Welcome to this week's edition of our Friday Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting and entertaining links. Brew a fresh cup of coffee, find a comfortable place, and relax.
Photo: Ben Sklar, WIRED
The Kickstarter Kings Who Taught the World How to Crowdfund »
This week, our friends Tom and Dan of Studio Neat were featured in this great WIRED profile:
Manufacturing at scale, going from one high-quality thing to a hundred or a hundred million just like it, is really, really hard. Even a decade ago, no one could have started a company like Studio Neat. Gerhardt and Provost would have started a small, local business, or sold their wares at farmers’ markets. Best-case, they get jobs at Apple or Samsung. But now, thanks to Kickstarter, 3D-printing, and a flourishing ecosystem of companies designed to help hardware companies actually make stuff, they’ve gone their own way.
[...] Silicon Valley was built by companies that started in garages and graduated to sprawling campuses with slides and free food. But the next generation of hackers and makers might stay in the garage.
They've hit the big time! Congrats fellas.
The Met's new logo.
Not Diving But Swimming (or, The Peanut Galleries of New Logos) »
Michael Beirut, writing for Design Observer, shows why he likes The Met's new logo and, in a larger sense, why it's important to give new things a chance before we go around delivering snap judgments about them:
Graphic designers, whether we admit it or not, are trained for the short term. Most of the things we design have to discharge their function immediately, whether it's a design for a book or a poster, a website or an infographic, a sign system, or a business card. In school critiques, architecture and industrial design students produce models. Graphic designers produce finished prototypes. As a result, the idea that we create things that are unfinished, that can only accrue value over time, is foreign to us. It's so easy for us to visualize the future, and so hard to admit that we really can't. That's what we face every time we unveil a new logo.
Photo: ISRO/MOM
Images from India's Mars Orbiter Spacecraft »
It doesn't seem to get talked about much here in the US, but India has a Mars orbiter and it's been sending back great images of the red planet. Some interesting info and details in this gallery.
- Related: "A New Look at Ancient Mars", The New Yorker
Image: Tom Harrison Maps
How a Modern-Day Mapmaker Does His Job »
Bourree Lam of The Atlantic interviewed cartographer Tom Harrison about what goes into a good map and why making one can take nearly two years:
Lam: What’s involved in creating not just a map, but a good map?
Harrison: One of the secrets of making a good, easy-to-read, map is what you leave off the map. A lot of maps have way too much stuff. When you’re reading a map, your eyes are going back and forth. And if you have too much stuff, your eyes go back and forth too much and your brain cannot process everything it's seeing.
Being a former park ranger, I know that people can get in trouble in the outdoors without any help from me or anybody else. People want to know, where does the trail start, where can I go camping, how far is it from this point to that point, is it up or down? Those are the basic things they want to know. So I try to put the important information in the visual foreground, and the stuff that carries the body of the map—the contour lines and the vegetation and streams and things—that’s in the background.
Photo: Morten Hilmer
Photo: Morten Hilmer
The World's Most Extreme Dog Sled Patrol »
Kara Segedin of BBC Earth shares the story of wildlife photographer Morten Hilmer's time as a member of Slædepatruljen Sirius (Sirius Sled Patrol), Denmark’s elite navy dog sled unit. Just a fantastic series of photos.
Photo: Masashi Wakui
Photo: Masashi Wakui
Cinematic Nighttime Photos of Tokyo »
Thanks to this post at Spoon and Tamago, I discovered the photographic work of Masashi Wakui. Here's how they described it:
Masashi Wakui has a unique, surreal style of capturing Tokyo by night and making it look like an animated still from Akira or a Ghibli film.
Wakui has a penchant for the backstreets of Tokyo, specifically those with plenty of lanterns, streetlights and neon signs that only add to the surreal, cinematic quality of the scene. And those who have spent any number of nights wandering these streets will find Wakui’s photos achingly captivating.
Wakui's photos are indeed beautifully cinematic and surreal. I could stare at them for hours.
Gordon Ramsay Teaches How to Master 5 Basic Cooking Skills »
In this short compilation video, Gordon Ramsay how to...
- ...finely chop an onion (0:00)
- ...cook rice perfectly (1:09)
- ...skin and debone a fish (3:23)
- ...sharpen a knife (4:59)
- ...and cook perfect pasta (6:07)
One more they should've added, and which I myself have relied on many times: How to cook a steak in a pan.
Got any suggestions for articles, videos, stories, photographs, and any other links you think we should be posting in our weekly Quality Linkage? Please do let us know on Twitter.