Speaking of Things Fall Apart, there is an accompanying 2015 wall calendar with one teardown photo from the book for every month. At the bottom of each page is a view of the previous and next months, which is nice.
If you were the kind of kid who liked to tinker with gadgets and take them apart to view their inner workings, you'll love Todd McLellan's book, 'Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living.'
If you keep up with the web design world at all, you probably already know about The Manual, a design journal started by XOXO Fest cofounder Andy McMillan and with contributions from world-class designers like Frank Chimero and Ethan Marcotte. Each printed edition—of which there are three thus far—contains stories about what it means to design for the web and the people…
The idea behind the ICON project, as told by designers Nathan Goldman and Dan Kuhlken: “Every film has one. A signature prop, set, or location. Something that, in a single image, can represent the entire movie. With this in mind, they created 50 geometric prints of iconic places and things from various films and TV shows. Examples include Office Space, Groundhog Day,…
If you're the kind of person who listens to vinyl records and also digs good typography, you'll love using these beautiful, laser-cut wooden dividers to keep your albums organized. They also work nicely for books and other physical media. There are a variety of collections to choose from, ranging from $100 to $410 depending on size, orientation (vertical or horizontal), and typeface…
The t-shirt designers at United Pixelworkers have teamed up with Fiks:Reflective to produce the super-reflective Active Duty II shirt for nighttime cyclists and runners. Made from soft black American Apparel poly-cotton 50/50, this tee sports UP's classic UNTD PXLWRKRS design (I snagged this one a while back) in reflective black and red on the front, with black reflective stripes on the lower…
Our friend Federico Viticci and his girlfriend Sylvia Gatta have released Perspective Icons 2, a lovely set of 100 icons for use with OmniFocus 2 for Mac. These icons are available in various colors and resolutions (including Retina), and allow you to add a touch of personality to your OmniFocus custom perspectives. Once installed on your Mac, they will sync to the…
This morning the folks at A Book Apart released renowned graphic designer Jason Santa Maria's new book, On Web Typography. The title says it all really, but I'll go ahead and include their own foreword so you know what this is all about. “Typography is your design’s voice and the most powerful tool you have to communicate with your readers. Learn how…
You may or may not already be familiar with Cameron Moll's work over at Authentic Jobs, but did you know he also painstakingly recreates pieces of architecture in letterpress form and sells prints of them? If not, now is a good time to look at his store because he's having a buy-one-get-one-free sale until July 31, 2014. My personal favorite is the…
These Spaceflight maps are perfect for anyone who's ever dreamed of going to space. From Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 mission routes to lunar landings and even to a Kennedy Space Center launchpad, these prints are sure to make your inner astronaut happy. They're printed on heavy pearlescent paper stock, giving them a beautiful and subtle metallic shimmer. City Prints carries the…
As this print's store page says, “Great espresso is both an art form and a science” Crafted with custom inks on beautiful Italian paper, this 20" x 27.5" print celebrates espresso by describing its theory and preparation in great detail, accompanied by illustrations. Get one from stellavie design for an introductory price of 59,95 EUR (~$81 USD) + 10,55 EUR shipping (~$14).
If there's one tool digital designers love to hate, it's Photoshop. It's ideal for editing photos and creating complex graphics, but not so much for designing user interfaces. Sketch is a Mac app specifically designed for building UIs, icons, CSS-friendly web elements, and much more. Today, Sketch updated to version 3, bringing all sorts of new features with it such as "Symbols",…
People have mixed feelings about Comic Sans. "Civilians" love the font for its casual handwritten look, while designers just love to hate it. Graphic designer Craig Rozynski decided he'd had enough of this divide, and designed a new typeface intended to make both camps happy: Comic Neue. In Craig's own words: “The squashed, wonky, and weird glyphs of Comic Sans have been…
Sean McCabe, the guy who designed the awesome 'Influence the World' poster (amongst many other things) has put together a set of video courses to help you become a hand-lettering artist yourself. In these videos, Sean shows you how to craft a hand-lettered composition from start to finish, including lots of tips on technique and style. In the more advanced lessons, he…
This Friday—February 21, 2014—would have been the 52nd birthday of one of my favorite essayists, David Foster Wallace. To celebrate the occasion, designer Debbie Millman teamed up with Brain Pickings to capture a passage he wrote about leadership, both in print form and as an 5 recorded by Millman herself. Millman originally created the print as a handcrafted felt-on-felt piece for the…
It's a standard metric ruler on one edge (20cm), and a detailed city skyline stencil on the other. There's not a whole lot else I can say, other than that it looks awesome. They've got stencils for London (my favorite), Paris, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, Toronto, and Jerusalem. Each one goes for $9.
Our friends at Studio Neat have designed an awesome t-shirt ($21) that sports all of their products in one image. Not much more to say than that, other than that the sale is run sort of like Kickstarter, in that they need to meet a minimum number of pre-orders for the shirt to be printed. The minimum here is only 25, so…
Certain industrial designers, such as Dieter Rams and Jony Ive, get a lot of attention within our community—and rightfully so—but one guy who maybe doesnt get talked about as much he deserves is Naoto Fukasawa. Some readers may recall this beautiful, wall-mounted CD player from 1999, which is arguably his most famous work, but he's designed all kinds of things that any…
Released just this morning, Jony Ive by Leander Kahney (editor of the Cult of Mac blog) explores the meteoric rise of Apple's famous product designer, Sir Ive himself. We're really looking forward to reading this. While this is not a book based on direct conversations with its subject in the way that Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs was, it does cover…
Written by Nathan Barry and Jeremy Olson, The App Design Handbook is an eBook package that guides app makers through the process of designing their apps for iOS 7. With 126 pages of great information, video interviews with nearly a dozen app experts, and a handful of tutorials and other resources, this is the best starting place for anyone who wants to…