The old days.

Astronomers Robert Harrington and Joseph Stehlik take a break from operating Big Schmidt – a giant telescope that could very well be a pot bellied robot hiding in the corner – to draw portraits of one another from memory. Think of it as charting a star map of someone’s face.

Photograph by J. Baylor Roberts, National Geographic, 1955

Just saw this photo by Christian Stoll (by way of but does it float) and couldn’t help but think how incredibly awesome the KOMBOH office would look with a megalithic mail room. We’d likely never have enough mail to fill even one of the cubbyholes, but maybe we could end up renting them out on a per night basis. Sort of like a cramped motel catered towards people who find that the stale smell of paper and lick-able glue helps them fall asleep easier. Chocolate mints on every crumpled FedEx box pillow substitute.

I imagine this is what it looks like when an executive gets fired from a multi-national pharmacutical company. Or a manufacturer of nicely colored urinal pucks.

Poster by Kazumasa Nagai
Via but does it float

I never knew that a playground could look like a fun-loving giant robot and a prison for hardened criminals at the same time. Add a shipping weight of over 4 tons into the mix and you have yourself a hot commodity.

Some modern competition for hell on earth.

Practical (a.k.a. pre-cg) special effects never cease to amaze me. Have a look at how some of this magic was built. Hint: lots of acid-etched brass, fiber-optic lights, and fog.

Found this little gem in a Southern Railway System ad circa 1955. No, time machines were not involved.

Luckily this past weekend I had strep-throat. If it weren’t for the friendly bacteria inhabiting my throat, I wouldn’t have made the treck to the walk-in clinic that just so happened to have a magazine that just so happened to have an article about sustainable developments in Berlin. See, lucky me. One of the highlights of the article was a nod towards Sauerbruch Hutton, an architecture firm doing some cutting edge (sound effect here) work. It helps that they have a very nice, clean, straight-forward website too.

Beautiful poster by Atelier Bundi.

A set of labels for an airplane instrument panel perhaps? A slightly edutcated guess, but beyond that I have no clue. Ignorance may not be bliss, but in this case it sure is beautiful.

There is, in all likelihood, nothing as terrifying and violently humbling as staring into the face of a man-made sun. Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office.

Much can be said about the work and ideologies of Sol Lewitt. Unfortunately however, my bantering cannot do him any justice – I’ll let a few of his words ice the cake: ”Ideas cannot be owned…they belong to whomever understands them”.

Lacking a steady hand with microscopic precision? Look no further than the trusty CAD-SG-3370 drawing template; great for coloring between the lines and pretending to be an electrical engineer. Or for the typographer in all of us, FontFont has a great template inspired wallpaper for FF Unit Slab – something worth drooling over in and of itself.

I don’t know what I can say about Charlie Harper that a thousand people haven’t already. It seems he only really gained a modern following after his death in 2007, which is a tragic shame. His work basically says to me that graphic design and illustration are one and the same.

Shorthand is, apparently, a genuine codified secret language. It was used by secretaries, doctors, and court reporters to jot down notes fast enough to keep up with live speech or testimony. Gregg shorthand was a variant of shorthand that focused on smooth, elliptical lines that recorded phonetically, rather than attempting to simply shorten correct English spelling. Today it’s mostly been replaced by the likes of stenotype machines and digital audio recording.

Ever wonder what the path of asteroid 1951RA – between the dates of August 31st and September 21st, 1951 – looked like? Probably not, but you’d be all the wiser if you did. Equally wise: tracked out all-caps Futura on a star map.

Photo-credit: J. Baylor Roberts / National Geographic / Feb. 1952

There is something really endearing about beautiful letterforms that have no symbolic meaning to me. I just appreciate them for their abstract nature, graceful curves and decisive strokes. Have a gander at Nathanael Archer’s beautiful Tibetan calligraphy in his flickr stream.