Good news, bad news this week. Bad news first: my AI-powered WordPress plug-in stopped working. No idea why. It’s a little sad — maybe I’ll dig back in and figure out what broke, but for now, it’s dead.
The good news? Nothing specific — just a really good batch of links this week. Enjoy.
Graphic Design/Branding
Illoca branding by Unseen Studio®
Architecture begins with paper. For Illoca, we rooted the entire brand in this idea. The layered weight of stacked drawings, the warmth of trace overlays, the considered marks of a pencil on paper.
Tools
ColorSym: Symbols that speak color.
When color is the only way to convey information, millions of people are left guessing. ColorSym bridges this gap with universal symbols anyone can understand.
Practical guides and examples for using Claude effectively
Architecture
Tropical silence. Macahuite House by Studio Font
The house designed by Studio Font is organized around an H-shaped composition, formed by two volumes connected by a central pergola that serves as a meeting and social space. Four vertical walls and a floating horizontal plane structure the whole, creating a sequence of interior and exterior spaces that intertwine with the landscape.
Art
Dynamic Scenes Emerge from Fumiaki Aono’s Wooden Assemblages
Aono continues to revitalize found objects, particularly discarded furniture. Dressers, chests, and cabinets stack into towering assemblages and become the imaginative backdrop for the artist’s constructed scenes.
Each piece is individually hand-sculpted out of stoneware clay, and is hand-glazed before being fired in an electric kiln in Chicago.
The artist’s current work documents and reflects his immediate surroundings in Switzerland’s Mittelland. Monllor toys with the vivid and vibrant colours of his palette, rendering objects in ways they cannot be perceived naturally in reality.
Photography
Damien Aubin Documents a Former Soviet Mining Settlement Suspended in Time
The small settlement of Pyramiden on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is literally frozen in time. A former mining outpost for the Soviet Union, industrial operations ceased in 1998, and residents relocated.
Industrial Design
Kami (紙): paper in Japanese. A brown paper grocery bag. In leather.
Work
“Does it work?” is a binary question. “Is it good?” is a subjective question whose answer lives at the intersection of multi-disciplinary knowledge and taste, which is to say: it’s harder to answer than “Does it work?”
Typography/Web Design
Setting type like a printed page
Fluid scales, balanced headings, drop caps, optical sizing, hanging punctuation. The browser now ships most of a typesetter’s toolkit in pure CSS, switched off by default until you ask for it.
Random
Reading the news is the new smoking
I quit. I feel great. You can too.