Keepers at Great Britain’s Port Lympne Reserve are celebrating as not one but three litters of endangered African Painted Dog puppies make their public debut — via ZooBorns
No one seemed to notice him: A dark figure who often came to stand at the edge of London’s Hammersmith Bridge on nights in 1916. No one seemed to notice, either, that during his visits he was dropping something into the River Thames. Something heavy.
Over the course of more than a hundred illicit nightly trips, this man was committing a crime—against his partner, a man who owned half of what was being heaved into the Thames, and against himself, the force that had spurred its creation. This venerable figure, founder of the legendary Doves Press and the mastermind of its typeface, was a man named TJ Cobden Sanderson. And he was taking the metal type that he had painstakingly overseen and dumping thousands of pounds of it into the river.
As a driving force in the Arts & Crafts movement in England, Cobden Sanderson championed traditional craftsmanship against the rising tides of industrialization. He was brilliant and creative, and in some ways, a luddite — because he was concerned that the typeface he had designed would be sold to a mechanized printing press after his death by his business partner, with whom he was feuding.
So, night after night, he was making it his business to bequeath
it to the river, in his words, screwing his partner out of his half of their work and destroying a legendarily beautiful typeface forever. Or so it seemed.
Almost exactly a century later, this November, a cadre of ex-military divers who work for the Port of London Authority were gearing up to descend into the Thames to look for the small metal bits—perhaps hundreds of thousands of them — that Cobden Sanderson had thrown overboard so many years ago.
They were doing this at the behest and personal expense of Robert Green, a designer who has spent years researching and recreating the lost typeface, which is available on Typespec. As Green told me over the phone recently, the Port of London Authority had been hesitant about letting him pay its diving team to search for the lost type. They were actually concerned that I was some crazy bloke looking for a needle in a haystack and throwing a couple grand away,
he laughs.
It’s not hard to imagine how crazy he must have seemed. A civilian offering to pay the city’s salvage divers to troll the depths of the muddy Thames, possibly for weeks, looking for tiny chunks of metal that were thrown there by a deranged designer more than a century ago? Yeah, that’s pretty crazy.
In the end, it only took them 20 minutes to find some — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Photo: Sam Armstrong, courtesy of The Sunday Times
At a scale of 1/1,000, these beautiful little models bring famous buildings to life but can also be fitted into whole blocks or assembled to form micro-metropolises. Available on Shapeways, IttyBlox features everything from stereotypical New York town houses to world-renowned works of architecture, including a lovely rendition of the Guggenheim at a thousandth the size of the original. Illumination from below and different thicknesses of materials above combine to allow these neat buildings to light up at night as well — via Urbanist
In his pursuit to create a suitable house for sparrows, Ryan Bruxvoort worked through multiple iterations in an effort to reach a final product called Affinity
— via designboom
I took this shot today while getting trench foot in the rain… It cracks me up… This is why I don’t jump into anything head first — at Rosamond Gifford Zoo — via Facebook
For his daughter’s third birthday DIYDad
decided to build her a bed in the shape of a VW bus, based loosely on the classic type 2
model. The idea, DIYDad explains on his website, was born out of the fact his now 6-year-old had outgrown her crib — and that he had scored an assortment of free VW Beetle parts via Craigslist. For the sake of frugality, the bus
was constructed around a metal frame bunk bed, also from Craigslist — via Make:
One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him — under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself — to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.
Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night’s pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night’s seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes’s rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck.
Fortunately for him, and adding to the Chaplinesque aspect of the night’s miseries, the deck was no more than four feet off the ground, but such was the urgency of his escape that he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air-conditioning unit, sustaining injuries that would require medical attention, cut short his baseball season, and—in the fullness of time—pit him against the mighty forces of the Alpha Tau Omega national organization, which had been waiting for him — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Silkscreen Madness! or something like that as the March towards APE continues! 3 of the 4 colours are done! Just need to print the back and the cover! This is my second edition of this book — I’ve changed the colours up a bit and added a pattern to the back — via CM Butzer Comics & Illustration
Inspired by the Kraken Mythical Merit Badge, this laser cut acrylic necklace comes from the darkest depths of the ocean straight to you. The octopus tentacles and hanging fish charm are available in several colours of acrylic, allowing you to customise your very own necklace — via Etsy
Two Maned Wolf pups were born 21 December at the Little Rock Zoo and are growing strong. The pups’ parents are Gabby
and Diego
. Gabby occasionally takes her pups out into the yard of her exhibit, allowing visitors to catch a glimpse every so often. The pups are expected to fully be out on exhibit in the next two to three months — via ZooBorns
Poor design and chaotic management by the supposedly crack team at the Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service (GDS) left huge swathes of the British government in disarray, internal documents seen by the Register reveal. The documents confirm that GDS knew its flagship initiative to move all government websites under one roof, GOV.UK, was destroying useful online services and replacing them with trendy webpages bereft of useful information.
One internal report is particularly damning. The Home Office Visa and Immigration site transitioned [to GOV.UK] without a good understanding of users and needs … there was quickly a flood of negative feedback … coming from all directions,
an insider states for the record. The report details a breakdown in fact checking described by more than one person as
general chaos
and a total nightmare
.
The disclosures paint a picture that contradicts the public image of supremely confident digital gurus modernising the British government’s many websites, and making them more efficient. For all its vaunted skills in website design, GDS had a far poorer understanding of what the public actually needed than the relevant government departments did — this, according to GDS’ own internal analysis — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The approaching cold doesn’t deter this wise mammal. Well adapted to its Arctic home and able to thrive where others struggle, the musk ox is a proud symbol of strength and resilience. Handmade with great care, every exposed stitch is carefully placed, every set of horns sculpted, textured and painted. Designed and made by hand in rural Canada, Measures 14cm x 9cm / 5.5 x 3.5 — via Etsy
People look for meaning in things, but the truth is, I was out in the garden and suddenly thought I wish I had a tiny moose
— via Squash Tea
Pod art from Chris Gugliotti
Three Lion cubs born at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium on 21 November recently showed off their playful side for the cameras. The two male cubs and one female cub were born to first-time mother Ahadi, who is providing good maternal care — via ZooBorns
Kutarq Studio have designed Carved, a set of solid wood trays that were inspired by the texture left in yogurt when eating it with a spoon — via CONTEMPORIST
Homage to Chuck Jones. Original paintings, mixed media on paper, by Mike Peraza, art director for The Lion King — via Directed by Chuck Jones
I tuned in to eBay on the old computer and bought myself 2×50 Dropper Bottles for ten pound plus shipping, sure that’s cheap and the mould quality reflects this… a bit like Mantics Miniatures lol, anyway guys I suggest that if you buy these you should like me trim the mould lines at the base so that the bottles stand straight, it sounds like I making them out to be pants they arnt I just want them standing straight on my shelf, you can buy more expensive bottles but whats the point I would rather spend the money on mini’s and other shiny things — via SON’S OF SOTHA
Square Kufic (kufi mrabba’), sometimes known as bannâ’i (masonry script
) is a particular style of Kufic that is going to allow us to create composition using the basic structural forms of the letters. Indeed, Square Kufic (abbreviated SK) is the barest of all Arabic writing styles, and an interesting precursor to pixel art, although it was originally made up of bricks and tiles and used on a large scale in architecture.
This style is absolutely not concerned with legibility: it is understood that the message, the Word, is there, and gazing upon it is enough to receive its blessing. Literacy may have been limited in the past, but beauty was always accessible to all, and it is the beauty of the pattern that matters. In its simplest form, SK is austere, and derives its beauty from the purity of its austerity; but it lends itself to clever, even playful variations only limited by one’s creativity. More than any other calligraphic practice, creating in SK feels very much like solving a puzzle, giving it particular appeal for problem-solvers — via Tuts+
A Rhinoceros calf born at the Copenhagen Zoo is the first of this endangered species to be born at the zoo in 35 years — via ZooBorns
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