Catch of the Week
Ten good ideas this week, most of them made by hand. A road mural that a passing car sets in motion, buildings designed to burn, a typeface that bends like a paperclip, a book about dying with space to write in, eleven tiny handmade websites. The thread is people getting an odd idea and carefully making it anyway. Looking takes less time than reading, so this is a fast issue.
A mural that only moves if you drive past it at forty miles an hour
Hervey Garcia painted a Muybridge-style sequence along a road in Indio, California, so that passing cars animate a horse into a Pegasus into a bird. The audience supplies the motion, which is a quietly good idea about where an artwork actually happens.
The houses built by people who decided a house could be anything
Photographer Michael Schmelling spent four years documenting the hand-built homes of Northern California's back-to-the-land movement: salvaged redwood, triangular windows, octagonal footprints, no architects, a great deal of hope.
Forty years of architects building things they intend to burn
Dezeen marks Burning Man's fortieth by rounding up twelve installations from studios including BIG and Arthur Mamou-Mani. Quietly a question about what designers do differently when the brief includes an ending.
A chess problem written as a war memorial
Alexander Petrov composed a puzzle in which Napoleon begins on Moscow and is chased across the board to a3, which is Paris. The white knights are Cossack cavalry, the bishops are partisans, and every black reply is forced, which is presumably the argument.
A parliament of owls was the work of one fifteenth-century woman with a list
Juliana Barnes compiled the collective nouns for birds and beasts in the 1486 Boke of Seynt Albans, among the first books printed in English, and five centuries later we still say them without wondering who decided.
A 1973 typeface with no capitals, revived by someone who took its name literally
Tor Weibull of Kanon Foundry turned Ad Werner's Paperclip Contour into Clippy: uppercase added, the outlines filled in, and fifteen styles that bend between roman and italic the way a paperclip does. The interesting part is that it is not a restoration.
A book about death made with a former funeral professional, and it is not grim
Lisa Mouchet and Marine Prunier spent a hundred risograph pages on funeral law, funeral food and the symbols nobody looks at closely, then left room for the reader to write a will or a message. Treating a subject with dignity turns out to be a different thing from treating it carefully.
The toll-free number turned out to be a bigger idea than a phone service
99% Invisible on how 1-800 plus a credit card quietly deleted opening hours from shopping, and how a 1976 Supreme Court case let lawyers start advertising. Two stories about infrastructure changing behaviour without anyone voting on it.
Decades of early artificial intelligence, back in a browser tab
The Internet Archive has gathered vintage AI software into one collection and made it runnable again, which is a cheaper cure for the field's amnesia about its own past than most of what is being written about it.
Eleven small handmade websites, and a vote on which is the best
The Tiny Awards shortlist is the annual argument that the web can still be small, strange and made by one person on a weekend. Voting is open until 25 September.
“The details are not the details. They make the design.”
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