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An online design museum made by and for designers? The concept seems obvious, but has taken decades in internet years for the reality to fully emerge in the Letterform Archive. Now that it has, we can see why. Good design may look simple, but no one should be fooled into thinking it’s easy. “After years of developme...

Nearly 100 years after it was introduced, architect Margarete (Grete) Schütte-Lihotzky‘s famous Frankfurt Kitchen continues to exert enormous influence on kitchen design. Schütte-Lihotzky analyzed designs for kitchens in train dining cars and made detailed time-motion studies of housewives’ dinner preparations in he...

Sitting or standing before an esteemed writer’s desk can make us feel closer to their process. Virginia Woolf’s desks — plywood boards she held on her lap and sloped standing desks — show a kind of austere rigor in her posture. “Throughout her life as a writer,” James Barrett points out, Woolf “paid attention to the...

I always think tattoos should communicate. If you see tattoos that don’t communicate, they’re worthless. —Henk Schiffmacher, tattoo artist Tattooing is an ancient art whose grip on the American mainstream, and that of other Western cultures, is a comparatively recent development. Long before he took up—or went under...

“One of the biggest considerations when traveling to Japan is its inscrutable language,” writes Designboom’s Juliana Neira. But then, one might also consider making that language more scrutable — and making one’s experience in Japan much richer — by learning some of it. Kanji, the Chinese characters used in the written Japanese language, may at […] Download 280 Pictographs That Put Japanese Culture Into...

Rings with discreet dual purpose have been in use since before the common era, when Hannibal, facing extradition, allegedly ingested the poison he kept secreted behind a gemstone on his finger. (More recently, poison rings gave rise to a popular Game of Thrones fan theory…) Victorians prevented their most closely kept secrets—illicit love letters, perhaps? Last wills and testaments?—from falling […] A 400-Year-Old Ring that Unfolds to Track the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtIf5WHTbns Origami artist Juho Könkkölä spent 50 hours folding an origami samurai from a single square sheet of paper, with no cutting or ripping used in the process. He describes his process on Reddit: Folded from a single square sheet of 95cm x 95cm Wenzhou rice paper without any cutting. The finished size of the […] An Origami Samurai Made from a Single Sheet...

All magazines are their editors, but Flair was more its editor than any magazine had been before — or, for that matter, than any magazine has been since. Though she came to the end of her long life in England, a country to which she had expatriated with her fourth husband, a Briton, Fleur Cowles was […] <i>Flair</i> Magazine: The Short-Lived, Highly-Influential Magazine That Still...

Type selection is an intensive process that requires intimate knowledge of a brand’s values, audience, competition, voice, and goals. —Fonts in Use, FAQ Fonts in Use is a typography nerd’s dream come true. The 10-year-old independent archive of typography has collected over 17,000 designs, each using at least one of over 12,000 typeface families from more than 3,500 type […] Fonts in Use: Enter a Giant Archive of...

For those with the time, skill, and drive, LEGO is the perfect medium for wildly impressive recreations of iconic structures, like the Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower, the Titanic and now the Roman Colosseum. But water? A wave? And not just any wave, but Katsushika Hokusai‘s celebrated 19th-century woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. As Open Culture’s Colin Marshall pointed out earlier, […] Hokusai’s Iconic Print, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,”...

The pandemic has resulted in a lot of people reinventing their fitness regimens, investing in pricey items like Mirror and Peloton bikes to turn homes into home gyms. Personally, we’re saving our pennies until some Etsy seller replicates the mechanical therapy systems of Dr. Gustav Zander (1835–1920). From the mid-19th century through WWI, these machines were at the forefront […] Behold the Steampunk Home Exercise Machines from the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWr67v620kY Buckminster Fuller had a difficult time as an inventor in his early years. “Having been expelled from Harvard for irresponsible conduct,” notes The Guardian, “he struggled to find a job and provide a living for his young family in his early 30s.” Despite later successes, and a later reputation as legendary as Nikola Tesla’s, he […] The Eden Project Built a Rainforest Ecosystem Inside...

English astronomer and physicist James Jeans’ 1931 essay “Why the Sky is Blue” has become a classic of concise expository writing since it was first published in a series of talks. In only four paragraphs and one strikingly detailed, yet simple analogy, Jeans gave millions of students a grasp of celestial blueness in prose that does […] Discover the Cyanometer, the Device Invented in 1789...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TqqdOcX4dc Today we take a ride on the world’s oldest electric suspension railway—the Wuppertal Schwebebahn in Germany. Actually, we’ll take two rides, traveling back in time to do so, thanks to YouTuber pwduze, who had a bit of fun trying to match up two videos discovered online for comparison’s sake. The journey on the left was filmed in 1902, […] Trips on the World’s Oldest Electric Suspension Railway...

There may be no more welcome sight to a New Yorker than their own Pantone-colored circle on an arriving subway train. (Provided it’s also the right train number or letter; is making local stops (or express stops); has not been rerouted due to track work, death or injury, etc.) The psychological effect is not unlike […] How the Iconic Colors of the New York...

For decades, urban planners around the world have looked to the Danish capital of Copenhagen, with its low-rise high density and unparalleled culture of everyday cycling, as an example of how to design a city. But what of the Danish track record in designing suburbs? Recently, a photographer by the name of Henry Do brought […] Denmark’s Utopian Garden City Built Entirely in Circles:...

In the 1950s and 60s, one record label stood “like a beacon,” writes Robin Kinross at Eye, among a host of Civil Rights era independents that helped jazz “escape the racial-commercial constraints applied by White Americans, and find its own place, unpatronised and relatively free of exploitation.” That label, Blue Note, ushered in the birth […] Jazz Typefaces Capture the Essence of 100 Iconic...

At one time paperback books were thought of as trash, a term that described their perceived artistic and cultural level, production value, and utter disposability. This changed in the mid-20th century, when certain paperback publishers (Doubleday Anchor, for example, who hired Edward Gorey to design their covers in the 1950s) made a push for respectability. […] Good Movies as Old Books: 100 Films Reimagined...