Map Typography from the early 20th Century

9:16 PM
A selection of images from the blogpost entitled Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Typography published on the BibliOdyssey blog earlier this week in which title pages, headings and letterforms of maps issued between 1880 and 1920 by the Sanborn company are shown. The images below are from the Virginia map from October 1907 (top); the South Carolina map from June 1919 (middle); and the Washington DC m...
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Bembo...

10:39 PM
... is the name of the typeface which Francesco Griffo , working for the Aldine Press under Aldus Manutius , cut for Venetian scholar Cardinal Pietro Bembo in 1495. One of the noteworthy things about Bembo is the  fascination which contemporary graphic designers show for this 500+ year old typeface. Below are an anonymous poster based upon Bembo (top), "Bembo Type Work" by *Xantiel (middle), ...
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ECM Music

3:01 PM
Founded by producer Manfred Eicher in 1969, ECM has issued over a thousand albums spanning many idioms, including standard-setting jazz recordings by Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and others: http://www.ecmrecords.com/Startseite/startseite.php Importantly, for the field of graphic design Ecm has also pursued a consistent visual langu...
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David Trautrimas

1:40 PM
http://www.trautrimas.ca/ David Trautrimas takes the components of familiar household appliances and transforms them into ironic/iconic architectural landscape paintings such as top secret Cold War era military outposts or residential building sites. The images below are "Micro Re-Instigator" from the The Spyfrost series (top), "The Fishing Complex" (middle) and the "Coffee Pot Towers" (bo...
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The Visual Telling of Stories

12:49 AM
http://www.fulltable.com/CA/index.htm : Fabulous resource on mid 20th century living, told through all kinds of visual material, mostly advertisements and editorial design. Here is what Chris Mullen has to say about his own site: "Welcome to Chris Mullen's website, The Visual Telling of Stories. You can go to the main gate or shuffle about in the Samplers till you get some hang of the place. It w...
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Fashion Art by Daniel Widrig

12:30 PM
Daniel Widrig studied architecture in Germany and the UK. After graduating from the Architectural Association in London with a Master’s Degree in Architecture and Urbanism in 2006 , he joined Zaha Hadid Architects where he worked on several major international projects. Since establishing his own studio in London, Widrig has been working on architectural concepts, products, objects and experiment...
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Embroidery Samplers

2:48 PM
A needlework sampler is a piece of embroidery produced as a demonstration or test of skill in needlework. Samplers often include the alphabet, figures, motifs, decorative borders and sometimes the name of the person who embroidered them and the date. The oldest surviving samplers were constructed in the 15th and 16th centuries. As there were no pre-printed patterns available for needleworkers, a ...
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Visual Complexity

12:12 PM
Rigorously curated by its founder Manuel Lima , the Visual Complexity portal shows the very best output of a new hybrid profession between graphic design and computer science - Data Visualization : http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
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A stunning blog: BibliOdyssey

8:43 PM
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/ To read from its header this is a blog on "books, illustrations, history, science, Visual Materia Obscura and eclectic book art" . And is it ever! I have been looking and looking since I found it. The blog takes its visual feed from a huge Flickr stream , of many many sets full of good sized images, covering all cultures and historic periods, with an emphasis on...
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Iranian/Persian Miniatures

8:20 PM
I cannot get over the hierarchical structure in Persian miniatures where (in the absence of perspective) this effect is achieved solely through visual separators such as boxes and rules; often intricately placed inside each other or in overlapping layers - creating complex but very easy to navigate informational systems. And especially the way in which text and image is brought together... Of cou...
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The Periodic Table of Typefaces

6:32 PM
This is a great project developed by Cam Wilde at squidspot.com . You can purchase prints and other memorabilia, such as vinyl decals or even a moleskine notebook cover, at a page dedicated to the table . Cam Wilde tells us that "the Periodic Table of Typefaces is obviously in the style of all the thousands of over-sized Periodic Table of Elements posters hanging in schools and homes around the...
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Steampunk Typography

4:00 PM
One problem when writing a post on Steampunk is how to label it correctly: Does one use the label "19th Century" or "21st Century" or both? Again, would this genre go under "Victoriana" or "Computer"? It seems to me that all of the above would have to apply: Although Steampunk , as an art and design movement is contemporary and is also often computer based through its wide usage in game design, the inspir…
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CCA Advertisements for Fortune Magazine

1:21 PM
Throughout the 1930's and 1940's the Container Corporation of America ran a series of mostly black and white advertisements in Fortune Magazine. Designed by the likes of Cassandre, Kepes and Herbert Bayer, these ads are nothing less than landmarks of modernist design. Of the images below, the upper advert is either by Herbert Bayer or Kepes; in the upper middle we have one by Herbert Bayer; the l...
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When Mucha sends you a postcard...

12:56 PM
I live in dread of the Cartamania site going out of existence one day since it has not been updated in over 2 years now. This is one of the greatest places that I have come across for things such as postcards from the 19th century, as well as all kinds of other wonderful paper based curiosities. So far, so good... One of the nicest collections on Cartamania is a set of postcards designed by Alp...
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A brainchild of Sumerian Bureaucracy

12:36 PM
That is what this well written article on Sumerian writing and seals calls these wonderful objects, engraved with a picture story and accompanying text written with cuneiform . Their function was to roll an impression onto a two-dimensional surface, generally wet clay. Cylinder seals were invented around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia. They were used as administrative tools, as jewelery/magical amulets a...
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Champs Fleury

4:27 AM
Geofroy Tory (1480-1533), was one of a number of typographic masters who, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries invented the capital letter as we know it today. Thus, Tory created a link between the Italian printers of the fifteenth century, who first revived the antique Roman letterforms, with the work of those who adapted those designs as typefaces for letterpress printing in subs...
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Antique Greece: Black Figure Pottery

3:20 AM
One of the best resources for finding out about these beauties is also the most obvious: Wikipedia . However the page on the Metropolitan Museum of Arts website is good also, as is the page at Stanford University . Again, wikimedia commons probably has the nicest collection of images, separated into historic categories. Amongst the many reasons that these artifacts are very appealing to graphic...
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The Bayeux Tapestry

2:50 AM
The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered strip of linen, telling the story of the events that led up to the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. Although the 70 meter long (50 cm high) cloth is termed as a tapestry, from a technological viewpoint this is not strictly true since the Bayeux tapestry is not woven but embroidered. Throughout the ages the cloth has remained an ...
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