After discovering What Was On (1957), I became a big fan of Square America. Well, Ofer has pointed me to another image collection on the site that is not to be missed: a sequence of stills from a 1970’s IBM ad that looks like it could be a collaboration between John Baldassari and Ed Ruscha. Brilliant.

See it here.

Popularity: 17% [?]

The call for entries for Blurb’s Photography Book Now contest has come and gone and all 1796 submissions have been posted online for everyone to browse through. Now it’s just up to the fine selection of jurors to decide who will go home with the $25,000 grand prize and other awards.

Well, it’s been long enough now for me to give a good look through the entries and select a few personal favorites. In no particular order, here are some deserving titles (taking into consideration concept, design and of course the photographs):

Johnstown by Ed Panar

Cairo Sunset by Misha de Ridder

Something is Happening by John Lehr

Public School by Victoria Hely-Hutchinson

How Can We Be So Different? by Nicola Kast

Reading by Talia Chetrit

3Situations by Bill Sullivan

Angry Black Snake by Michael Corridore

The Theatre of War by Patrick Lyn

After the Fall by Hin Chua

The Daughters of Job by Alison Malone

Human Nature by M. Alexis Pike

Mid-North by Grant Willing

Fjord (edited by Alana Celii and Grant Willing)

At a Loss by Shawn Records

All My Life I Have Had The Same Dream by Will Steacy

Davey by Brian Sorg

The Marine Layer by Peter Holzhauer

Ditch Plains by Joni Sternbach

Big Rock Candy Mountain by Tammy Mecure

I’ll keep it to myself, but the book that I feel should take home the grand prize is somewhere on the above list. There are plenty of other entries to consider, so take a look at them all and decide for yourself!

Best of luck to everyone.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Thanks to Leslie, I’ve been entertaining myself for the last fifteen minutes with this great little Java applet that can turn any website into a graph.

For a simple example, see my portfolio (shanelavalette.com):

Here’s an explanation of how it works from Sala, the creator:

Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser’s job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the “View source” tab somewhere in your browser’s menu.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph.

Sala has written an applet that visualizes such a graph. As you might expect, the visualization get more interesting when there are more tags. Here’s what this blog looks like (shanelavalette.com/journal):

Curious what the colors mean?

blue: links (the A tag)
red: tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: the DIV tag
violet: images (the IMG tag)
yellow: forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Here’s Google (google.com):

Looking at the graphs themselves is interesting – in fact, there’s a Flickr group dedicated solely to these sorts of images – but the applet also animates the graphs, allowing you to watch them grow from the HTML tag, the root node. Pretty neat.

Head to the site and try it for yourself!

Popularity: 32% [?]

Early color wheel, 1708
© C.B. (presumably Claude Boutet)

Pulling from Sarah Lowengard’s text, The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe, the COLOURlovers blog put together a great article on the history of the color wheel. The article looks at the progression of color organization systems and how the wheel came to be, featuring a some great color organization examples along the way.

Read it here.

Popularity: 16% [?]

A little while back, I posted about an online archive of jazz LPs. I was thrilled to come across a similar collection of classical record sleeves. Love it.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Check out Vintage Vanguard’s great online archive of record sleeves for albums by various jazz musicians. Nice use of color, image placement and typography in some of these LPs.

In case you were wondering, “ジャズレコード館” translates from Japanese to English as “Jazz Record Mansion.”

Popularity: 19% [?]

cover and p. 1 of About 2 Squares, 1922
© El Lissitzky

In one of my classes today we spent a little while looking at and discussing this beautiful children’s book by Russian artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer, and architect (seriously!) El Lissitzky, titled About 2 Squares.

In the images above, the page on the left (the cover) translates from Russian to English as “About 2 [Squares]” and the page on the right translates as “To all, for all Children.” Lissitzky produced and sold about 3,000 copies of it in 1922 – quite a lot at that time.

The MIT Press released a great letterpress reproduction with English translations printed on a transparent overlay to register over the original Russian in 1991 – now out of print. From their website:

El Lissitzky’s first supremacist book is a story about how two squares, one red, one black, transform a world. It is Lissitzky’s “scientific romance,” an allegory of the fourth dimension and its effect on the three-dimensional world. When it was first published in Berlin in 1922, About 2 [Squares] presented a radical rethinking of what a book was, demonstrating a new way of organizing typography on a page and relating it to visual images. It marked the beginning of a new graphic art and is among the most important publications in the history of the avant-garde in typography and graphic design.

It’s really worth seeing if you can find it. Lissitzky’s vision of design and typography was brilliant for his time and he was making work that was both visually innovative and socially/politically relevant.

See more pages from About 2 Squares (with text in Russian) here.

Popularity: 24% [?]

T: 1930, 1940, 1950 B: 1960, 1970, 1980
© Pelican / Things Magazine

I’m not sure where I saw this first, so I’ll just link to the original source. Things Magazine presents the Pelican Project – an archive of covers of Pelican (now Penguin) books from the 1930s to the 1980s.

What a great image of the evolution of graphic design and typography. And it’s interesting to see the visual unity within each of the decades.

The ‘70s were golden.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Daily mail on the desk where it all took place
© Rob Haggart

Rob Haggart, the now exposed photography director behind A Photo Editor, made a great post today about promo cards. Also see the Flickr set.

Popularity: 19% [?]

screenshot of the image mosaic from The Whale Hunt
© Jonathan Harris / thewhalehunt.org

With his project The Whale Hunt, Jonathan Harris seems to have redefined the role that images can play in telling stories but, furthermore, what a complex web interface can do for the presentation of these images. Harris writes about the project,

I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.

You really have to see the website to visualize this “photographic heartbeat.”

(thanks Justin)

Popularity: 15% [?]