A New Photo Book Documents the Wonderful Homemade Cat Ladders of Switzerland

in Architecture, Design, Travel | June 7th, 2019

There are days when Calgon is not escape enough…

Days when one longs to be a cat, specifically a free-ranging feline of Bern, Switzerland, as featured in graphic designer Brigitte Schuster’s forthcoming book, Swiss Cat Ladders...

Some American cats come and go freely through—dare we say—doggie doors, those small apertures cut into existing points of entry, most commonly the one leading from kitchen to Great Outdoors.

The citizens of Bern have aimed much higher, customizing their homes in alignment with both the feline commitment to independence and their fearlessness where heights are concerned.

As Schuster documents, there’s no one solution designed to take cats from upper residential windows and patios to the destinations of their choosing.

Some buildings boast sleek ramps that blend seamlessly into the existing exterior design.

In others, surefooted pussies must navigate ramshackle wooden affairs, some of which seem better suited to the hen house.

One cat ladder connects to a nearby tree.

Another started life as a drain spout.

Humans who prefer to outsource their cat ladders may elect to purchase a prefabricated spiral staircase online.

Pre-order Swiss Cat Ladders for 45 € using the order form at the bottom of this page. The text, which is in both German and English, includes diagrams to inspire those who would cater to their own cat’s desire for high flying independence.

All photographs © Brigitte Schuster

Via Colossal

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Join her in New York City this June for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. And congratulations to her homeschooled senior, Milo Kotis, who graduates today! Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Download Iconic National Park Fonts: They’re Now Digitized & Free to Use

in Design | June 6th, 2019

Fonts put in the service of the public good, like road signs, and street names, try to be invisible most of the time. They’re here to do their job and nothing else. But certain fonts accumulate something else, a sense of familiarity, a feeling of comfort and affection. That’s the thinking behind this recreation of America’s National Park font, which a team of five designers has created after much loving research.

Jeremy Shelhorn, the font studio’s founder, pinpoints exactly that kind of comfort:

Anyway I wasn’t fishing for some reason and was wandering around  following a deer trail turned into fisherman’s trail then back to another trail as sometime fisherman do.  I had trekked pretty far that day and wasn’t exactly lost, but I needed a little reassurance that I was heading the right direction when I came across one of those ubiquitous signs you see in a national park. You know the ones that have the text carved or “routed” into it. Entering Rocky Mountain National Park.

The font is “routed” into wooden signs and follows familiar rules: rounded serifs, simple angles. Shelhorn began to wonder:

...if it actually was a typeface or “font” that anyone could download and use? Do park rangers have this as a typeface on their computers to set in their word docs, pdfs and power point slides?...Turns out it isn’t a typeface at all but a system of paths, points and curves that a router follows.

The National Park Type Face was created by Shelhorn, his partner Andrea Herstowski, two students from the University of Kansas-- Chloe Hubler and Jenny O'Grady--and an actual NPS Ranger Miles Barger. It looks like the real thing and comes in three weights and one outline font. Research was done by taking pencil rubbings of various signs. And now you can download the fonts here.

Outside this font, Jeremy Shellhorn and associates work on other projects involving our National Parks (always under threat from big industry and rapacious capitalists). You can check their various work here.

Melbourne typographer Stephen Banham once described the cultural baggage that comes with Gil Sans:

Whenever I read text set in Gill Sans, I can’t help but hear the voice of an English narrator reading along with me.

With that in mind, what does the National Park font (download here) sound like to you? A friendly ranger? The sound of hiking boots on a trail? Birdsong? A babbling brook? The voice of nature itself? Let us know in the comments.

via Kottke

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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The Bauhaus Bookshelf: Download Original Bauhaus Books, Journals, Manifestos & Ads That Still Inspire Designers Worldwide

in Art, Design, History | May 21st, 2019

The Bauhaus, Barry Bergdoll writes in the New York Times of the German design school founded a century ago last month, "lasted just 14 years before the Nazis shut it down. And yet in that time it proved a magnet for much that was new and experimental in art, design and architecture — and for decades after, its legacy played an outsize role in changing the physical appearance of the daily world, in everything from book design to household lighting to lightweight furniture." Celebrations of the Bauhaus' centenary have taken many forms, including the documentary series Bauhaus World, the reimagining of modern corporate logos in the classic Bauhaus style, and now the free online resource Bauhaus Bookshelf.

Bauhaus Bookshelf creator Andrea Riegel calls the site "my modest contribution to #bauhaus100 and beyond: (almost) all Bauhaus books and journals in a virtual bookcase — with the possibility to download and take a closer look at the media and original sources, supplemented by short excerpts and contributions by Bauhaus people and contemporary witnesses or other content in context."

In other worlds, you'll find there not just the original Bauhaus manifesto, but sections on the series of "Bauhaus books" published by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy; Bauhaus-associated creators and teachers like Paul Klee; Bauhaus advertising; the women of the Bauhaus (a subject previously featured here on Open Culture); and materials from the 1938 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art that introduced the Bauhaus to the world.

And 100 years after its founding, the world is still thinking about the Bauhaus, which, in Bergdoll's words, "produced one of the most powerful expressions of a view that design was everything. It served, in a way, as the embassy of modernist design. But its success has often led to a reductionism in our understanding of the rich nexus of artistic movements that crisscrossed at the school itself, as well as the diverse developments it helped inspire." For a better understanding of the Bauhaus, perhaps we must go back to the Bauhaus itself, not just in the sense of looking at the art, craft, design, and buildings its teachers and students produced, but the documents it issued on its mission and ideals. Whether in its English or German versions, Riegel's Bauhaus Bookshelf serves as an intellectually and aesthetically stimulating place to find them.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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A Brief History of IDEO: A Short Documentary Takes You Inside the Design Firm That Changed the Way We Think about Design

in Design | April 10th, 2019

The design firm IDEO was founded in 1991, which may not sound like an especially long time ago, but consider it in technological terms: what kind of devices were we using in 1991? How did they look and feel? Chances are not just that the phone and computer you now carry around bear no resemblance to the ones you would have carried around — not that most of them could be carried around — 28 years ago, but that your furniture and household appliances have changed as well. And think, too, of your everyday experiences with shopping, medical care, and government services: some have transformed, usually for the better, and if others haven't, it's probably not a good thing that they've stayed the same.

IDEO has worked on the design of products and services in all those fields and others, and has indeed done much to redefine the field of design itself. The company's founders and employees tell the story in their own words in the short documentary video IDEO and a Story of Design above, which focuses on IDEO's achievements in changing the way we think about design (exemplified by the time they redesigned the humble shopping cart on Nightline).

And though IDEO as a corporate entity has only existed since the early 1990s, it has deeper roots in the history of design, appearing as it did as a merger of four existing firms, David Kelley Design, ID Two, Matrix Product Design in California, and Moggridge Associates in London. Kelley, who's also a professor at Stanford, appears in the video not only to remember IDEO's founding, but also to talk about its future.

So does Tim Brown, who after nineteen years as IDEO's CEO announced last week that he will step down, passing the position on to former global managing director Sandy Speicher. When IDEO enters a world, Speicher says in the video, "we bring our creative lens, imagining how we can make that world better. I'm careful about words like 'solution' or 'the answer,' because these are people-based systems." That remark, as well as the others made by the variety of IDEO people — in a variety of accents befitting a now-global firm with nine locations around the world — provide a glimpse into IDEO's mutually inseparable corporate culture and its conception of design. And if all their talk about reinvention, responsiveness, and asking the big questions sounds a bit high-flown, most of it may come down to an old saying that holds up in every domain just as well today as it did in 1991: There's always room for improvement.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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David Bowie Songs Reimagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers: Space Oddity, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

in Art, Books, Design, Music | April 1st, 2019

In the last year, screenwriter Todd Alcott’s hobby has blown up into a legit side career.

This Etsy seller isn’t peddling kombucha SCOBYs, letter pressing new baby announcements, or repurposing old barns for use as cutting boards.

No, Alcott’s crafty fortunes fall squarely at the intersection of pulp fiction and rock and roll, with classic song titles, lyrics, and other cunning references replacing the cover text of pre-existing vintage paperbacks.

David Bowie’s lifelong fascination with space travel, tortured anti heroes, and outrageous fashion make him a natural fit with Alcott’s ongoing project, which has lavished similar attention on such luminaries as Bob Dylan, Radiohead, Talking Heads, and Elvis Costello.

As Alcott, who conceives of his mash ups as tributes to his long time musical favorites, told Open Culture:

Bowie dressed as an androgynous alien, went out onstage and told his audience "You're not alone, give me your hands," I can't think of a more encompassing gesture to a misfit. No matter how weird you were in your community, you would always find someone like you at a Bowie concert. During a time of my life when I felt incredibly isolated and alone, (Bowie was one of) the key artists who made me feel like I was part of a bigger world, an artistic continuum.

Meanwhile, Alcott is tending to another continuum by posthumously pairing such late greats as Bowie and Queen’s Freddie Mercury (“co-author” of the deep sea-themed Under Pressure cover, above) with the sort of adventurous, occasionally steamy reading material that were among the hallmarks of their 1950s' boyhoods.

Many of these items have found their way to used book and thrift stores, where, tattered and worn, they provide a vast trove for someone like Alcott, who browses with his favorite acts’ catalogues deeply imprinted on his mental hard drive.

It must’ve been a grand day when he happened across the above 1970s sci fi cover. A few deft tweaks, and Life on Mars, a nonexistent “new adventure from the author of Space Oddity," was born.

(Hardcore fans, take note of the doctored publisher in the upper left corner)

Heroes, which takes its inspiration from the 1981 X-Men comic Days of Future Past, is crammed full of such Easter eggs. Can you spot them all?

What a fitting tribute to the Starman’s enduring hold on the public’s imagination.

Browse Todd Alcott’s Bowie-themed pulp fiction collection in his Etsy shop.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Join her in New York City April 15 for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Modern Corporate Logos Reimagined in a Classic Bauhaus Style: Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Bauhaus Movement Today

in Art, Design | April 1st, 2019

Image by Vladimir Nikolic

American children, a study found a few years ago, recognize over 1,000 corporate logos but almost no plants. To some it was a damning indictment of the modern world; to others it was nothing more than a description of the modern world (in the 21st century, after all, which skill is more help in finding food?); and to a few it was an opportunity to proclaim that, for the sake of the children, the modern world could use some better corporate logos.

Image by dellfi

The artists, architects, and designers of the Bauhaus, the modernist art-school-turned-movement with its origins in Weimar Germany, might well have agreed. Right from the Bauhaus' foundation in 1919, its members worked on shaping the aesthetics of the future.

Now, for the school's 100th anniversary (today!), 99designs has commissioned revisions of current corporate logos in the Bauhaus style. "It outlasted a century’s worth of competing styles," writes 99designs' Matt Ellis, "survived the initial criticisms from traditionalists, and although the Nazis shut down the institution in 1933, the Bauhaus movement itself lives on to this day."

Image by ArsDesigns

Ellis goes on to quote the still-inspiring words of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius: "The artist is a heightened manifestation of the craftsman. Let us form... a new guild of craftsmen without the class divisions that set out to raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us together create the new building of the future which will be all in one: architecture and sculpture and painting." This project put up the five pillars of the Bauhaus style: "form follows function," "minimalism," "revolutionary typography," "passion for geometry," and "primary colors."

Image by dnk

The reimagined corporate logos made for the centenary of the Bauhaus stand on all those pillars, turning the emblems of products and services that many of us consume and use every day — or perhaps, as we scroll through Instagram on our iPhones or Android devices at Starbucks in our Adidases, all at the same time — into designs that merge the cutting-edge aesthetics of interwar Europe with those of the thoroughly globalized 2010s.

Image by PonomarevDmitry

Whether a pure Bauhaus revival will result in the actual adoption of logos like these remains to be seen, but in a way, the exercise simply doubles down on an influence that already runs deep. As Artsy's Kelsey Ables puts it, "It is a testament to the longstanding influence of Bauhausian minimalist ideals that the selected logos were already streamlined to begin with; many of the designers who reimagined 'Bauhaus style' logos had to add visual elements. Perhaps Google and its brethren are more Bauhaus than the Bauhaus itself."

Image by ArsDesigns

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Behold an Anatomically Correct Replica of the Human Brain, Knitted by a Psychiatrist

in Art, Creativity, Design, Neuroscience, Science | March 29th, 2019

Our brains dictate our every move.

They’re the ones who spur us to study hard, so we can make something of ourselves, in order to better our communities.

They name our babies, choose our clothes, decide what we’re hungry for.

They make and break laws, organize protests, fritter away hours on social media, and give us the green light to binge watch a bunch of dumb shows when we could be reading War and Peace.

They also plant the seeds for Fitzcarraldo-like creative endeavors that take over our lives and generate little to no income.

We may describe such endeavors as a labor of love, into which we’ve poured our entire heart and soul, but think for a second.

Who’s really responsible here?

The heart, that muscular fist-sized Valentine, content to just pump-pump-pump its way through life, lub-dub, lub-dub, from cradle to grave?

Or the brain, a crafty Iago of an organ, possessor of billions of neurons, complex, contradictory, a mystery we’re far from unraveling?

Psychiatrist Dr. Karen Norberg’s brain has steered her to study such heavy duty subjects as the daycare effect, the rise in youth suicide, and the risk of prescribing selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors as a treatment for depression.

On a lighter note, it also told her to devote nine months to knitting an anatomically correct replica of the human brain.

(Twelve, if you count three months of research before casting on.)

How did her brain convince her to embark on this madcap assignment?

Easy. It arranged for her to be in the middle of a more prosaic knitting project, then goosed her into noticing how the ruffles of that project resembled the wrinkles of the cerebral cortex.

Coincidence?

Not likely. Especially when one of the cerebral cortex's most important duties is decision making.

As she explained in an interview with The Telegraph, brain development is not unlike the growth of a knitted piece:

You can see very naturally how the 'rippling' effect of the cerebral cortex emerges from properties that probably have to do with nerve cell growth. In the case of knitting, the effect is created by increasing the number of stitches in each row.

Dr. Norberg—who, yes, has on occasion referred to her project as a labor of love—told Scientific American that such a massive crafty undertaking appealed to her sense of humor because “it seemed so ridiculous and would be an enormously complicated, absurdly ambitious thing to do.”

That’s the point at which many people’s brains would give them permission to stop, but Dr. Norberg and her brain persisted, pushing past the hypothetical, creating colorful individual structures that were eventually sewn into two cuddly hemispheres that can be joined with a zipper.

(She also let slip that her brain—by which she means the knitted one, though the observation certainly holds true for the one in her head—is female, due to its robust corpus callosum, the “tough body” whose millions of fibers promote communication and connection.)

via The Telegraph

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Join her in New York City for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain, this April. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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