Giles Hoover

Photography and design for print production

Tag: kottke

  • Beautifully Briefed 26.3: The Ides of Equal Madness

    Beautifully Briefed 26.3: The Ides of Equal Madness

    This month, some optimism, some interesting books, some creative fonts, and some fantastic photos, and somepositivity — plus a smidgen of pessimism — in the form of Adobe.

    On the whole, it’s mostly optimism, promise. And there’s butter. And a sleeping fox. And duck.

    This Month’s Spine
    Rutgers University Press. Cover design by Ashley Muehlbauer; production editor, Vincent Nordhaus.

    “Our initial direction for [the designer] was to create a clean, simple text design that conveyed crisis, dread, or the element of threat,” this title’s production editor said in response to my request for information.

    “To say that someone lit a fire under those directions is an understatement,” I wrote in this title’s commentary. “In today’s American academic reality, where every day could indeed be … shall we say, fraught, this cover takes the brief and runs straight onto the dean’s list.”

    See the rest of this month’s University Press Coverage at Spine.

    Why She’s an Optimist 

    Joan Westenberg (previously) has another great essay up about the AI doom loop — why it’s easy to believe that the downward spiral is tightening, to roughly paraphrase — and why she believes it just isn’t true:

    In 1810, 81% of the American workforce was employed in agriculture. Two hundred years later, it’s about 1%. If you had shown someone in 1810 a chart of agricultural employment decline and asked them to model the economic consequences, the only rational projection would have been apocalypse. Where would 80% of the population find work? What would they do? How would anyone eat if the farmers were all displaced by machines?

    The answer, of course, is that entirely new categories of work were created that no one in 1810 could have conceived of, and these new jobs paid dramatically more than subsistence farming. Factory work, office work, services, knowledge work, the entire apparatus of modernity: none of it was visible from the vantage point of the pre-industrial economy.    — Joan Westenberg, “Everything is Awesome”

    “The transition was brutal and uneven. [People] suffered,” she writes. “But the trajectory was real, and the people projecting permanent immiseration […] were, in the fullest sense, catastrophically wrong.”

    The essay isn’t perfect; it’s too long, and the editor failed to catch a few typos (he said, hypocritically). But … it scales. Zoomed out, it applies to more than AI.

    “The doomers may have the best stories. I believe the optimists have the best evidence,” she concludes. I agree. Or, at least, I’d like to. 

    Go read it and see whether you do.

    Great Web Moments X2
    Kottke.org 

    Kottke Turns 28. There are few websites I nod along with as often as this gem from the late ’90s, still going strong.

    Kottke.org: 47,300 posts and counting.
    Scripting.com

    Dave Winer shoots for the stars:

    We’re going to try to reboot the web.
    Doing what the social networks do, but only using the web.
    Every part replaceable.     — Dave Winer, scripting.com, “Mission Statement”

    Scripting News has been around since ’94 and if you’re even a little interested in a free web, his site is a fine place to start learning how you can contribute to keeping it free.

    Note: scripting.com is, famously, still non-https — which means that if you click on either of the above links you’re likely to get a warning that the site isn’t secure. It’s very much a safe link.

    Book Notes X3
    Oliver Munday, Head of Household
    Somehow, I expected someone older. (Courtesy of Debutful.)

    Nearly every one of his book cover designs could be called an instant favorite. He has a wry, brief expression that often delights.

    So, when he wrote a book, did he do the cover? Well … no, as it turns out — and he preferred it that way.

    Cover design by Chris Brand.

    Munday’s collection of stories has an interesting cover by industry veteran Chris Brand, and I like it — although some of the alternatives seem to me like better fits for Munday’s take on life. 

    But, of course, that’s the point: it’s not about him, it’s about his book.

    See the other book cover design drafts Brand designed for Head of Household at LitHub. (And a short Q&A.) Enjoy also this interview with the author/designer at Debutful.

    The Butter Book
    Book design by Lizzie Vaughan.

    No, it doesn’t soften when left out — or spread any larger meaning. It’s just a great book cover (and jacket).

    Chronicle gets a kick out of “things that look like other things.” We made a notepad called Pad of Butter that has been selling steadily since 2015. So, imaginations did not need to stretch when a butter-focused cookbook with a vellum jacket was proposed. It’s our “bread and butter,” so to speak.— Q&A with author Anna Stockwell and designer Lizzie Vaughan, PRINT

    “It’s important to find joy wherever you can these days and it’s hard to hate on butter,” the article says. Read the rest at PRINT.

    “Naïve” Design
    Image courtesy of the LA Times.

    The LA Times examines the latest book design trend: naïve design. (Yes, I pretentiously style that like the New Yorker does. The LA Times does not.) It’s where serious subjects wear … nostalgic cover designs, to use a phrase. Find out why.

    Parenthetically, of the covers mentioned in that article, only one — by design legend Na Kim — has found its way into my 2026 Favorite Covers folder. It’ll be a minute, but stay tuned to find out which.

    Special Bonus #1: “You’ll need a magnifying glass to read these,” says This is Colossal:

    Courtesy of the V&A Museum.

    Special Bonus #2: A favorite collectible (and slight tangent), these books “keep a lost design legacy alight,” says It’s Nice That:

    A sample from The Matchbook Book by CentreCentre. 

    Update, 1 April: CreativeBoom has a nice feature on this title as well, with additional images. Check the slipcover:

    Awesomeness courtesy of CreativeBoom.
    Fonts March Foreword
    CreativeBoom’s March Faves

    CreativeBoom‘s regular feature contains sixteen choices this month — awesome! — but I’d like to just highlight my three favorites: 

    Archibrazo by Rubén Fontana.

    “Rubén Fontana is one of the most respected figures in Latin American type design, and Archibrazo, released through TypeTogether earlier this year, represents a characteristically considered piece of work. The typeface brings together two traditions that might seem at odds: the fluidity of calligraphic practice and the hardness of sculptural form. The result is a serif family that wears its sources with confidence, without collapsing into historicism or affectation.”

    See more at TypeTogether.

    Djaggety by Alessia Mazzaarella.

    “Djaggety began in a classroom. Alessia Mazzarella of Typeland, who teaches type design to BA Graphic Design students, uses an 8×8 grid exercise as a standard introduction to letterform construction. The constraint, she explains, strips away the paralysis of infinite choice and forces students to focus on what makes a character recognisable within a tightly defined system. During one iteration of the exercise, she found herself drawn into the process rather than simply demonstrating it. […] Overall, it’s a good lesson in how constraint can generate, rather than foreclose, creative possibilities.”

    See more at Typeland.

    Musikal by Fred’s Fonts.

    “After three years in development on Future Fonts, Fred Wiltshire’s Musikal has reached v1.0: a significant milestone for a typeface that began with a conscious act of divergence. Herman Ihlenburg’s Obelisk (1880s) served as the starting point: a high-contrast, ornamental display face of considerable geometric rigour and decorative confidence. Rather than reviving Obelisk directly, Wiltshire took its ‘playful nature’ as a conceptual springboard and built something clearly of the present.”

    See more at Future Fonts.

    Letterform Archives’ New Celebration of Hand-Painted Type
    One example — I mean, who can argue with “Lettres Riches Fantaisie“?

    “A new book published by Letterform Archive, Lettres Décoratives: A Century of French Sign Painters’ Alphabets, celebrates the vivacity and timelessness of French sign painting from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Compiled from lithograph portfolios, which range from 1875 to around 1932, the volume includes more than 150 full-color reproductions of these bold lettering samples. These portfolios once served as catalogue-like albums, providing inspiration for styles and motifs that could be translated onto large billboards and small signage alike.”

    Read more about this great new book at This is Colossal or PRINT.

    Cambridge’s Old Baskerville Punches

    Heavy metal for the type crowd:

    Image courtesy of Cambridge University.

    “John Baskerville was an influential 18th-century printer and type designer; you’ve probably used (or at least heard of) the Baskerville typeface. Cambridge University has the original punches used to create his signature typeface and has made high-res digital photos of them available online,” Kottke writes. “[S]eeing close-ups of the actual cut & shaped metal from 1757 is something else.”

    In case you’re not familiar:

    The typographic punch is the initial design for the letterform and one of the first of three stages in the manufacturing of metal type: short lengths of steel onto which his letters were cut in reverse and in relief. The punch was ‘tempered’ to increase its toughness and enable its use as a tool. Secondly, the punch was struck into the surface of a softer piece of metal (copper), leaving an impression of the ‘right-reading’ character to be cast. This was called the matrix. Finally, type was manufactured when the matrix was passed to the type-caster and inserted into a mould, into which molten lead-alloy was poured. This produced a cast of the type in relief and in reverse which were then arranged to create a text block and once inked, paper could be pressed against it.

    Not just hi-res photos of punches for various sizes of type, either: some have 3D versions. Very cool.

    Special Bonus #3: The menu that never was:

    World Class Female Singers.

    Okay, okay, that’s not actually an unused menu from before Apple’s Macintosh was released in 1984, but how it came about isn’t something I’m going to quote. Instead, I’m just going to ask you to read it in full — it’s fantastic.

    Courtesy of Unsung, Marcin Wichary’s awesome blog. (Yes, he of Shift Happens fame.)

    Great Graphic Items X2
    The Tenth Muse
    Screenshot of the Tenth Muse home page.

    “The Tenth Muse is an art discovery engine. Over 120,000 artworks from museums and institutions — searchable by feeling, mood, atmosphere, era, and medium.”

    (Via Kottke.)

    AIGA NY: 50 Years of Posters
    Just one example of the many posters now available for your persual.

    “A 50-year goldmine of design: AIGA New York unveils its poster archive to the public,” It’s Nice That reports. “A newly opened window into its design archive, this unique visual library provides the public with an inside view of the design, art and activism that’s emerged from the city’s recent history. AIGA NY has ambitions for the collection to become physically accessible with an accompanying book that will showcase the posters in more depth.”

    Adobe, Yet Again
    DNG Now Standard

    Let’s start with the positive:

    “In March 2004, Australian photographer Robert Edwards asked a simple but meaningful question on Rob Galbraith’s now-defunct photography forums: ‘Could Adobe make a RAW format?’ The answer was very much ‘yes,’ and Adobe announced the DNG format, or Digital Negative, later that same year. Now, more than two decades later, DNG is now the official standard under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO),” PetaPixel writes.

    From back in the day.

    I remember lurking on Rob Galbraith site. Such were the importance of his forums — and, for that matter, the overall size and condition of the ’net in the early Aughties — that Thomas Knoll himself, one of the creators of Photoshop, would post there.

    In case you’re not familiar, a camera’s RAW file is what the sensor sees at the moment of exposure, stored in a format for later editing. It’s completely different from a JPG file, which has all the camera’s choices baked in to the final image. Sports or journalism photographers usually shoot JPG, due to the need to post immediately; social media photography is, of course, its own animal.

    Most fine photographers — that is, folks who shoot for art or pleasure, including your author — only shoot RAW, because it gives you maximum flexibility in “look.”

    I’m honestly not sure how much of a difference this will make, but it’s nice to see DNG accepted as a standard — and it’s an example of Adobe meaningfully contributing to the bigger picture. 

    Train Adobe’s AI on Your Style

    From the “mixed” department:

    It’s not tin foil.

    Adobe has launched Firefly Custom Models, “allowing artists to generate image variations that ‘more consistently reflect’ their own style, subject, or characters. 

    Adobe’s Deepa Subramaniam says, “Today, we’re expanding access to Firefly custom models, which let you turn your creative style into a reusable model trained on your own images. In this public beta release, custom models are optimized for ideation in character, illustration and photographic style.” 

    The goal of Custom Models, according to PetaPixel, is to “allow artists to train Adobe’s Firefly AI specifically to unique workflows so that when it generates content, it is more aligned with their specific style.”

    Hmmm. How ’bout practical effects? Seriously, this might turn out to be useful. Time will tell. Helmet of tin flowers and all.

    CEO Retires. Stock … Down?

    Here’s where the attitude sneaks in: most of us, present company included, are sick of Adobe’s attitude towards its customers.

    “Adobe’s longtime CEO, Shantanu Narayen, announced this week that he is stepping down after 18 years as CEO and nearly 30 years at the company. If you ask shareholders, Narayen was, for a long time, among the very best in the biz. If you ask Adobe’s core customers, the artists who were once indispensable to the company’s success, it’s a different story,” writes Jeremy Gray in an opinion piece for PetaPixel.

    Adobe made more than $7 billion in net profit last year, a clear win for shareholders. This is due to their choice to treat creatives as a profit center. But their stock is down because their AI efforts have fallen flat — Firefly is way behind Midjourney or Gemini — and the planned additional profit center has failed to materialize. 

    And by “down,” I mean significantly. During Narayen’s tenure, Adobe’s share price increased from around $40 in late 2007 when he took over to an all-time high of $688.37 in 2021. But as of this writing, it’s $243. “Although Adobe and Narayen are painting his departure as entirely the outgoing CEO’s decision,” Gray continues, “it’s easy to wonder whether tumbling share prices had something to do with the transition, or at least sped up existing plans.

    “I respect the sheer scale of what he achieved. I admire that he grew Adobe so that it could hire more great workers to build better software. But for me, Narayen’s legacy is ultimately one of treating [creatives] like an afterthought […] using our passion and love for art to boost his brand.”

    I understand that Adobe has become one the Internet’s favorite punching bags of late, and I try to distance myself from that sport (no matter the subject). But I can’t help but agree with many of the things expressed in that piece.

    Let’s hope that the future bring change, one way or another. For many professionals, Adobe essentially holds a monopoly. 

    But then, so did Microsoft.

    Special Bonus #4: Unsung asks, “Why wouldn’t everyone deserve the gift of focus?” He’s talking about the tragically-short-lived focus mode in Photoshop, wherein the user isn’t automatically shown pop-ups or blaring (bleating?) buttons regarding new features.

    I mention this because I just uninstalled Acrobat, Adobe’s PDF management program, because I couldn’t turn off the pop-ups, sharing invitations, or requests to add comments. All I wanted was to proof documents, but what I was gifted with was frustration — even anger, on days where a deadline was involved. 

    Special Bonus #5: “A slap on the wrist” is understatement writ large:

    “Canceling a software subscription is supposed to be easy — that’s what US law dictates. Adobe, however, has played fast and loose with its Creative Cloud subscriptions in the past. The company was sued by the Department of Justice in 2024 due to its practice of hiding hefty termination fees when customers signed up. The case has now been settled, with Adobe agreeing to a $75 million fine and matching free services to users of its products,” Ars Technica writes.

    The company doesn’t admit to violating the law. “While we disagree ⁠with the government’s claims and deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter,” Adobe said in a statement.

    March Photo Round-Up

    Okay, let’s switch gear and end with inspiration — even happiness.

    International Garden Photographer of the Year 2026

    Yes, you read that right: there’s an international contest for the best garden photograph. (If you want hard-hitting stuff, see Sony’s awards. There’s enough “news” in the world, so….)

    Grange Fell Last Light. Overall Winner. Photograph by Mark Hetherington.

    Soothing. The image also earned first place in the Breathing Spaces — more soothing —category, and was captured in Borrowdale in England’s Lake District; the “photograph shows heather, silver birch trees, and the warm light of sunset viewed from Grange Fell,” PetaPixel writes.

    See all the winning photographs at the contest website.

    British Wildlife
    Asleep at the Wheel. Winner, Urban Wildlife. Photograph by Simon Withyman.

    It’s a shame these are still photographs. Hearing a red fox bark in a British accent is a hoot.

    Standing Tall. Winner, Animal Portrait. Photograph by Alastair Marsh.

    Proof that excellence in photography extends to all parts of the realm. See all twenty-one winners at This is Colossal or PetaPixel.

    London Camera Exchange Photographer of the Year 2026

    Last of the items originating in the UK this month, although the excellent photographs within aren’t limited to just those countries. Some examples:

    Crossing the Curves. Winner, Street. Photograph by Helen Trust.

    “A lone cyclist moves through sweeping arcs of light and shadow at the City of Arts and Sciences. Reflections echo the architecture’s rhythm, momentarily aligning human motion with structure, symmetry, and space.”

    Saving Lives at Sea. Winner, Action. Photograph by David Lyon.

    “Captured from the shore, during a regular Newhaven training exercise.”

    Magical Uphill Lincoln. Winner, People’s Choice. Photograph by Andrew Scott.

    “This image was taken during golden hour in Lincoln. The image captures the historic streets and architecture of Lincoln as a golden sunset sets in. […] The golden glow of the sky, cobbles and light from the window add that extra dimension in terms of how the overall image works as a result.” (The description somehow missed “soothing.”)

    See all the winners at the London Camera Exchange website. Via Macfilos.

    Andrew Moore: Theater

    “Known for his atmospheric photographs of landscapes, interiors, and urban centers that feel mysteriously locked in a not-so-distant past, Andrew Moore’s enigmatic images invite us into a slippage of time,” This is Colossal writes.

    Grand Luncheonette, New York, 1996. Photograph by Andrew Moore.

    Not only great, but currently on display: Moore has a solo show running at Atlanta’s Jackson Fine Art. (Update: The show ended March 21st, darned it. I’d have gone if I’d read that properly.)

    Cinematic Plastic

    No, not current events — something better:

    Jurassic Pit. Photograph by Chuck Eiler.

    “Chicago-based photographer Chuck Eiler transforms action figures into cinematic, story-driven miniature worlds that blur the line between toy photography and film. Through meticulously crafted sets, practical effects, and careful lighting, he creates immersive scenes that bring nostalgia and storytelling to life,” PetaPixel writes.

    Apex Predators. Photograph by Chuck Eiler.

    Awesome. (And available as prints, in case you want for your sandbox walls.)

    Finally: Duck This

    Last month saw the incredible fresh pasta camera. Well, in case you think I only recommend a vegetarian lifestyle, there’s…:

    Four Minutes in London.

    Martin Cheung’s Chinese roast duckcam. 

    Presumably, he throws a fresh camera into the oven every time he needs one: “I will continue making Duckcam while I travel, so next time when you see a person with a roasted duck on a tripod, please say hello to me.”

    Enjoy your spring, everyone!

  • Beautifully Briefed, 25.11: More than Turkey Here

    Beautifully Briefed, 25.11: More than Turkey Here

    This month, the usual fontastic newness and photographic excellence. and I veer into nostalgia — maybe, perhaps, soapboxing — for the web’s “old days.” Also, for those in the U.S., I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Pack up your leftovers and settle in.

    University Press Coverage on Spine

    This month’s column has some good stuff — On Gaslighting has been a favorite for a minute, and Post-Weird is pretty much guaranteed to make an appearance in January — but I thought I’d give the first of two shout-outs to the University of Georgia:

    Cover design by Erin Kirk.

    Check out my regular column at Spine. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for the other UGA mention below.

    50, Mega: It’s all Auld Neue
    CreativeBoom: 50 Fonts for 2025
    Hatton by Pengram Pengram.

    In their annual feature (previously), CreativeBoom lists fifty fonts that “will be popular with designers in 2025.” Most are paid, a few are free, and several are awesome.

    Neue Machina by Pengram Pengram.

    It’s sometimes hard to see — yes, a new website is on the radar — but there are links in the captions if you’re interested. (Just to the website; I don’t do affiliate links, full stop.)

    RST Thermal by Reset.

    See the whole list.

    Megazoid
    DJR’s mega effort. The website is cool, too.

    Described by Kottke as having “Radio Shack vibes,” David Jonathan Ross — DJR — brings us this retro-futuristic fantastic-ness, to coin a term.

    Auld English
    A “playful experiment” that is, in fact, quite a bit more.

    In addition to the “Mock Tutor” long-s character (optional), it’ll even (temporarily) change your spelling to proper English, none of this American stuff. Oh, and it looks properly auld school. Free for personal use, with licensing for professional use.

    Special Bonus #1: 90 years of Penguin type, brought to you by CreativeBoom.

    I must be getting old, Part One: Griping
    Needy Software
    A detail of the advertisement in the print edition (!) of The Onion.

    The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.

    — About Us page, theonion.com

    “It is an incredibly competitive market for Creative Software. Adobe knows the best way to stay relevant in a space with so many options is to provide their customers with incremental adjustments and AI-powered conveniences to improve their birthday invitations on a monthly basis, all at a fluctuating yearly price point,” The Onion tells PetaPixel in an email. “This is the kind of ingenuity and integrity we are proud to advertise in America’s Finest News Source.”

    Meanwhile, Pixel Envy points us to a post by Nakita Prokopov — no, I’ve never heard of him either — with an incredibly salient point: that software has gone from something we need … to something that needs us.

    The company needs to announce a new feature and makes a popup window about it. Read this again: The company. Needs. It’s not even about the user. Never has been.

    Both of those are worth a read — but it’s the notation after the quote that makes the Pixel Envy post special: mention of Photoshop’s “Quiet Mode.”

    Wait. What?

    That’s right: Adobe actually recognizes that it’s gone so overboard with it’s notifications, blue dots, pop-ups, and helpful “feature introductions” that it’s invented a preference setting to reduce — not eliminate, ’cause — interruptions to your workflow.

    Now all they need to do is bring it to InDesign, Lightroom, Illustrator, ….

    Cracker Barrel: Falsehoods, Cheesy Falsehoods, and Statistics

    CreativeBoom usually works for me: more content than not, if you know what I mean. (The article on typography and Penguin linked above, for instance.) Alas, their recent article on Cracker Barrel — “The Cracker Barrel rebrand: a $100M masterclass in brand value” — so widely missed the mark that it’s shameful.

    All because the author is speaking to a fixed narrative instead of the facts.

    “When Cracker Barrel’s shiny new look caused its stock to drop by almost $200 million, the internet laughed. But buried in the chaos was a golden lesson: what happens when you forget that brand isn’t just visuals—it’s value, emotion, and culture, all rolled into one,” writes Cat How, a founder and executive creative director of How&How branding agency and, apparently, her real name. (“A former journalist and design critic, she leads climate and mentorship initiatives including GetSet and GetEven, and […] an Ambassador for UN Women,” her bio reads.)

    The thing is: her journalism is at issue here. But what gives me, basically a nobody, the right to say that? Well, thank Brand New.

    That website is subscription, so I’ll have to summarize their brief post. No, to heck with that, I’ll quote it in its entirety:

    Cyabra, which offers an AI platform that shields companies and governments by uncovering fake profiles, harmful narratives, GenAI content, deepfakes, and other digital misinformation, analyzed the Cracker Barrel backlash and found that 21% of profiles discussing its logo change were fake accounts orchestrating a coordinated disinformation campaign that, in turn, triggered thousands of direct engagements from real profiles, which is when things start to snowball. This, apparently, is a full-fledged business known as Rage Farms, deploying bots to purposely harm brands. 

    — Armin Vit, Brand New

    Those twenty-one percent of profiles discussing Cracker Barrel’s logo change were identified “as fake accounts orchestrating a coordinated disinformation campaign, whose […] content reached over 4.4 million potential views and thousands of authentic profiles’ engagements, [and that] manufactured outrage correlated with a 10.5% stock price drop,” and, viola, $100M in market value, Cyabra writes.

    “Disinformation-as-a-Service” has become a profitable, global criminal enterprise: low-cost, high-impact bot networks hired to attack and destroy businesses and individuals … like you. And the social media platforms that could stop them won’t, because chaos is profitable. Propelled by AI, these strikes are targeting brands big and small. And the financial consequences are real — sliding stock prices, damaged brand equity, ruined careers.

    — Mark Schaefer, businessgrow.com

    That second quote, a follow-up to Cyabra’s post, is worth reading.

    Now, to be clear: without complete information, Cat How’s post at CreativeBoom seems legit. But with that information, published almost a week before, it’s exactly what those fake profiles were after: justifying something when it shouldn’t be — and damaging reputations, including Cat How’s.

    “One wonders how often this occurs,” he said … without a trace of snark.

    Special Bonus #2: Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era. “This is likely not the first story you have read about a freelancer managing to land bylines in prestigious publications thanks to dependency on A.I. tools,” Pixel Envy‘s Nick Heer writes, “but it is one told very well.”

    Special Bonus #3: Things do not necessarily need to be an outright fake to contribute to the problem. Many of you might have seen this image:

    Accomplished, complicated, and … not quite what it seems.

    PetaPixel speaks glowingly of the process, the coordination, and laps up the marketing. But: it’s a composite. Interesting parts made with a good deal of effort — but made into something implied to be awesome when, in fact, it’s Photoshop.

    I must be getting old, Part Two: Those Were the Days

    Elizabeth Spiers, “Requiem for Early Blogging”:

    The growth of social media in particular has wiped out a particular kind of blogging that I sometimes miss: a text-based dialogue between bloggers that required more thought and care than dashing off 180 or 240 characters and calling it a day. In order to participate in the dialogue, you had to invest some effort in what media professionals now call “building an audience” and you couldn’t do that simply by shitposting or responding in facile ways to real arguments.

    There’s a part of me that hopes that the most toxic social media platforms will quietly implode because they’re not conducive to it, but that is wishcasting; as long as there are capitalist incentives behind them, they probably won’t. I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.

    — Elizabeth Spiers

    A progressive columnist, Spiers makes the argument that it is possible to work against the rage that so dominates at the moment; if you’ve not heard of her, she says, “Whether I like it or not, the first line of my obituary will probably be that I was the founding editor of Gawker.com.”

    As a reminder, I don’t participate in social media. What I have to say is said here, on the record, under my own name, with all the consequences that entails. (Especially this month.) I’m old school enough — I’ve been blogging since the ’90s — to expect want any responses to be posted in a similar venue: a conversation between people rather than a fight between usernames.

    Special Bonus #4: Doc Searls, old school emeritus, suggests that it is, in fact, appropriate to capitalize: Internet and Web, even if there’s a “the” involved. On the other hand, Dave Winer, arguably the most emeritus of the old school, doesn’t. Section 7.85 of the Chicago Manual of Style says no — but Doc’s argument is a strong one.

    While We’re On the Subject of Social Media…

    Short-form video platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are now a major part of daily life for many people. Our synthesis of 71 studies revealed that greater engagement with these platforms is associated with poorer cognitive and mental health in both youths and adults.

    — 2025 American Psychological Association study

    One fix? Art. According to The Guardian:

    The research clearly shows the stress-reducing properties of viewing original art and its ability to simultaneously excite, engage and arouse us. Stress hormones and inflammatory markers […] are linked to a wide range of health problems, from heart disease and diabetes to anxiety and depression. The fact that viewing original art lowered these markers suggests that cultural experiences may play a real role in protecting both mind and body.

    — Dr Tony Woods, researcher, King’s College London

    “It’s always a good time to look at art,” Kottke writes, pointing to Korean artist Lee Hyun-Joung’s work, Poetic Texture:

    Artwork by Lee Hyun-Joung.

    We all need museum breaks — make time whenever you can. Even if it’s from home.

    Special Bonus #5: I would argue that the average reader of this blog would suggest books, too; check out LitHub‘s interviews with National Book Awards Finalists for some worthwhile titles.

    November’s Photography Round-Up
    UGA: Rural Churches

    For a while, I had it on my list to do a photographic tour of rural and abandoned churches across Georgia. There are a ton, and some of them are quite photogenic.

    This one in Talbotton,1I took the opportunity to remaster these photographs to both correct an unnoticed error and for better consistency between the photographs taken in 2022 and those in 2025. for instance:

    Historic Zion Episcopal Church, Circa 1848, Talbotton, Georgia
    Zion Episcopal Church (Detail #3), Talbotton, Georgia

    Alas, that project faded in importance, partially because I learned of the first volume of … you guessed it, Historic Rural Churches of Georgia, from UGA Press.

    Now there’s a second volume — and a bundle — available. Check ’em out.

    Oregon’s Trail of Tears, Photographed

    While we’re on the subject of interesting photography projects, this one is worth notice: retracing one of America’s (all-too-many) Trail of Tears:

    Photography by Nolan Streitberger.

    By any measure, photographer Nolan Streitberger has built a practice that bridges art, history, and the profoundly personal. His work, particularly his acclaimed project Oregon’s Trail of Tears, transforms beautiful photography into both historical document and dialogue, a means of reclaiming memory and giving voice to stories long overlooked.

    — Kate Garibaldi, PetaPixel

    Done manually, using a wet-plate, Eastman No. 33A large-format camera from 1935, he’s done something extraordinary. Take a moment and explore this great work.

    Where George Orwell Wrote 1984

    Another large-format discovery:

    Jura Stream, Scotland. Photograph by Craig Easton.

    “Easton’s interior photographs of household items perfectly capture the simplicity of Orwell’s life[.] Collectively, they create an atmospheric vision of Orwell’s time on the island and the mood, desire and hope he experienced,” PetaPixel writes.

    Table Still Life, Scotland. Photograph by Craig Easton.

    Get the story.

    Close-Up Photographer of the Year Shortlist, 2025
    Fatal Jump. Photograph by Bence Mate.

    Some great stuff to peruse — admittedly, most long-list than shortlist — in multiple categories of natural subjects at the website. The winners will be announced in January.

    Farewell to Autumn. Photograph by Catherine Illsley.

    Via This is Colossal.

    Nature Photographer of the Year, 2025
    Overall Winner: Sundance. Photograph by Åsmund Keilen.

    Another in the “annual treat” category, this European contest features some incredibly accomplished work.

    Chamois. Photograph by Jakubowski Radomir.

    See a round-up at PetaPixel or visit the contest’s website.

    British Photography Awards, 2025

    Standard photography contest, perhaps, but I swear there’s a bit of that uniquely British humor showing.

    Bar Hair Day. Photograph by Jayne Bond.

    If you’ve ever been close up to a pelican, you’ll know that they’re neither small nor particularly friendly; this great shot ably demonstrates both.

    While we’re on the subject of neither small nor particulately (sic) friendly:

    Shadows of Industry. Photograph by Harvey Tomlinson.

    Imagine living there. No, don’t: go enjoy the other winners instead. (Via PetaPixel.)

    Royal Photographic Society Awards, 2025

    The Royal Photographic Society Awards began 147 years ago — the world’s oldest — celebrating photography as an art form.

    This shot, for instance, taken without a camera:

    Full Moon, Hawthorn. Artwork by Susan Derges.

    The RPS notes that Derges’ photographic work explores humanity’s relationship to the natural world, often by bringing natural phenomena to life in the photographic medium in new and exciting ways. For example, Derges has exposed the physical movement of rivers and oceans onto photosensitive materials at night using moonlight, carefully composing plants and other natural matter in front of photosensitive paper, and then exposing it to light, and exposing photosensitive materials to sound waves, letting the frequencies create the final prints.

    — Jeremy Gray, PetaPixel

    Plenty of other deserving artists, as well, but they use cameras:

    Artic Heroes, Ittoqqortoomiit Storm. Photograph by Ragnar Axelsson.

    See the website for all the honorees. (Via PetaPixel.)

    Best Nature Photography, 2026 Showcase

    No, you read that right: the first winners of next year, from the North American Nature Photography Association:

    Cormorant Diving. Photograph by Kevin Lohman.

    Most of these contain detail best seen at larger sizes. (See the website.) Well, okay, except maybe this one, which is cute at any size:

    Fox Kit with Helper. Photograph by Marcia Walters.
    Thank You for Visiting

    That’s it from here for November. I still owe you coverage of AIGA’s 50 Books|50 Covers (update: posted); weather permitting, there will be a new photography gallery mid-month; there will, of course, another Beautifully Briefed at the turn of 2026; and, don’t forget my annual Favorite Book Covers post mid-January. Please have a happy and healthy holiday season.

    • 1
      I took the opportunity to remaster these photographs to both correct an unnoticed error and for better consistency between the photographs taken in 2022 and those in 2025.
  • Beautifully Briefed 25.10: [Blank] of the Century

    Beautifully Briefed 25.10: [Blank] of the Century

    In this episode, design whims and wins, fontastic links, a Toyota Century, and the monthly round-up of great photography bracket some thoughts on — what else? — AI, especially as it relates to art. Grab a beverage, brush, or a comfy chair, and let’s dig in.

    This Month’s Spine
    New York University Press. Cover design by Devon Manney, art director, Rachel Perkins.

    One could argue that this cover — and title — could work well even if the word “climate” was removed. See the whole list of University Press goodness.

    And check back for a special, mid-month post in honor of University Press week, Nov. 10–14.

    Good Movies as Old Books, Revisited

    Let’s start with something great: Steven Heller highlights the “talent and imagination” of Matt Stevens (previously) as the paperback version of his book, Good Movies as Old Books, becomes available.

    Cover design by Matt Stevens.
    Cover design by Matt Stevens.

    “My goal with the style was to try new things and create interesting combinations. Oftentimes, I was trying to do something that had not been done for a particular film,” Stevens says. Short and fun, the PRINT interview is worth a few minutes of your time.

    Old-Fashioned Methods, Delightfully Off-Kilter Results

    While we’re on the subject of movies, let’s slip closer to … well, what passes for reality these days: items “steeped in human anxieties and fever dreams.” It’s Nice That highlights poster and title design for films by Greek artist Vasilis Marmatakis.

    Design by Vasilis Marmatakis.

    With design, much like life itself, Vasilis says that his posters are his honest reactions to the films. The same approach runs like a red thread throughout his work, each poster leaning a little too heavily into one of the film’s themes. […] In Bugonia, Vasilis consciously restricts superfluous elements and allows the frames to breathe.

    — Arman Kahn, It’s Nice That
    Design by Vasilis Marmatakis.

    Even the font — and how it’s used — is interesting: the freely-available Churchward Roundsquare, customized with brush and ink. That and much more is discussed in this great article.

    New Vintage Classics Series

    It’s unusual not to relish a new set of reissues from Vintage, and the new editions of Julio Cortázar are no exception:

    Book design by Stephen Smith; art director, Suzanne Dean.

    The always great — and not mentioned often enough — Casual Optimist has more.

    Special Bonus #1: Via Kottke, Na Kim’s self-portrait:

    Fascist Posters, Italian Style

    Also via Kottke are these posters, which evoke a certain … something:

    In a fascist movement inspired by art, how does the fascist government influence the artists living in its grasp? This exhibition explores how Benito Mussolini’s government created a broad-reaching culture that grew with and into the Futurist movement to claw into advertising, propaganda, and the very heart of the nation he commanded.

    — Poster House exhibition The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy.

    The exhibit features “some of the best posters produced during the worst period in modern Italian history.” See more.

    Special Bonus #2: While we’re perusing the poster department, Archinect‘s ongoing lecture series (previously) has another winner:

    Fontastic Fall
    New for October

    CreativeBoom‘s monthly roundup is out, and while Grundtvig is retrotastic and the three-axis variable Pranzo is accompanied by some great illustrations, it’s Jovie that I’d love to use in print project:

    “Jovie’s character emerges through its soft-serif approach, which tempers traditional serif authority with contemporary approachability. Playful italics, expressive alternates, swashes, and ligatures provide designers with a rich typographic palette, whilst maintaining coherent family relationships across all variations,” they note. (Another variable-width item, too.) Great stuff.

    Custom Type is Everywhere, It Seems

    Meanwhile, custom type for branding is becoming the norm. In another article, CreativeBoom explains why: “Bespoke letterforms are no longer a “nice-to-have” and they are increasingly seen as a strategic necessity[.] Type has become the glue that holds their voice together,” they write.

    Those letters are your brand’s voice. They do the heavy lifting, they carry personality, and they create instant recognition – sometimes without the need for any other distinctive assets. […] Typography is everywhere in a brand system – packaging, products, campaigns, interfaces. When you build your own, you’re not at the mercy of someone else’s design choices, and you get a voice that’s tuned to your values, your audiences, and your long-term ambitions.

    — Frankie Guzi, business director, Studio DRAMA.

    Elizabeth Goodspeed (previously) agrees, mostly. “For most of the 20th century, branding treated typography as background, not backbone,” she writes. But now, brands are recognizing that, “[a]s a primary container for meaning, typography inevitably carries an enormous share of that emotional load.”

    An exception to the rule: a type gem — with legs! — from 1971.

    But, she cautions, “[s]peed also feeds a kind of conceptual shallowness. With so many studios drawing type, the market has been flooded with fonts that solve narrow visual problems but can’t stand up to long-term use. Too often, new brand fonts cling to a single gimmick while leaving the structure of the letters untouched.”

    Read the rest at It’s Nice That.

    AI All the things
    The Oatmeal, penned by Matthew Inman, has some thoughts on AI.

    The new-to-me FlowingData — via Kottke’s rolodex feature — first pointed me to this piece, and it’s gotten a ton of press. In summary, Inman suggests that AI art causes a certain discomfort; that, perhaps, AI art even deserves air quotes around the word art because it’s somehow less than “actual” art.

    Indeed, much of that press has been approving: a pile-on of people (not that such things happen on the internet) saying, “yes, AI art deserves those air quotes. It is less.”

    One of my favorite reactions was from Nick Heer:

    A good question to ask when looking at an artwork is “who made this?”, and learning more about what motivated them and what influences they had. This is a vast opportunity for learning about art of all mediums, and it even applies to commercial projects. Sometimes I look up the portfolios of photographers I find on stock image sites; their non-stock work is often interesting and different. There is potential for asking both questions of A.I.-assisted works in the hands of interesting artists. But it is too often a tool used to circumvent the process entirely, producing work that has nothing to offer beyond its technical accomplishment.

    — Nick Heer, Pixel Envy

    “Who made this?” is the right question — to start. But let’s take that a step further.

    John Gruber, at Daring Fireball, quotes the piece: “[When] I find out that it’s AI art[,] I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bit bored. This feeling isn’t a choice.” Then says that he fundamentally disagrees with that premise:

    I think it very much is a choice. If your opinion about a work of art changes after you find out which tools were used to make it, or who the artist is or what they’ve done, you’re no longer judging the art. You’re making a choice not to form your opinion based on the work itself, but rather on something else. […] Stanley Kubrick said, “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.” If an image, a song, a poem, or video evokes affection in your heart, and then that affection dissipates when you learn what tools were used to create it, that’s not a test of the work of art itself. To me it’s no different than losing affection for a movie only upon learning that special effects were created digitally, not practically. Or whether a movie — or a photograph — was shot using a digital camera or on film. Or whether a novel was written using a computer or with pen and paper.

    — John Gruber, Daring Fireball

    “Good art is being made with AI tools, though, and more — much more — is coming,” he says. Over the next few days, he cited some examples, including David Hockney’s art made with a Xerox machine, and then this:

    Jonathan Hoefler’s ongoing series, called Apocryphal Inventions.

    The objects in the Apocryphal Inventions series are technical chimeras, intentional misdirections coaxed from the generative AI platform Midjourney. Instead of iterating on the system’s early drafts to create ever more accurate renderings of real-world objects, creator Jonathan Hoefler subverted the system to refine and intensify its most intriguing misunderstandings, pushing the software to create beguiling, aestheticized nonsense. Some images have been retouched to make them more plausible; others have been left intact, appearing exactly as generated by the software. The accompanying descriptions, written by the author, offer fictitious backstories rooted in historical fact, which suggest how each of these inventions might have come to be.

    These images represent some of AI’s most intriguing answers to confounding questions — an inversion of the more urgent debate, in which it is humanity that must confront the difficult and existential questions posed by artificial intelligence.

    — Jonathan Hoefler

    “This is art,” Gruber says, with no other text. I don’t think any other is needed.

    On a Related Note
    This is AI.

    “The top 200 photographers requested by Midjourney users have been exclusively revealed to PetaPixel — and it’s a world-famous, still active photographer that tops the list.” I bet you can guess who that is.

    This is, in fact, the majority of what Inman was thinking — or at least, feeling — when he drew out an argument on why AI art can be such a let-down, both intellectually and emotionally. The above “photograph” is both awesome and hugely disappointing at the same time.

    Further Reading

    I’m not qualified to speak with any authority on the state or potential future of AI, AGI (artificial general intelligence), or the continuing convergence of AI with … well, all the things. I will say that, to me, there’s a palpable sense of bubble going on; whether financial, material, or resource requirements, it feels like something is going to need to give fairly soon.

    Below are several articles on the intersection of AI with life, culture, or art that I found valuable. If you can set aside a few minutes, the information provided could be helpful in the quest to stay informed:

    Side Note: I’ve dropped the punctuation in “AI.” Not unlike capitalizing “Internet,” I think we’ve crossed that bridge.

    Special Bonus #3: AI apparently overuses em dashes, something that has, frankly, caused me to use them less. Which is a good thing — I overuse them. But then, I am a professional. [That’s only funny if you’ve read the link. —Ed.]

    The Century Coupé Concept

    Toyota (the company) has reorganized: there are now three levels. There’s Toyota (the car line), for the mass market; Lexus, Japan’s first answer to BMW et al from the late ’80s and also very much mass market (if targeted differently); and now, to compete in the ultra-high-end market, Century:

    Long hood, imposing “grille” — trend, recycling, or cliché, depending on outlook.
    The no-rear-window thing continues to grow in popularity. (For “cocooning.”) Hmph.

    Powertrain is yet to be determined; the rumors suggest it’ll be available both with a combustion engine (possibly a V12) and electric drive. In the case of the latter, owners will, of course, be able to send their driver off to get the thing charged while they lunch or plot takeovers — no range anxiety here.

    Century’s logo is a phoenix.

    Car geeks will know that Toyota’s Century sedan model has been around forever. It’s always been badged as a Toyota, and is aimed at Japanese executives and members of state (and will, in fact, still be produced). It was joined a few years ago by a SUV that bears more than a passing resemblance to a Rolls-Royce Cullinan. Both existing Century models available only in Japan and China.

    The 2025 Century SUV. That D-pillar absolutely “borrows” from the Cullinan.

    Toyota has decided to make those three models into a new brand that’s just called, “Century.” It’s going to be set up with exclusive dealers, eventually be available worldwide, and compete with Bentley’s new EXP 15 (previously) and Rolls-Royce’s … everything.

    And, of course, Jaguar. The elephant in the room get a mention here because it’s looking more and more like JLR made the right call in targeting one-percenters with out-there, vaguely coupe-like designs. Because if the Century SUV resembles a Cullinan, the new coupé concept looks like a cross between the Jaguar Type 00 concept and said Bentley:

    The Bentley EXP15, top, with the Jaguar Type 00, bottom.

    Very much unlike the Jag, which is low and could possibly be described as “sleek,” the Toyota has a higher stance; a coupé/sedan and SUV mix seems to be a new answer to the so-called “death of the sedan.” Volvo’s ES 90 might also apply here.

    Bear in mind that I’m not talking about the coupé-style SUVs (BMW’s X6, for instance), which are a different animal — at least for now. It’s possible the whole class of “coupe-like things” might converge in the not-too-distant future.

    That being said, a member of that new class of vehicle being aimed at the chauffeur-driven market is new.

    The glass divider is to allow the chauffeured their privacy.

    One more item: The old-school isn’t going quietly.

    Did someone mention grille? (Lit, naturally.)
    Leaving the hood long behind.

    Mercedes is, arguably, the best (non-American manufacturer) at displaying “gangster” qualities. Oh, and check out the awesomely-retro interior:

    Note the lack of screens amongst that vintage style. And yes, velour is “in.”

    Read more about the Toyota (teaser or intro, both at The Drive) or Mercedes (The Drive, Wallpaper*).

    Special Bonus #4: Audi poached the Type 00’s designer. His first showing is the Concept C, Audi’s return to form, called “radical simplicity.” It’s a cross between their sports-driven R8 and designer-driver TT:

    Love the wheels. The grille less so (there have been dictator comparisons), and the lack of rear window not at all.
    October’s Photography Round-Up
    2x Film
    Grays Fisheries, Bradford (UK), left standing during inner city slum clearance. Photograph by Ian Beesley, 1977.

    From an interesting and moving feature at MacFilos, “Capturing the decline of industries and communities with a Leica M6”:

    At my recent career retrospective exhibition “Life” at Salt’s Mill, Saltaire (a world heritage centre near Bradford, West Yorkshire, England), a man came to talk to me. He said, “You won’t remember me, but I remember you. I worked in a camera shop in Bradford, and you were always coming in to buy rolls of black and white film. It makes me so proud to think that the film I sold you created some of these wonderful photographs.”

    I take this as a great compliment and a very moving one. It is one of the reasons why I decided to donate my entire archive of negatives, prints, notebooks (over 200,000 items) to Bradford City Art Galleries and Museums. I am hanging on to my Leica M6 for a bit longer, but at some point, it will be re-united with all the negatives it created.

    — Ian Beesley, MacFilos
    “Rocky Mountains On Wetplate Collodion,” Canada. Photograph by Bill Hao.

    “The Analog Sparks 2025 International Film Photography Awards celebrate analog photography as a medium and elevate the best film photographers worldwide,” PetaPixel writes. Some excellent reminders that sometimes, the old ways are still the best ways.

    Color and Pano
    “Beholders No. 1.” Photograph by Li Sun.

    “All About Photo Magazine unveiled the winners of its latest competition: Colors. The 25 prize-winning photographers demonstrate how powerful color can be in images, whether it’s vibrant, subtle, or minimal,” PetaPixel writes.

    To be honest: at first, I thought this was a coin-operated binocular thing you see at attractions or overlooks, and laughed out loud. Alas, the laughter died away when I realized it was, in fact, CCTV — an overlook of an entirely different kind. I guess there’s a certain irony in the “face.”

    The Mirror, Valencia, Spain. Photograph by Anto Camacho Villaneuva.

    It is possible to recognize a Santiago Calatrava building immediately, with its soaring, often winged structures. (The World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York springs to mind, for instance.) This panoramic photograph captures two of them — nice.

    A press release from Epson, the contest’s sponsor, notes that this year there was a “prevalence of ultra-wide panoramas and increasingly innovative perspectives, including very low angles, very close-up subjects, and aerial photography,” including the above. PetaPixel has more.

    Birds and Wildlife
    “Snowstorm,” Germany. Bronze Award, Best Portrait. Photograph by Luca Lorenz.

    “The 2025 Bird Photographer of the Year gives a lesson in planning and patience,” This is Colossal writes about this year’s contest winners (specifically, regarding the photo seen at the right in the header image) — but getting the cold shot, above, wasn’t an easy thing either. (See also: PetaPixel‘s plumage article.)

    “Ghost Town Visitor,” Kolmanskop, Namibia. Winner, Urban Wildlife and Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025. Photograph by Wim van den Heever.

    From PetaPixel‘s coverage of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025 contest: “Capturing the unusual intersection between nature and abandoned urban spaces, Wim’s photograph is a haunting yet captivating image of a brown hyena wandering through the skeletal remains of Kolmanskop, Namibia’s long-deserted diamond mining town. The shot was taken with a camera trap and is the result of a decade-long effort that began when Van den Heever first discovered the animal’s tracks at the site.” [Emphasis mine.] See This is Colossal‘s post, too.

    Comedy and Dogs

    To round out this month’s super-long post — thanks for bearing with me — something from the light-hearted department:

    “It is tough being a duck.” Photograph by John Speirs.
    “Bad Hair Day!” Photograph by Christy Grinton.

    The Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards, 2025 edition, brings us 40 … um, moments. Awesome. PetaPixel has all the winners.

    “Suppertime,” winner of the Open category. Photograph by Katie Brockman.

    “Good Boys and Girls,” PetaPixel barks, regarding the 2025 Dog Photographer of the Year. (In the name of equal-opportunity pet celebration, I chose one that includes cats.)

    Have a great Halloween. If you’re in the US, be sure to vote, Tuesday, Nov. 4th. And, don’t forget to check back for the special Spine post, Nov. 10th. Thank you!

  • Beautifully Briefed 25.9: Generous

    Beautifully Briefed 25.9: Generous

    It’s fontastic, illustrative, and full of imagery: your beginning-of-fall design round-up here on Foreword. (And A.I., because it’s everywhere.) Enjoy.

    This month on Spine

    A fun and interesting University Press Coverage post on Spine when you have a moment, including this title from the University of Nebraska:

    That was not a simple photograph to set up. Awesome.

    Generative Book Cover Design

    How 2 Shout Media presents a how-to: 20 cover design prompts for ChatGPT. “Creating the perfect book cover starts with the right vision — and that’s where ChatGPT transforms from a writing assistant into your creative design partner.” (Emphasis theirs.)

    There are, for instance, specifics on “the anatomy of an effective prompt” and how to customize the provided templates; they even provide bonus templates to save and reuse, including one to quickly iterate on previous output.

    The article contains some good advice, honestly, but the most relevant suggestion — to “[t]hink of ChatGPT as [a] creative director who provides vision and direction rather than final artwork” — is buried at the bottom of a fairly long page. I’m willing to get there are more than a few (especially in the self-publishing space) who read this as the definitive how-to . . . possibly without judging the output versus what a professional can create.

    This cover sample is far and away the best of the eight illustrated options:

    The prompt: “Design a literary fiction cover for ‘[Title]’ using a single continuous brushstroke that forms both an abstract landscape and a human profile when viewed differently—an optical illusion revealing loneliness and connection. Executed in indigo ink wash on cream paper texture. The brushstroke starts thick and confident, becoming increasingly fragmented and uncertain. Minimal color palette: indigo, cream, with one tiny spot of cadmium red as a focal point (perhaps a bird or flower). Title integrated into the negative space using a classic Garamond variant, appearing to be part of the original artwork. Author name in small, understated caps at bottom. Overall feeling: wistful, sophisticated, gallery-worthy.”

    Take a moment to compare the output with the prompt, and you’ll see the generated output ignores several of the items, but overall, is kinda — sorta — close.

    The other examples not so much. But I’m not going to spoil the whole thing: Go and see for yourself.

    For now, I’d suggest that book design professionals — those that make a living from the art and science that is publishing excellence — are safe. Other professionals in the industry recognize what talent is and how valuable it is, and the designers themselves can take advantage of the power that some of these models offer to help brainstorm.

    That said, today’s A.I. models are gaining quality at a rapid rate. In 5–10 years, at most, publishers (and authors self-publishing) that might not recognize that they’re best served by professionals — or those who don’t have the budget, despite the recognition — will have access to what might very well be “good enough.”

    From Your Intelligence to Artificial Intelligence

    So, where do the A.I. engines get their training material? From you and yours, of course; to quote a source we’ll get to in a moment, “[i]n writing this […] I am acutely aware it will become part of a training data set.” Some sites, such as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, have seen an exponential upswing in traffic — all from the so-called “bots,” programs sweeping internet content into the never-satisfied regurgitation chamber that is today’s ChatGPT, Claude, and others.1One of the reasons my photography, as presented both here on Foreword and in the galleries, is both relatively lo-res and watermarked is to preserve a sense of ownership; likewise, one of the (many) reasons I no longer participate in social media is due to posts specifically being used to train A.I. — Instagram/Meta, for instance.

    Ars Technica and Pixel Envy both highlight a new program, modeled on Really Simple Syndication (RSS), designed to “block bots that don’t fairly compensate creators for content.”

    To quote Doug Leeds, the founder, “A.I. companies know that they need a constant stream of fresh content to keep their tools relevant and to continually innovate.” The “Really Simple Licensing” (RSL) standard evolves robots.txt instructions by adding an automated licensing layer that’s designed to block bots that don’t fairly compensate creators for content.

    Free for any publisher to use starting today, the RSL standard is an open, decentralized protocol that makes clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation of any content used to train A.I[.]
    The new standard supports “a range of licensing, usage, and royalty models, including free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl (publishers get compensated every time an AI application crawls their content), and pay-per-inference (publishers get compensated every time an AI application uses their content to generate a response).”

    — RSL Press Release

    But — and it’s a big “but” — RSL is only one response to the problem. Another is to wall content off entirely, breaking one of the most valuable qualities of the internet itself: its openness.

    We’re watching the construction of a fundamentally different internet, one where access is controlled by gatekeepers and paywalls rather than governed by open protocols and user choice. And we’re doing it in the name of stopping AI companies, even though the real result will be to concentrate even more power in the hands of those same large tech companies while making the internet less useful for everyone else.

    — Mike Mesnick, TechDirt

    Here’s where Pixel Envy agrees:

    A.I. organizations have not created a bottom-up rebellious exploration of the limits of intellectual property law. They are big businesses with deep pockets exploiting decades of news, blogging, photography, video, and art. Nobody, as near as makes no difference, expected something they published online would one day feed the machines that now produce personalized Facebook slop.

    — Nick Heer, Pixel Envy

    “One thing that might help, not suggested by Masnick, is improving the controls available to publishers,” Heer writes, going on to discuss the new RSL standard proposal and what it might do to help. But, in the end, he’s not optimistic:

    I simply do not know how much control I reclaim now will be relevant in the future, and I am sure the same is true of any real media organization. I write here for you, not for the benefit of building the machines producing a firehose of spam, scams, and slop. The artificial intelligence companies have already violated the expectations of even a public web. Regardless of the benefits they have created — and I do believe there are benefits to these technologies — they have behaved unethically. Defensive action is the only control a publisher can assume right now.

    — Nick Heer, Pixel Envy

    Yeah.

    Special bonus #1: From the you’ve-trained-it-so-enjoy-A.I.-for-fun department,Kottke introduces us to generativ.design. “I wore out the “randomize” button on each of these,” he writes. (Via the new-to-me sidebar.)

    Prefab Design

    Meet fabricá, a new hair care company, whose identity ticks all the boxes: it’s trendy, eco-friendly, and well put-together:

    But there’s a catch: fabricá doesn’t exist — at least not yet. It’s a fully-formed identity, available now at Brands Like These, a new prefab identity outfit from Lyon&Lyon.

    Now I’ll admit: at first, this seemed like a Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe thing,2Yes, I grew up listening to Car Talk. something that we all had a chuckle over before allowing it to shuffle into the background, readily available for use as a pithy line whenever we needed it: “Ha, we got Lyin’ and Lyin’ selling your precious startup canned … stuff.”

    Unfortunately, it’s not a joke.

    When Elizabeth Goodspeed, of It’s Nice That, got thinking about it, she had lots to say. “In a good design engagement, the back-and-forth between company and designer pushes the company itself to sharpen what it is; the ‘friction’ people complain about is also the juice that makes the work exciting.” (I find this true in editorial and publishing work, certainly.) But there’s a warning, too:

    If this cart-before-horse approach takes hold, it won’t just change how companies buy branding, but how designers make it. The skills a designer needs shift from listening and refining to cranking out polished shells that could plausibly fit anything. […] Even if sites like BLT only sell a brand once, the more ambiguous the design, the more it risks echoing a dozen others (and collapsing under trend fatigue).

    These models also threaten to hollow out the middle of the industry. We’ve seen this pattern before: bookstores went from indie shops and regional chains to Amazon or your local holdout; music from affordable CDs to either $50 LPs or all-you-can-stream. Branding may be headed for the same split – prefab kits at the low end, ultra-expensive bespoke at the high end, and little in between. And if prefab becomes the norm, it’s hard not to imagine the next step: why should these kits even be designed by humans? Once clients are trained to buy a look off the shelf, there’s little stopping A.I. from flooding the market with pre-packaged “brands” generated at scale.

    — Elizabeth Goodspeed, It’s Nice That

    This feels like an accurate prediction. Read the rest. (See also: her item on copyright, covered in February.)

    Okay, we’ve dealt with the heavy stuff. Let’s enjoy the rest.

    The New Type in Town

    Several articles to point to if you’re interested in expanding your font collection — including 50 predictions for what’ll be popular 2026. Nice.

    Steven Heller’s Font of the Month

    Over at I Love Typography, industry veteran and designer extraordinaire Steven Heller’s monthly column exalts Ritualist.

    CreativeBoom’s Best o’ September

    They have several, but my favorite is not dissimilar to the above, a new face called Urbolyt, a variable “that represents a clash between geometric rigor and organic forms.”

    Zelow Studio’s Nature

    Pixel Surplus brings us a new — and free! — variable grotesk typeface called Nature, available in a variety of styles.

    CreativeBoom’s 50 for 2026

    The vast majority of these are, basically, Helvetica; like Nature, the simple sans serifs are what’s in right now. (Sigh.) However, there are some gems on the list, and I’d like to take a moment to highlight an absolute favorite: Freight.

    Freight is a collection of integrated typefaces ready to add unique style to any design project. What Joshua Darden started as a serif family inspired by the warmth and pragmatism found in 18th-century Dutch typefaces became The Freight Collection and now ranges across multiple weights, widths, and optical sizes — from Big to Display, Text, Micro, Macro, Sans, Neo, and Round — all of which include companion italics. That’s 192 fonts that have the ability to be bold and daring just as easily as they can be quiet and unassuming.

    — freightcollection.com

    I’ve used Freight in a variety of book projects and the breadth of options available always satisfies. It’s referred to as a superfamily: from the standard Text and beyond-excellent Neo (a sans with style), there’s an option for going Big and even two — Micro and Macro — best used at small sizes (readable footnotes!).

    I cannot recommend more highly. Indeed, I could only take one font family with me to a desert island, I’d take Freight.

    Illustrations Open Doors
    Illustration Awards 2025

    CreativeBoom: “From playful packaging to poignant explorations of identity, the World Illustration Awards 2025 showcase the breadth of contemporary illustration. With over 4,700 entries from 85 countries, this year’s winners reveal how artists are shaping how we see, think and connect.”

    One of the overall winners is this great poster:

    Léane Ruggli – RTD’s Cocktail Campaign

    Book covers (adult and children’s):

    Jennifer Dionisio – The Talented Mr Ripley
    Jenya Polosina – The Country of the Blind
    Camila Carrossine – The Girl, the Ghost and the Beetroot Forest

    Site Specific:

    Ren Kyles – Pride mural in Wilsonville, Oregon

    The awards underline “how illustration continues to thrive as a medium of both beauty and urgency”: from packaging that delights to books that challenge taboos, the winning works reveal the versatility of illustrators working today.

    See the whole list of winners and commended artists at the WIA 2025 Online Showcase, including interviews and insights into their creative process.

    Illustration for Branding

    Another CreativeBoom article suggests that, “[f]rom murals to motion, illustration is starting to reassert itself in advertising,” because “illustration still offers unique advantages. Distinctiveness is the obvious one because, in a sea of photography-led campaigns, an illustrated execution can […] cut through precisely because they are unexpected.”

    As this great TfL poster exemplifies:

    “A Riot of Color and Joy”

    Yet another example of illustration done well, this time from — wait for it — 1956:

    A Saab 93 full-car cutaway.

    I still miss Saab. See more at The Autopian.

    Special Bonus #2: These minimalist cat illustrations define brilliant:

    Illustration by ShouXin.
    September’s Photography Highlights
    International Pet Photography Awards

    While we’re on the subject of cats — and dogs, whose entries far outstripped those for cats (and horses, rabbits, pigs, and all the other things folks keep for pets) — this year’s pet photography contest has some pretty spectacular results:

    Photograph by Mirka Koot.
    Photograph by Shandess Griffin.
    Photograph by Janneke De Graaf.

    Getting my dog to stand still long enough for a photograph is nigh-on impossible; some of the accomplishments shown in these winning photographs are fantastic. Kudos.

    Special bonus #3: Cats, book matched.

    Audubon Photography Awards

    The 15 winning entries for 2025 have been announced, including this one:

    “Burrowing Owl.” Photograph by Jean Hall.

    See more at PetaPixel or This is Colossal; explore galleries of this year’s winners and honorable mentions, or grab a copy of the Fall 2025 Audubon Magazine.

    Astronomy Photographer of the Year

    This is Colossal: “The universe’s workings may always remain a mystery. So it’s no surprise that when peering up at the night sky, whether it’s homing in on distant stellar clusters or simply watching the moon rise, photography helps us appreciate its enigmatic beauty.”

    “ISS Lunar Flyby.” Photograph by Tom Williams.
    “Saturnrise.” Photograph by Tom Williams.

    I didn’t realize until after I’d selected them that these were both from the same photographer, but unlike some that are just (amazing) night sky, these have an almost-science-fiction quality.

    ’Course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg: “The Royal Observatory Greenwich’s ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 17 contest showcases the best astronomical and night sky images of the year, captured by exceptional photographers worldwide,” writes PetaPixel.

    Two more that aren’t quite what you expect:

    “Encounter Across Light-Years.” Photograph by Yurui Gong and Xizhen Ruan.
    “Fourth Dimension.” Photograph by Leonardo Di Maggio.

    See the more winners, from here and beyond, at PetaPixel or This is Colossal.

    Special bonus #4: While we’re on the subject of Earth and sky, PetaPixel profiles Italian photographer Gianluca Rubinacci:

    Photograph by Gianluca Rubinacci.

    Special bonus #5: The UK’s Weather Photographer of the Year 2025 Competition list of finalists has been announced, including this one:

    Photograph by Lukáš Gallo.

    See all of ’em — and vote (until October 16th) — here.

    Natural Landscape Photography Awards

    This one’s a little different, in that there can be no generative AI, no compositing of different photographs, and RAW files are checked by judges to ensure authenticity. (Refreshing, honestly.) “The competition is designed to promote photographers looking to work within the constraints of the natural landscape and traditional bounds of photography.”

    From the Project of the Year, Sápmi (Lapland). Photograph by Hanneke Van Camp.

    See more at Petapixel, or to see all of the contestants head to the Natural Landscape Photography Awards website.

    “Cyberpunk” and “Gotham” vs. “Otherworldly” and “Forgotten”

    To close out this month, I’d like to mention a couple more book projects. Let’s start with Ben Moore, whose new photo book is titled Above & Across London. As the name suggests, he found high-up vantage spots: “I’ve always loved the look of a cool, urban, cyber-futuristic world, and at times I catch glimpses of that in London,” he writes.

    Photograph by Ben Moore.

    Meanwhile, photographer Bryan Sansivero feels a strong pull to document and explore forgotten dwellings; his new book, America the Abandoned, explores deserted homes around the country in 200 striking images — including this one:

    “The Grand Room.” Photograph by Bryan Sansivero.

    Have a great October, everyone.

    • 1
      One of the reasons my photography, as presented both here on Foreword and in the galleries, is both relatively lo-res and watermarked is to preserve a sense of ownership; likewise, one of the (many) reasons I no longer participate in social media is due to posts specifically being used to train A.I. — Instagram/Meta, for instance.
    • 2
      Yes, I grew up listening to Car Talk.
  • Beautifully Briefed 25.3: March Madness

    Beautifully Briefed 25.3: March Madness

    A huge stack of items for the March wrap-up, from libraries and type to a bunch of photography items, with a brief stop in the land of Jaguar that is … Paris. (Yes, the world’s gone all wonky. But you knew that already.) However, first, a quick discussion of what we’re not going to usually talk about.

    On Seriousness

    I’m going to keep my coverage of current events to a minimum; this is not the place, and I am not qualified to write about it with any authority (other than as a concerned citizen). But there are some items I think are worth sharing.

    Techdirt, for instance — like Kottke and others — have posted extensively on the political and culture shift in the United States, but in this case, specifically how it intersects with technology.

    TechDirt, March 2025.

    We’ve always covered the intersection of technology, innovation, and policy (27+ years and counting). Sometimes that meant writing about patents or copyright, sometimes about content moderation, sometimes about privacy. […] But there’s more to it than that. […] When you’ve spent years watching how some tech bros break the rules in pursuit of personal and economic power at the expense of safety and user protections, all while wrapping themselves in the flag of “innovation,” you get pretty good at spotting the pattern.

    — Mike Masnick, Techdirt

    “Connecting these dots is basically what we do here at Techdirt,” they argue, and I find it convincing. As some of us struggle with how to source actual news these days, Techdirt has earned a spot in my list of daily reads.

    Of course, it’s not just the United States. Arguably, the United Kingdom led with Brexit:

    “Boris Johnson, Liar.” Image by POW.

    ArchDaily brings us the story of Led by Donkeys, which started out “as a witty response to Brexit” and morphed into a visual tour de force. (Their name is a historical reference to World War I, where German commanders reportedly described British soldiers as “lions led by donkeys,” a critique of incompetent leadership — and not at all a reference to the U.S. Democratic party as it currently, uh, stands.)

    Rupert Murdoch, NYC. Photo by Fionn Guilfoyle.

    Light Matters, a column on light and space, is a regular item at ArchDaily.

    Then there’s AI and its current leap to the fore. While it’s been discussed here before, what hasn’t been is the effect on “the free.” What about the Wikis and free-as-in-beer intellect that isn’t property?

    From Citation Needed:

    But the trouble with trying to continually narrow the definitions of “free” is that it is impossible to write a license that will perfectly prohibit each possibility that makes a person go “wait, no, not like that” while retaining the benefits of free and open access. If that is truly what a creator wants, then they are likely better served by a traditional, all rights reserved model in which any prospective reuser must individually negotiate terms with them; but this undermines the purpose of free, and restricts permitted reuse only to those with the time, means, and bargaining power to negotiate on a case by case basis. […] The true threat from AI models training on open access material is not that more people may access knowledge thanks to new modalities. It’s that those models may stifle Wikipedia and other free knowledge repositories, benefiting from the labor, money, and care that goes into supporting them while also bleeding them dry. It’s that trillion dollar companies become the sole arbiters of access to knowledge after subsuming the painstaking work of those who made knowledge free to all, killing those projects in the process.

    — Molly White, Citation Needed

    The whole essay is excellent and absolutely worth a read. (Via Pixel Envy.)

    Update, 2 April 2025: ArsTechnica reports on a 50% rise in Wikimedia bandwidth usage as LLMs “vacuum up” terabytes of data for AI training purposes. “Wikimedia found that bots account for 65 percent of the most expensive requests to its core infrastructure despite making up just 35 percent of total pageviews.”

    Update, 10 April 2025: Nick Heer:

    Given the sheer volume of stuff scraped by A.I. companies, it is hard to say how much value any single source has in generating material in response to an arbitrary request. Wikimedia might be the exception, however. It is so central and its contents so expansive that it is hard to imagine many of these products would be nearly so successful without it.

    I do not see the names of any of the most well-known A.I. companies among the foundation’s largest donors. Perhaps they are the seven anonymous donors in the $50,000-and-up group. I suggest they, at the very least, give more generously and openly.

    Let’s assume it’s okay to say, “Heer, Heer!”

    Special Bonus #1: David Opdykes vintage postcard paintings, described at This is Colossal as “[o]ccasionally darkly humorous yet steeped in a sense of foreboding.”

    David Opdyke, “Main Stage” (2015-2020), gouache on vintage postcard, 6 x 4 inches.
    On Libraries, Type, and Type Libraries
    Museums and Libraries

    Kottke isn’t just about politics, though; he’s tried to keep up with some of the things necessary in today’s world — the projects that bring light or even delight. So, while we’re on the subject of Wikipedia, let’s highlight his link to the Museum of All Things:

    A “nearly-infinite virtual museum generated from Wikipedia,” this program is made possible by the images associated with an article. Better still, there are exits from the galleries that follow the links in those articles, leading to … well, lots to see.

    Meanwhile, Cultured magazine brings us a great article on four great libraries in the U.S. — I mean, a slide!? Awesome:

    The North Boulder library. Photograph by Bruce Damonte.

    Visit Seattle, Scottsdale (AZ), Eastham (MA), and, as shown above, North Boulder, Colorado, and read a brief item with the architect that designed them.

    Print magazine brings us an article the New York Public Library’s celebration of 100 years of the New Yorker magazine — another institution continuing to do great work in the face of today’s realities:

    Photograph by Amelia Nash.

    The exhibition, which “charts the magazine’s evolution from the roaring twenties to the digital age, drawing from NYPL’s vast archives and supplemented by treasures from The New Yorker itself,” is up through February 21st, 2026. Or, if you’re not able to make it to the Big Apple, check out the film on Vimeo.

    Type and Typography

    Feckled offers “150+ hand-orinted letterpress fonts for digital download,” This is Colossal highlights, mentioning creative director Jason Pattinson’s new venture. It’s not perfect — those letterpress fonts are JPG files, not installable typefaces — but nonetheless, worth a look if you need something unique for a Photoshop project:

    Some of the typefaces offered at Feckled.

    CreativeBoom brings us their monthly feature on type, with two I’d like to highlight. Naancy, new from French foundry 205tf, is Art Nouveau in all the right ways:

    “Inspired by the French city of Nancy and its school of art and design,” 205tf says.

    But it’s Aktinson Hyperlegible Next that gets the prize from me:

    “The Atkinson Hyperlegible font uses special design principles to differentiate characters and make each one unique,” helping low-vision readers everywhere.

    First introduced in 2019, it’s now been expanded to different weights and styles, with new glyphs (individual characters, that is) for different languages and situations. As before, it’s free from the Braille Institute. Fantastic.

    On A Wild Jaguar

    Back in December, Jaguar made a huge splash — not necessarily the graceful skipping stone we think of from the glory days, but lots of waves nonetheless — with its Type 00 concept, highlighted here on Foreword (along with literally everywhere else).

    The satin blue finish is only one of the striking things in this photograph.

    On March 10th, it was, um, spotted in the wild, in what was certainly a choreographed event — given the huge influencer paparazzi presence — but not gained a ton of traction (sorry) in the mainstream press. (Motor1 caught a whiff, and decided it “doesn’t even look real….”)

    However, I mentioned in December that it’s too early to call a strike — a position The Autopian‘s Jason Torchinsky almost agrees with: “Holy crap, I think I like it.” Shown in Paris, and described as “gliding around and looking like it somehow doesn’t exactly fully exist as part of our reality,” it might be starting to bring people around.

    There’s no rear window, but at least now we know how the trunk is accessed on the car.

    The sedan this concept previews will debut this year. Let’s see how it shakes out.

    On Wild Photography
    Leica Turns 100
    The Leica I was unveiled 100 years ago: March 1, 1925. (Photo by Kameraprojekt Graz 2015. CC-BY-SA 4.0.)

    “The Leica I, the first mass-produced 35mm Leica camera, is widely celebrated for its influence on photography,” PetaPixel notes with dry understatement. (Thankfully, they use the word “revolutionary” farther down in the article.)

    “I hereby decide: we will take the risk,” Ernst Leitz II said in 1925 when he decided to mass-produce the famed Oskar Barnack’s Ur-Leica invention, and modern photography was born. From the front in World War II to the weblog you’re reading and literally everything in between, Leica has led in ways large and small.

    Their M system is a direct descendant of that Leica I and still produced today, to great acclaim; the Q all-in-one cameras are huge hits despite the luxury price tags; and even their missteps seem to find their place, as MacFolios highlights in “Two Leica digital cameras with legacies that defied initial criticism.”

    Some of Leica’s APS-C camera systems: from left, the T, the CL, and the X-E.

    One of those, the CL, is my camera of choice — and despite being six years old and discontinued, is still getting software updates and a growing selection of lenses thanks to the L-Mount lens system. (Another is the T/TL mentioned last month when Sigma introduced the BF.) May it live for a good long while yet, as Leicas tend to do.

    Special Bonus #2: PetaPixel bring us another interview with Sigma’s personable CEO, Kazuto Yamaki, on why he is “so passionate and driven for the success of his family business.”

    Nature and Wildlife Photography Awards

    Highlighting the “endless wonders of our planet,” This is Colossal brings us the fantastic results of the 2025 World Nature Photography Awards, a contest whose photography can “influence people to see the world from a different perspective and change their own habits for the good of the planet.”

    Fireworks, Brazil. Photograph by Marcio Esteves Cabral.
    Feathers, Sri Lanka. Photograph by Pandula Bandara.
    Devghali Beach, India. Photograph by Mantanu Majumder.

    Of course, it’s impossible to mention today’s wildlife without mentioning the “vulnerability of the earth’s inhabitants and juxtapositions between nature and the human-built environment,” as Colossal notes.

    Ankle Bracelets, United States. Photograph by Charlotte Keast.

    Meanwhile, there’s also the (unrelated) 2024 Nature Photography Awards, as highlighted by PetaPixel:

    Polar Bear Amid Fireweed Blooms, unlisted Arctic location. Photograph by Christopher Paetkau.

    There are also the 2025 British Wildlife Photography Awards, as noted by This is Colossal:

    Street Cleaners, London. Photograph by Ben Lucas.

    We do, in fact, run into too many of these contests; while I can’t argue with that, I can suggest that nature and wildlife are worthy subjects. Even in fun:

    Declaration of Love. Photograph by Roland Kranitz.

    Crooning, almost — Squirrel Sinatra. See more of the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards at PetaPixel.

    2025 Sony Photography Awards

    Another contest, yes, but one that’s gained a stature — almost a half a million entries this year — and one that covers a huge variety of subjects:

    The Colours of the Andes, Peru. Photograph by Kunal Gupta.

    Naturally, I gravitate towards the architecture category:

    Monochrome Majesty: Cuatro Torres Business Area, Spain. Photograph by Robert Fülöp.
    The Guard, Netherlands. Photograph by Max van Son.
    Centre of the Cosmos, China. Photograph by Xuecheng Liu.

    Read More at This is Colossal and Archinect or visit the World Photography Organisation.

    The Darkest Skies

    PetaPixel also brings us photography from Mihail Minkov, who spent nearly six months traveling to “dark sky” locations — those not suffering from the ever-increasing effects of artificial light — and brought home some spectacular results:

    A Moai on Râpă Nui, or Easter Island, in the South Pacific. Photograph by Mihail Minkov.

    Special Bonus #3: Lego F1 action photography!

    Great stuff from Hungarian photographer Benedek Lampert. (See his Star Wars Lego photographs, too.)

  • Beautifully Briefed 25.2: Late Winter Stew

    Beautifully Briefed 25.2: Late Winter Stew

    A bunch of tasty ingredients in this month’s post — from friendly identities and open-source typefaces to feel-good photography. Once past the minor rant we’re that covers the other meaning of stew, that is. Read on.

    It’s Nice That on Copyright and Reuse

    Elizabeth Goodspeed, editor-at-large for It’s Nice That, has a great column up regarding copyright and the current — and trending — business climate, especially with regard to copyright: it’s become the norm, she argues, for companies to mine open-source and expired-copyright imagery instead of hiring an artist, a trend exacerbated by the rise of AI. “Instead of safeguarding creators, copyright now favors whoever has the resources to outlast their opponent in a legal battle,” she writes. “Since public domain material already looks polished, using it also eliminates the time, effort, and expense of creating something new from scratch (not to mention the time spent building its associative meaning from the ground up). But why would anyone ever commission an illustrator when they can just pull something free from an archive?”

    She’s done it herself:

    The Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1895 (public domain). Aubrey Beardsley.
    New Antiquarians, 2023. Book design by Elizabeth Goodspeed.

    She also points to a new UK proposal for a data mining exemption to be given to AI companies. “[I]t would lead to a “wholesale” transfer of wealth from the creative industries to the tech sector,” Sir Paul McCartney argues. (Source.) But isn’t that true of the larger picture these days, no matter the country?

    Not all borrowing is the same. Copying is often more about power than propriety. When working with archival material myself, I like to think in terms of the stand-up comedy rule: punching up vs. punching down. Picking up visual motifs from a billion-dollar corporation that’s built its empire on copyright hoarding? That’s punching up. Repackaging the work of a living artist from a marginalised background without credit or compensation? Likewise, using found material for an indie zine is a far cry from pulling from the same source for a corporate client that could easily afford to commission something new.

    — Elizabeth Goodspeed, It’s Nice That Editor-at-large

    It is most certainly a trend in book design — but the bigger question here is one she states as fact: “[r]ather than referencing the past, designers are stripping it for parts.” It’s worth stepping back, as designers, and consider how we source — and use — imagery.

    The entire article, only part of which is discussed above, is worth a read. And more than a moment’s thought.

    Okay, on to the fun stuff.

    An author on her own book design

    Mary Childs, a co-host of the Planet Money podcast on NPR, writes on LitHub what it’s like to tackle the cover design for the book she’d written:

    LitHub’s great cover graphic — pun likely intended — for Mary’s attempts.

    “This very slight, low-stakes request for ‘inspiration’ became an all-consuming assignment. My brain started spitting out cover ideas. And then more cover ideas. I was sure I would break through and create the Great American Finance-book-that-reads-like-a-Novel Cover,” she writes — and, better still, backs up with illustrations.

    Cover design by the Flatiron Books in-house art dept.

    In the end, she left it to the professionals — but the trip is absolutely worth the read. (Be sure to follow the Na Kim link, too.) Via Kottke.

    Special Bonus #1: Speaking of Na Kim, and also via Kottke, she’s somehow found time to start painting. “Be careful what you’re good at, you’re going to get stuck doing that.”

    The Fantastic Mr. Font (and other big Dahls)

    “Pluckish and playful” is more than a description of the wonderfully-named Fantastic Mr. Font, it’s the description of the new identity for the Roald Dahl Story Company. (Which is, unfortunately, a division of Netflix — but we’ll leave that for another day.)

    Just right. So, too, it the font’s interaction with various illustration elements:

    Roald Dahl and Sir Quentin Blake — plus the new font.

    The typeface was “developed in collaboration with type foundry Pangram Pangram, the font is a customisation of its existing font PP Acma, turning its already unconventional characteristics into something ‘more mischievous,’” Ellis Tree — another great name — writes at It’s Nice That.

    Read the full, well-illustrated story.

    Special Bonus #2: While we’re on the subject of branding, check out the new look for Publisher’s Weekly:

    BrandNew’s before-and-after of the PW logo.

    It’s actually a return to an older form, but updated. Their website has a brief explanation. (Via BrandNew.)

    PW examines options for their new/old logo.
    Some Fantastic Fonts
    Lettra Mono

    Speaking of Pangram Pangram, let’s start there: their Lettra Mono was the standout of Creative Boom’s roundup of new fonts for February. Monospaced serif fonts are unusual, but good ones….

    The italics, especially.
    Inclusive Sans

    CB also chose the incredible update to Inclusive Sans, which was also the subject of an article at It’s Nice That — and, better still, free, open-sourced, and now available in five-weight goodness at Google Fonts.

    Love the retro style of the supporting images.

    “Inclusive Sans is a new typeface from Olivia King that puts accessibility at the forefront,” It’s Nice That writes. “It’s arisen from the type designer’s research into typographic accessibility and readability – from highly regarded traditional guides and papers to more modern approaches to letterform legibility.”

    Available in a variable weight, too.
    Gorton

    Marcin Wichary — he of Shift Happens fame — pens (heh) an comprehensive and incredibly well-illustrated article on Gorton, a typeface you’re undoubtedly seen but don’t know.

    Anyone who knows Shift Happens will recognize the illustrative style. Photograph by Marcin Wichary.

    “One day,” he writes, “I saw what felt like Gorton on a ferry traversing the waters Bay Area. A few weeks later, I spotted it on a sign in a national park. Then on an intercom. On a street lighting access cover. In an elevator. At my dentist’s office. In an alley.”

    See also the f6 in the title image, above. Photograph by Marcin Wichary.

    It’s a long post, so save it for when you’ve a minute to enjoy — but 110% worth it.

    Special Bonus #3: Creative Bloq has a list of the best typography of the 1920s — “from Futura to Industria Gravur” — as chosen by designers. My fave? Gill Sans, of course.

    Used in Saab’s advertising, amongst about a billion other examples.

    Special Bonus #4: Nick Heer at Pixel Envy comments on a list posted by Robb Knight: “Something very useful from the Atlas of Type: a huge list of type foundries.” A good Canadian citizen, he reminds us that Pangram Pangram is, in fact, Canadian. More: “I was particularly excited to learn about Tiro Typeworks. They have a vast library of type for scientific and scholarly works [… I]f you are reading this on MacOS, you probably have STIX Two installed.”

    Some Great Photography

    Comet G3 visits every 600,000 years, they say. Hmph.

    Yuri Beletsky of the ESO caught G3 over the telescopes in Chile.

    Great stuff. See more at PetaPixel.

    Meanwhile, on the subject of space — and PetaPixel — a reminder that one of the most infamous photographs in history turned 35 on Valentine’s Day:

    The Pale Blue Dot. (2020 remastered edition.)

    Aaaand one more from PetaPixel: a book. Eight photographers documented 24 hours at the Vienna Airport, offering up more than a few behind-the-scenes shots — in celebration of its 70th anniversary:

    Photograph by Jérôme Gence.

    “The project was overseen by Lois Lammerhuber,” PetaPixel writes, “a publisher and photographer, who has since turned the collection of images into a book titled The Dream of Flying.”

    Photograph by Ulla Lohmann.

    The project was “about showing the people who use the airport as well as highlighting the staff who ensure all the airplanes depart and land safely.” My favorite shot:

    Photograph by Ana María Arévalo Gosen.

    I’m an airport and large/commercial plane junkie — and old enough to remember when all-access at the local airport wasn’t a big deal — so it was great to see these.

    Lastly, from This is Colossal, another round of the “coincidental” style of Eric Kogan:

    Photograph by Eric Kogan.

    All NYC this time. Check ’em out.

    Special Bonus #5: Art News notes that Paul Rudoph’s Walker Guest House is for sale for the bargain price of $2 million. It’s a kit home that’s been assembled in various places, including the grounds of the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. (It’s currently in storage in Rhinebeck, New York. Shipping is not included.)

    So why is in the photography section, you ask?

    Photograph by Giles Hoover.

    That’s why. Check out more of my photography from Ringling and Sarasota. (The Walker images are near the top.)

    Photograph by Giles Hoover.
    Sigma: a new BFF?

    No, that’s just BF — it stands for “beautiful foolishness,” after a line from a poem in Okura Tenshin’s The Book of Tea — but, as usual for them, something different. Something good.

    Like the FP before it, there’s nothing you don’t need, bordering perhaps on a minimalism that’s … stark? No viewfinder, no stabilization, no mechanical shutter, built-in memory (so no card slot), haptic interface. But style for days, a great shape and texture, and absolutely the right size.

    It’s made at the rapid clip of nine per day, because it’s made from a single billet of aluminum — shades of the Leica T/TL/TL2 (something I maintain was before its time, and discontinued short-sightedly) — except full-frame. And, of course, supported by Sigma’s extensive catalog of L-mount lenses. (Another commonality with the TL.)

    At $2000, it’s the right price, too. Read more here or here or here.

    Oh, and one more thing: Sigma has a new identity to go with the BF:

    Slightly more formal, slightly on-trend typography, which is fine — but the logo is clever in being both a letter and a lens. More of that just right to close out the day.

    Special Bonus #6: Sigma’s CEO Kazuto Yamaki is charismatic, interesting, and dedicated, as seen in the videos PetaPixel has introducing their new HQ building in 2022. Love the library-wrapped staircase.

    Update, 4 March 2025: PetaPixel has posted a YouTube podcast/interview with Kazuto Yamaki, in which he talks about the BF and possibly a new, “serious” camera to compliment their 300-600mm lens. (This is probably a better intro to Sigma’s CEO than the above.)

    Special Bonus #7: TTArtisan, the Chinese manufacturer making interesting L-mount lenses — I have two, both solidly in the cheap-and-cheerful category — is about to introduce their first camera … and “interesting” is, in fact, the best way to describe it:

    Purely mechanical, no batteries required, instant film camera that’s decidedly retro.

    See you in the spring!

  • Beautifully Briefed 24.12: New Year’s Eve Fireworks

    Beautifully Briefed 24.12: New Year’s Eve Fireworks

    Let’s continue a couple of discussions before closing out 2024, and send you into 2025 with some photographic and typographic goodness.

    More AI Book Design

    This was mentioned in another context in July, but is heading our way more aggressively as time goes by, with Microsoft and TikTok, among others, getting into the publishing arena.

    Cover design: unknown. (Human or machine: unknown.)

    While Microsoft’s new imprint, 8080 Books, plans “to test and experiment with the latest tech to accelerate and democratize book publishing.” They’re not entirely up-front about what that is — and might not know themselves yet, given the rapidly evolving tech and marketplace. That said, with the corporate giant’s name attached, we can be assured of some level of quality.

    Yes, I just wrote a sentence suggesting that Microsoft is a guardian of quality. (“Books matter. In a deluge of data. In a bloat of blogs, a sea of social, and a maelstrom of email. Books will always matter,” they write.)

    With others, the for-profit nature — TikTok’s engagement-before-all-else approach speaks volumes (or writes volumes, as the case might be) — assures that quality might come behind, say, slop. Publisher’s Weekly reports that 320 publishing startups have emerged just in the last two years, most in the AI space, adding to the 1,300 noted as of 2022. (PW also notes, “It is widely believed that each of the Big Five publishers has internal AI projects discreetly hidden from view.”)

    And then there’s this: introducing Spams Spines, your AI book design and book completion service: “[f]rom manuscript to book in your readers’ hands – a single platform to help any author proofread, cover design, format, print, and distribute over global channels — zero tech know-how required.” Prices start at $1500 and promise a finished product in less than 30 days.

    Their goal is to release 8,000 books per year. AI is heavily involved:

    There’s a Sherlocked joke here somewhere….

    Because, yes, you want a machine to suggest that Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle needed assistance regarding a turn of phrase. (Never mind his expensive editor.)

    The first and third are really “only” bad. However, Dr. Seuss would like a word with Spines’ AI training dataset, please, and the cover for “Stay Humble” defies words.

    But it’s the book design that got my attention: these are apparently the good ones, the cited examples to which someone says, “Yes! Take my money!”

    The sad thing is that people will say that. Have already said that. And there’s much, much on the publishing industry’s horizon. Our horizon.

    Read more at The Conversation, “The tech world is ‘disrupting’ book publishing. But do we want its effortless art?” Shout out to the AV Club and the aforementioned PW article.

    The Cat Leaps

    Last month, we left off Jaguar’s continuing road trip with a teaser. Let’s get right to it. The car’s called the Type 00:

    Some details:

    The interior:

    The internet, predictably, has lost its collective … um, mind. However, amongst the melee, there are a few items worth mentioning.

    Creative Boom: “If the new logo seemed divisive in isolation, seeing it brought to life with Type 00’s design has brought much clarity. The flush surfaces, panoramic roof, and glassless tailgate – all adorned with the new Jaguar device mark and reimagined leaper – create a cohesive vision of modern luxury. Rawdon Glover, managing director of Jaguar, emphasised the importance of this shift: ‘We have forged a fearlessly creative new character for Jaguar that is true to the DNA of the brand but future-facing, relevant and one that really stands out.’”

    The quote there is something to pay attention to. Read those words again, and think about the actual choice of language; it’s this, exactly, that has struck some. Armin at Brand New, for instance: “[W]hat I dislike the most about the new Jaguar brand: its tone of voice is INSUFFERABLE. Everything from the platitudes in the campaign to the script of McGovern’s presentation to the press releases is obnoxiously over-confident and self-congratulatory.” (Brand New, while excellent, is subscription-only — alas without a sample article. Here’s a link anyway.)

    Meanwhile, Dezeen provides us some real-world images from the Miami launch:

    Wai Shin Li, via Dezeen

    But it’s The Autotopian that stands out. They have not one but two excellent articles by Adrian Clarke, an ex-JLR1That’s Jaguar Land Rover, before it was, um, initialized by owner Tata. designer, who has several important points to contribute:

    A couple of weeks ago, the cancelled X351 Jaguar XJ leaked onto the internet. During my time at Land Rover, I saw this car back in 2018 and can confirm this is indeed, or rather was the EV XJ. Back when Mr. Tata was still alive every six months or so there would be a big board level presentation for him on upcoming products. […] I was privy to all the future production Jaguars and concepts. There was a J-Pace SUV to sit above the F-Pace (no problem in revealing this as it’s common knowledge) and everything else was as you’d expect. These cars were then cancelled as part of the revamp and one absolutely incredibly beautiful and exceptional proposal aside, nothing of value was lost.

    It’s the first time I’d seen the cancelled-just-before-release XJ EV, and despite the incomplete body panels and obviously-on-the-sly phone shot, it’s incredibly disappointing. They made the right call.

    Compare it next to a Rolls Royce Spectre, a car the production Type 00 will be a competitor for, and see how successfully it hides its bulk in profile. [I]n the side view, particularly in the bottom half, I’m seeing some Range Rover. The crisp shoulder line, the kick-up of the tail behind the rear wheel, and the feature line along the bottom of the bodyside all scream Range Rover. This is exacerbated by the verticality of the front and rear of the car – the new full-size Range Rover and Sport have sharply docked tails. I heard that the initial sketch of this car was done by Massimo Frascella before he departed for Audi. Frascella was McGovern’s right-hand man at Land Rover for decades before Ian Callum retired and McGovern used the opportunity to bring both the Jaguar and Land Rover studios together. So maybe that’s where this Range Rover influence comes from.

    The Jaguar Type 00, top, and Rolls-Royce Spectre, bottom, courtesy of The Autopian.

    We must remember this is only a concept. The actual production car will be a four-door GT. This is only a preview of the visual style of future Jaguar models. It’s certainly striking, but you’d struggle to call it beautiful. It’s also monolithic and slabby.

    Let’s hope this brutal revamp is […] successful, because there are a lot of jobs depending on it.

    — Adrian Clarke, ex-JLR designer

    There’s much more from those two articles, too much to quote here, so please go read them — the initial report is more on the design, while the second delves into the why: “Why Jaguar Had To Blow Up Its Brand In Order To Save It.“

    Meanwhile, I’ll actually be rooting for JLR to pull this one off. I’m not in the target audience — at all — but Jaguar needed to do something radical and, by God, they did just that. The concept is interesting. Some of the details are fantastic. Here’s hoping, indeed.

    Update, 15 Jan 2025: Turns out the Jaguar’s designers were a little worried about the outcome — or the outsourcing, in this case — and its effect on the brand. The Drive has the details.

    Special Bonus #1: Motor1 has a feature on Ian Callum’s current whereabouts. There are too many hypercars these days, but the Skye looks cool:

    The Callum Skye concept. (An island buggy?)
    Some Extraordinary Items of “Normalcy”

    To close out 2024, let’s take a break, pour a beverage, and enjoy some of what you read Foreword for: great photography, typography, and design.

    Northern Lights

    I didn’t know — or didn’t remember — that amongst the glut of photography contests is one dedicated to the phenomenon known as the Northern Lights.

    Cosmic Explosion, Isteria, Croatia. Photograph by Uroš Fink.

    PetaPixel reminds us that Capture the Atlas’ Northern Lights Photographer of the Year competition features some exceptional opportunities to make spectacular captures this year due to the solar maximum — the peak of its eleven-year cycle.

    Celestial Reflection, Dartmoor National Park, UK. Photograph by Max Trafford.

    The 2024 competition awards feature 25 winners, each with a narrative and each a striking example of the larger system we’re part of. Check it out. (Also via This is Colossal.)

    Nature

    PetaPixel is among several that point us to the Nature Photographer of the Year contest, with images both poignant and funny. Since it’s New Year, let’s go with the latter:

    Besties, Washington State, US. Photograph by Marcia Walters.

    Of course, there’s just “spectacular,” too:

    Cross to Bear, Talek River, Kenya. Photograph by Paul Goldstein.

    The contest’s winners page features many more, separated into categories; be sure to click on the individual photographs to get larger sizes and the story with each. Fantastic stuff.

    Frozen Prairie Landscapes

    Saskatchewan gets cold in the winter, but there’s a beauty to those temperatures, photographer Angela Boehm tells PetaPixel.

    Image from Minus Thirty. Photograph by Angela Boehm.

    “The frozen prairie landscapes, while a subject in their own right, serve as a powerful metaphor for the deeper themes the book explores: loss, memory, and resilience,” she says. […] “The loss is embodied in the emptiness and biting cold. The memory, or its gradual fading, is represented by the snow obscuring the horizon, softening and blurring the scenes. And the resilience is in the solitary tree — a steadfast survivor of countless storms in this unforgiving landscape.”

    — Angela Boehm, Minus Thirty

    Read more of PetaPixel‘s story of realization to publication or just check out the title.

    Special Bonus #2: Another book on an interesting subject — Japan’s brutalist architecture, which somehow manages to bring an inherent quality to the cement:

    Mixed-use complex, 1994, by Kuniyoshi Design. Photograph by Paul Tulett.

    Dezeen has more.

    Ukraine’s “Fight for Visual Identity”

    This PRINT piece is excellent: “A cultural gap persists in how history is organized and interpreted. I left the library without my requested images but with a lingering realization that how we organize history, even within the hallowed walls of an institution like the New York Public Library, can reflect the biases and oversights of a collective cultural perspective,” writes El. Stern.

    Home Soon, Dear. Image by Maria Kinovych, 2022.

    “Today, Ukrainian graphic design is rooted in national identification, in search of future needs, and in understanding the cultural influence of a painful past on a, once again, painful present.”

    Ukraine’s search for a future — and present, and past — in design. Great read.

    “A must-have manual for hot metal enthusiasts and linotype lovers”

    Type Archived, a new book whose fundraising campaign I didn’t see in time: a “stunning visual tour of traditional typefounding and offers a definitive account of London’s legendary Type Archive,” writes Wallpaper*.

    Custom metal for the book project.

    The book “traces the origins of typography through the physical tools, objects and machinery that made the printed word possible. Full of rich photography, [it’s] a visual journey through the punches, matrices, presses, type and paper which tell the story of the UK’s preeminent typefounding industry.”

    Hopefully available at bookstores soon.

    “The Arresting Typography of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps”

    Jason Kottke writes, “Several years ago, Brandon Silverman become obsessed with the lettering and typography on the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”

    Silverman’s launched an archive of the maps, an absolutely fantastic way to pass a few minutes hours.

    Special Bonus #3: Nick Heer, at the always-excellent Pixel Envy, has an essay on the essentials: “[E]fficiency and clarity are necessary elements, but are not the goal. There needs to be space for how things feel.” Delicious Wabi-Sabi is worth a few moments.

    Wishing you and yours a very happy New Year!

  • Beautifully Briefed 24.10: Content with Worthwhile Content

    Beautifully Briefed 24.10: Content with Worthwhile Content

    “Content,” that is, the feeling of satisfaction — contentedness — is a word I’d much rather use than “content,” that which is required of folks who produce material for their website/YouTube channel/social media feed/whatever. It’s a shame the world favors the latter over the former.

    Or does it? We’ll get to that — right in the midst of the other content that caught my eye in October, 2024.

    Adobe Content Credentials, Continued

    Adobe’s positive messaging continues, saying “[it is] dedicated to responsibly developing tools that empower creators to express themselves and tell their stories while helping address their concerns.” It even carried out a study to get some feedback from creatives on generative AI and one of the standout insights was rising concerns over unauthorised sharing of their work or misattribution with 91% of creators seeking a reliable method to attach attribution to their work.

    Bring on Adobe Content Authenticity. It’s a “powerful new web application that helps creators protect and get recognition for their work.”

    A screenshot of Adobe Content Authenticity website.

    In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, creators are understandably concerned about safeguarding and gaining attribution for their work and having more control over how it’s used. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Adobe Content Authenticity, a new, free web app that allows creators to easily attach Content Credentials to their digital work — helping you protect your work, show attribution and better connect with your audiences online.

    —Andy Parson, Senior Director, Content Authenticity Initiative, Adobe

    For now, it’s limited to a beta Chrome extension, with a wider beta opening to the general public in spring 2025. (I don’t use Chrome, but have signed up to the waitlist, and will update Foreword readers when I hear back.) Content Credentials are already available in Photoshop and Lightroom — provided you’re using the latest versions, which may require the latest OS.

    Three on Book Design
    PBS on del Rey

    I’d known the publishing house since . . . well, as long as I can remember. What I’d not known is the story behind the publishing house:

    Set aside thirteen minutes when you can — absolutely worth it.

    Multi-Panel Book Covers

    I agree with Jason Kottke: “Bento Books” is the term. A great example:

    Book design by Oliver Munday.

    Here’s the impetus discussing this latest book design trend, with many more examples.

    It’s Nice That: Book Design in Brazil
    Book design by Bloco Gráfico.

    Any foreigner entering a bookshop in São Paulo is likely to be impressed by the quality of the books on display. For a country with relatively few readers, few high quality printers and binders, and a very limited assortment of paper, the Brazilian publishing market shows remarkable graphic ingenuity[.]

    — Elaine Ramos, It’s Nice That

    Never mind the country, the great book design caught my attention: from The Great Gatsby, above, to the J.M. Coetzee series, Orwell’s 1984, even Melville — amongst others. A great read.

    Special Bonus #1: Life outside the internet . . . and physical books, please:

    “The whole internet social complex … and the way people use their computers to conduct life is doomed sooner than later,” said Justin Murphy, the founder of the media and education company Other Life. “The smartest people, the people who are the most cutting-edge, will increasingly live their lives outside of computers.”

    Whether or not that’s true — or even a potential — isn’t as relevant as an actual trend: physical book sales are up:

    Print, too, is on the rise, from books to magazines to newspapers. Print book sales had a pop with the pandemic in 2020, and have continued to maintain sales of more than 750 million units sold each year. Meanwhile, even though they’re cheaper, sales for ebooks are down slightly, which may be owed to the fact that younger readers, much like older generations, overwhelmingly prefer printed formats.

    — Zoë Bernard, Vox

    Flip phones, vinyl LPs, and . . . books: Read the whole article.

    See also: The Guardian: Bookstores are Suddenly Cool.

    50 Fonts for 2025

    CreativeBoom is out with their annual post on future type, “50 fonts that will be popular with creatives [next year].” Some of my favorites (links in captions):

    Editorial New, by Pangram Pangram.
    Nave, by Jamie Clark Type. (Bonus points for the great illustration.)
    Right Grotesk, especially the Casual flavor, by Pangram Pangram.
    Canvas Inline, designed by Ryan Martinson from Yellow Design Studio. Available through Adobe Fonts.
    Ssonder, from Type of Feeling. (Easily the most on-trend of my highlighted items.)

    An honorable mention goes to Gamuth Sans, from Production Type. See CreativeBoom’s 2025 popular fonts list here. (Note: some are available through Google Fonts, and thus free-to-use. Nice.)

    See also: Two more from CreativeBoom on the 2025 type scene: font trends and independent foundries.

    Photography that causes content
    Forest Fireflies

    From This is Colossal, we have Kazuaki Koseki, who describes himebotaru — fireflies — as “artists who paint light on the forest.”

    From the series “Summer Faeries” by Kazuaki Koseki.

    Artistry, all right. See more.

    Epson International Pano Awards

    The 2024 Pano Awards have been announced, with a wealth of great wide-angle shots for your viewing pleasure. Two of my favorites:

    “Storm Dump,” by Tom Putt. Taken near Wyndham, Western Australia.
    “Uprooted,” by Nickolas Warner. Taken in Moab, Utah.

    Epson’s rules are a little looser than some, but don’t diminish the sheer creativity displayed by the entrants. See coverage from PetaPixel or This is Colossal, or go to the source for the full list.

    Siena Creative Photo Awards 2024

    Just one favorite to highlight here, but what a favorite it is:

    “Storm on the Elbe,” by Anna Wacker. 1st Prize, Architecture.

    See some amazing sleeping bears — and much more — at the PetaPixel post or the full list at the Siena contest website.

    Architecture MasterPrize

    Few contests are more up my alley than this one, which inspires me to get back out there sooner rather than later:

    Kaktus Tower, Copenhagen, by Shoayb Khattab. See more from this series.
    “Fragments,” taken at the Nhow Hotel, Amsterdam, by Max van Son. See larger.

    Awesome. Meanwhile, the below caught my attention not due to the striking photograph, but the striking content — which, indeed, caused contentedness. Such a huge change to anyone who might recognize this former hulk, now beautifully refurbished and in a new park setting:

    “Michigan Central Station,” Detroit, by Jason Keen. See the full series here.

    See the post from PetaPixel or the full list of 2024 winners at the Architecture Masterprize 2024 website.

    Special Bonus #2: To close us out on this Halloween, the moon:

    Photograph by Darya Kawa Mirza. See more.
  • Beautifully Briefed 24.9: Falling Up

    Beautifully Briefed 24.9: Falling Up

    A long and diverse list this time, with a few thoughtful things and a ton of photography. Set aside a few minutes to get lost in links — and enjoy!

    Books and Values

    This article from the New Yorker is highlighted a little behind schedule — it’s from August (although, in my defense, I get my NYers second-hand) — but worth the read for the phrase “practitioners of bibliotherapy” alone.

    Illustration by Pierre Buttin. © New Yorker.

    Before we get into the meat of it, though, a primer on the growth of available titles in the United States:

    • 1939: 10,640 (est.)
    • 1970: 36,000
    • 2020: 1,000,000 (est., including ebooks)

    The New Yorker article lists this last figure as three million, but various internet sources dispute this; either way, it’s a huge number that no store could ever hope to stock. But … on to the important stuff.

    The central question:

    Amazon offers something like thirty million different print titles. The company has deals with purveyors of used and remaindered books, who are linked to on the site. It owns AbeBooks, the leading site for rare and out-of-print books. And there are many other places online where you can buy books, including barnesandnoble.com. So why does the world need bookstores?

    — Louis Menand, New Yorker, August 29, 2024 issue

    The New Yorker is kind enough to let you read a few articles a month without crashing into a paywall, so go find out the answer, appropriately enough, in their book review of Evan Friss’ The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore.

    Meanwhile, Nick Heer of the always-excellent Pixel Envy cites another New Yorker article on pricing for non-physical books — “The Surprisingly Big Business of eBooks” — and comes up with a few spending figures of note regarding the New York Public Library and Barack Obama’s title, A Promised Land:

    • $29,450, for 310 perpetual audiobook licenses at ninety-five dollars each;
    • $22,512, for 639 one- and two-year licenses for the e-book; and,
    • $5,300, for 226 copies of the hardcover edition.

    If you want to know why publishers so aggressively fought the Internet Archive on its model of lending out scanned copies of physical books, this is the reason. Publishers have created a model which fundamentally upsets a library’s ability to function. There is no scarcity in bytes, so publishers have created a way to charge more for something limitless, weightless, with nearly no storage costs.

    — Nick Heer, Pixel Envy

    You know what you can’t do with an ebook license? Put it on a shelf for re-reading in ten years’ time. Or resell it. In other words: control what happens to it. “[I]t is hard not to see publishers as the real villains in this mess. They are consolidating power and charging even legitimate libraries unreasonable amounts of money for electronic copies of books which the publishers and their intermediaries ultimately still control,” Heer writes.

    Exactly.

    Special Bonus #1: Nick Heer gets something else right, too, by noting the sharply divergent goals of social media platforms and his own wishes — indeed, those of what we would idealize as “normal people.” “Guided by Vices” is excellent. Check it out.

    Book Design: Kafka
    Cover design by Peter Mendelsund.

    Few subjects could more appropriately follow the above, so it is with a certain sense of joy that I highlight these fantastic new covers Frank Kafka’s works, brought to us by the incredibly talented Peter Mendelsund1“Get inside the mind of Peter Mendelsund, the pianist who went from Tchaikovsky to Tolstoy and became one of the best book cover designers working today, with editor Zac Petit’s interview in PRINT’s 75th Anniversary Issue,” with the link at the source article. via an interview with Steven Heller at PRINT:

    Cover design by Peter Mendelsund.

    The whole article, and especially, the whole series of title designs, are exactly why I treasure book design. Read on.

    Special Bonus #2: From Rolling Stone, an image reposted without comment (and absolutely not related to Kafka):

    Illustration by Victor Juhasz. © Rolling Stone.
    Colossally New

    This is Colossal, one of the very few sites elevated to “check daily” status and a frequent contributor to posts here on Foreword, has a new look:

    The new look of This is Colossal, September 2024.

    The last site, more than seven years old and designed by the great Armin Vit — he of Brand New fame — needed a refresh, mostly for technical reasons.

    Check it out. (And, separately, read the details.)

    Update, 4 Oct: More details from Firebelly. Great to see the progression of ideas.

    Update, 18 Oct: Part 3, “Crafting Colossal’s Whimsical Web.”

    SM[all] Majesté
    Photograph by DS Automobiles.

    I had to lead with an image there — even as concept cars go, wow. “DS’ tribute to the bewitching Citroën SM is the cure for concept car burnout,” The Autopian says, and I completely agree.

    The lights bleeding into the skirted rear wheels is, perhaps, perfection:

    Photograph by DS Automobiles.
    Photograph by DS Automobiles.

    Okay, it’s not even a Citroen, and the 1970’s are hot right now, but still, it’s an out-of-the-park home run from the staggering — perhaps even stumbling — juggernaut that is Stallantis. Read about it at Motor1 or Wallpaper*, or see one of these two YouTube videos from DS or YouCar.

    Special Bonus #3: Another design icon, the Volvo 240 series, celebrates its 50th birthday this year. (I learned how to drive on a 145, the immediate predecessor, and was surrounded by 240s in my teens. I remember them fondly.)

    A 1974 Volvo 245 in the perfect shade of blue. Fabulous.
    Photography Turns 200

    According to an article in French photography publication Réponses Photo, quoted on PetaPixel, photography turned 200 on September 16. While that’s surely a conclusion rather than documented fact, it’s worth remembering and considering the journey photography has taken over the past two hundred years.

    Indeed, one need only glance at the “phone” we all carry around to realize how democratized photography has become; those of us who carry bigger, more professional gear have become the exception — and our reasons for doing do more varied. (More on that soon.)

    Meanwhile, let’s celebrate with some of the latest and greatest photography from September, 2024.

    Tahiti Waves

    Via Kottke and This is Colossal, a great series of ocean photographs from Tim McKenna:

    Heaving Waves (Tahiti). Photograph by Tim McKenna.
    2024 Wildlife Photographer of the Year

    Via This is Colossal, something quite, uh, jaw-dropping:

    “Deadly Bite.” Photograph by Ian Ford.

    “The 2024 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition broke its 60-year record with a whopping 59,228 entries from 117 countries and territories,” and is connected with the Natural History Museum in London. (See also the 2024 Bird Photographer of the Year, via the BBC.)

    2024 Astronomy Photographer of the Year

    “The Royal Observatory Greenwich, in partnership with BBC Sky at Night Magazine, announced the beautiful winners of its 16th annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. The images show some of the most incredible cosmic objects and events in the Universe,” PetaPixel writes. (Also noted via This is Colossal, just ’cause.)

    “Shadow Peaks of Sinus Iridum.” Photograph by Gábor Balázs.

    See all the winners at Royal Museums Greenwich.

    Not included in that — taken too late to be entered, I understand — is this stunning photograph:

    “Saturn’s Ingress.” Photograph by Andrew McCarthy.
    2024 Natural Landscape Photography Awards

    Last but not least, some fantastic photography in this newish contest, now in its fourth year, set up to “promote the best landscape and nature photography by digital and film photographers who value realism and authenticity in their work.”

    Some of my favorites:

    “Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada.” Photograph by Andrew Mielzynski.
    Guatemala Adventure Volcano Panorama. Photograph by Thomas Skinner.
    Nightscape, 3rd place. Photograph by Takeshi Kameyama.

    Via PetaPixel.

    Special Bonus #4: Phil Edwards brings us a history of one the most iconic photographs ever:

    • 1
      “Get inside the mind of Peter Mendelsund, the pianist who went from Tchaikovsky to Tolstoy and became one of the best book cover designers working today, with editor Zac Petit’s interview in PRINT’s 75th Anniversary Issue,” with the link at the source article.
  • Beautifully Briefed 24.6: Summer of Win (Mostly)

    Beautifully Briefed 24.6: Summer of Win (Mostly)

    In this installment of Beautifully Briefed, let’s take a look at some great posters, great print items, and great photography. Plus, an update from Adobe’s continued campaign to lose friends and attract government attention. Fun stuff!

    GET LECTURED (ON ARCHITECTURE)

    Back in September, I mentioned Archinect’s Get Lectured poster series. They’re back with the Spring 2024 winners, including these two faves:

    ELAC lecture poster design by Tashfiah Ahmed.
    Lecture poster from the University of British Columbia; designer not listed.

    Great examples of design in a often difficult category. See the rest.

    Architecture Photographs by Hélène Binet

    While we’re discussing architecture, let’s talk about a Dezeen post that caught my eye: photographer Hélène Binet has a new book out, adding to her long career capturing the old-school way — using film.

    “A Sentimental Topography by Dimitris Pikionis, landscaping of the Acropolis, Athens, Greece.”

    This series captures shadows and light with exceptional talent, including the above, where she’s praised for “captur[ing] in a single image the tactile and textured presence of tectonic form, both in built and natural environments.”

    “Staircases in Sperlonga, Latina, Italy.”

    I love the softer shades of gray than shown in the previous image, and both this and the image below demonstrate a deep understanding of architectural expression.

    “Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Germany, by Peter Zumthor.”

    Read the post from Dezeen, see more examples of outstanding work on her website, or buy the book with 170 photographs, essays, and more.

    2024 Audubon Photography Winners

    This is Colossal posted about this a day before my Audubon magazine showed up with these prominently featured, and they’re all winners.

    Wild Turkey, Female Bird Prize Winner, by Travis Potter.

    Bird photography is a difficult skill requiring patience, perseverance, and specialized gear; those who excel at it deserve recognition. Plus, there’s this:

    Audubon’s climate science report Survival by Degrees reveals that two-thirds of North American birds are threatened by extinction from climate change, including species featured in this year’s Audubon Photography Awards like the Blackburnian Warbler, California Quail, and Sedge Wren.

    Forster’s Tern, Professional Honorable Mention, by Kevin Lohman.

    Check out the Colossal post, or see the full story at the Audubon website.

    Special Bonus #1: Kottke points us towards the Siena 2024 Drone Photography Awards. “Look! Up in the sky! It’s … another contest!” Good stuff nonetheless:

    “Jiashao Bridge” by Sheng Jiang, China.
    PRINT 2024 Awards

    The annual PRINT awards are out, featuring — natch — great items in print, including items like the Smithsonian’s annual report and a Naked Trails brochure. Here are a couple of items from the book design category:

    Jacket design by Robin Bilardello.

    Author sketch and lettering by the author. Also, let’s get the . . . :

    Cover design by Milan Bozic, with illustration and typography by Lauren Tamaki.

    Fantastic.

    Special Bonus #2: Hoefler & Co. brings us Typographic Doubletakes: “While good typefaces have prodigious families of carefully related styles, some of the best typography builds unexpected relationships between unrelated fonts.”

    Left: Chronicle Hairline + Landmark. Right: Vitesse + Gotham.

    Their blog refreshes as you scroll in more ways than one — enjoy.

    Left: Mercury Text + Ideal Sans SSm. Right: Whitney + Operator and Operator Mono.

    Special Bonus #3: Kottke points us to a LitHub post arguing for adding full credit pages to books acknowledging everyone who worked on them. “How lovely it is to be seen and appreciated.”

    Adobe “Too Easy to Hate,” Say Users, Employees

    Adobe continues to score big with the public — in the best Boeing style, a formerly-great company has put profits before users and employees. While successful from the shareholders’ point of view (record profits, again), some are . . . upset. PetaPixel:

    Just over a month ago, an Adobe exec called AI the “new digital camera.” Simultaneously, an Adobe marketing campaign chucked photographers under the bus, and not for the first time, which caught the attention of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP). At the very top of Adobe, there is a concerning and frustrating lack of understanding about art and the people who make it.

    Even “exasperated employees implored leadership to not let it be the “evil” company customers think it is;” while that might be a stretch — “ignorant greed” is a better description — either is not a winning look.

    The latest was a terms-of-service update that many saw as a rights grab, allowing the company to use users’ work to train its AI services. While those have been amended, the seemingly clear language — “We’ve never trained generative AI on customer content, taken ownership of a customer’s work, or allowed access to customer content beyond legal requirements” — comes from a company that has lost the trust of users, making those words just that — words. Time will tell if they are truth.

    But there’s more: Adobe’s just been sued by the FTC (via PetaPixel, Pixel Envy) for hidden fees and difficult cancellations:

    “For years, Adobe has harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms,” the lawsuit alleges. “Adobe fails to adequately disclose to consumers that by signing up for the ‘Annual, Paid Monthly’ subscription plan, they are agreeing to a yearlong commitment and a hefty early termination fee that can amount to hundreds of dollars. Adobe clearly discloses the early termination fee only when subscribers attempt to cancel, turning the stealth early termination fee into a powerful retention too that [redacted] by trapping consumers in subscriptions they no longer want.”

    I’m actually glad for this, as I wasn’t aware that my $60+ monthly fee is a payment on an annual plan. (Ug.) Not too big an issue — I actually feel like there’s decent value in the plan and will continue to subscribe for the foreseeable future.

    But I’d also be lying if I said I’m completely satisfied with our business arrangement: alternatives are few and far between. While Adobe does not have a monopoly legally or technically, in the publishing industry at least, they are, for all intents and purposes, the only game in town. It would be nice if they would at least demonstrate a modicum of respect for their users.

    Update, 25 July 2024: “Adobe Exec Says Early Termination Fees Are ‘Like Heroin’ for the Company,” according to PetaPixel. Hmph.