Notable today

Hitchcock posters reimagined.

Word Project: Odd and obscure words illustrated.

Eames Century Modern: I’m in love

Obama hires Edward Tufte, “Da Vinci of information graphics”

Paul Rand on permanence

A good solution, in addition to being right, should have the potential for longevity. Yet I don’t think one can design for permanence. One designs for function, for usefulness, rightness, beauty. Permanence is up to God. — Paul Rand

Crack

There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

— Leonard Cohen

So, let light in, and let love in.

Whoever whatever

I like this. It fits into the LOST phase that we’re in right now. I wonder where this really came from.

Two Piet Heins

Saw these mostest awesomest furniture while we’re walking around in Barcelona. The only reason I can remember the designer’s name is because at first, I thought he was the Dutch poet and mathematician.

The Art of Drowning

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn’t you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn’t any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

Billy Collins

Unhappy Hipsters

Unhappy hipsters Images of cool modernist architecture meets sardonic, anti-cool captions.

via

Handwritten

Suomi Hand Script: Yes, it’s a font, but no one needs to know.

Sew everything: Sewn Letter and sewn smses and sewn PS toolbox.

Funny memo from South Parkers, and a letter from Robert Heinlein.

The only kind of tattoos I’d consider.