husband and wife who have kitted out a FourRunner with a travel trailer and are exploring the continent. There are a lot of interesting videos and links to check out, and some ideas for working on Peer Pressure.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Hmm. A book about Ray Gun, the early 90’s magazine of art, music, and culture, is about to be published by Rizzoli. For those that aren’t familiar, it was a highly experimental magazine that rose with the advent of digital publishing and the explosion of new font creation. For design nerds it was heaven because it broke every 100-year-old rule about layout and design. $45 for 260 pages isn’t bad. (via)
This sounds exactly like something Finn would do: A girl wrote the New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, and requested she fund research into dragons and telekinesis so that she could find and learn to control a dragon. She even sent along a NZ $5 note. The PM thoughtfully declined and sent the money back with a personalized note.
Apparently the Howard County executive decided that they’re going to raze 4 buildings in Ellicott City and put in some kind of tunnel to port floodwater into the river faster. Phoenix Emporium, Discoveries, Bean Hollow and Great Panes Art Glass Studio are all facing the wrecking ball, even though they’re still privately owned. It sucks for the guy who owns the Phoenix, as he’s rebuilt twice and was up and running weeks after the second flood.
This is another great story from the midpoint of the web as we know it, right around the time I was getting out of front-end development for good and transitioning to design direction: The secret plot within YouTube to kill IE6 once and for all. Having dedicated endless hours to learning about and developing around all of the bugs in IE6, I appreciate the guerrilla motivation behind this story, and applaud the developers responsible.
This is pretty cool: The New York Times did an interactive piece on food affects climate change, and vice versa. It liberally references two WRI reports we published recently: Shifting Diets For a Sustainable Food Future and Improving Aquaculture.
What is this?
Simple Opt Out is drawing attention to opt-out data sharing and marketing practices that many people aren’t aware of (and most people don’t want), then making it easier to opt out.
It’s a site with deep links to the actual pages where you can explicitly request opting out of data sharing that you never opted into in the first place. There are a bunch on here that I need to contact tomorrow.
Wow, OK. Pitchfork gave the new Chemical Brothers album an 8.0. As an unapologetic holdout for big-beat dance and electronica, I’m happy to hear there’s at least one group still making the kind of heavy, hook-laden music I like. I will buy this.