Meanwhile #059

This is an old edition of Meanwhile from an inferior, more simian newsletter platform that has unhelpfully severed all the hyperlinks. It’s included here in the archive simply for sake of completeness.

TypeNotes. Fontsmith's new journal dedicated to typography and graphic design is all sorts of lovely. Great design, photography, words, the lot. Deserving of the very crispest chef-fingerkiss. 

Girls on tops. It's minimal to the extreme, but there's something kind of very great about this "t-shirt celebration of female voices in film". I'll have a Laura Dern one please. 

Dictionary Stories. Love this project by Jez Burrows. Very short stories composed entirely of example sentences drawn from a variety of dictionaries, with nothing added except the odd conjunction or preposition for flavour. 

Blacklego. Blackletter type made entirely from LEGO bricks. Trying to work out how I can shoehorn this into a job.

Streets of London. We Made This are collecting pictures of and stories about London street nameplates – "they aren’t just visual anchors, telling us where we are, but are temporal anchors too, telling us where we’ve come from". 

Marbles. This 1970 Bedfordshire County Council film about the art of paper marbling will improve your week significantly. Trust me. A nice reminder that the internet isn't entirely awful.

Ladybird modernism. The rise of Ladybird books coincided with postwar reconstruction – John Grindrod explores these accidental illustrated time capsules of British modernism. 

Cutaway World. A blog dedicated to cutaway diagrams and illustrations. More than just nostalgia – this is an invaluable resource for augmented reality designers. 

Bridges, etc. What’s the best way to cross the Thames? All 63 options ranked. 

You chose wrong. A harrowing collection of Choose Your Own Adventure fates. I'd completely forgotten that my childhood was filled with so much drowning and impaling and exploding and sudden death and more impaling. 

Closets. Shannon Mattern's stuffed history of the closet; a site of storage, paranoia, aspiration and self-definition; where the past becomes space.

Block. This supercut of writers struggling with writer’s block, from Barton Fink to The Royal Tenenbaums, is painfully spot-on. Elsewhere in the typewriterverse: why I left a biotech career to repair typewriters; turn your piano into a typewriter; Lauren Wakefield talks about designing Tom Hanks' Uncommon Type. 

Poet on the shore. A robot that goes for leisurely strolls on the beach and then writes poems about its feelings in the sand. Nothing to worry about. Probably won't malfunction and go on a killing spree. Everything's fine, everything's absolutely fine.

That is all.