Lunar Booties and Space Suiting

In more space news...a traveling exhibition of the Smithsonian's collection of relics from the Space Race will open this Spring! The Times got a sneak peak at some of these technical wonders that helped launch man to the moon. love love love. Read the whole article here and check out the awesome gallery of xray scans and photographed suits. Thanks Core77!

Arcade Fire: The Wilderness Dowtown

The Wilderness Downtown. Honestly the most amazing and beautiful thing I've seen using our current technology. Thanks Arcade Fire for being f*cking awesome.

Vajazzling your Vajayjay

Who knew you could vajazzle your vajayjay? Thanks for the heads up Catzie!

Photoshop Cooks

A video made in stopmotion for competition AdobeYouGC. What if you could use photoshop to whip up cookies instead of images?

USPS Automated Postal Center

Topping the list of folks' most dreaded errands is probably a trip to the Post Office. Long lines, unfriendly counter ladies, and screaming kids make the absurd waiting times nearly unbearable. I was anticipating a pretty long afternoon at my local post office when i was overjoyed to discover a newly installed USPS Automated Postal Center. They were rolled out in select locations last year but i hadnt encountered one until today. The process is as straightforward as buying a Metrocard or Self-Check kiosks at the airport cutting my wait time down from a 20+ person lineup to about 2 minutes start to finish. Kudos to whoever spearheaded this effort to bring our postal system into the 21st century.

Hand Lettering

A great missive from former New York Times art director Steven Heller about the return of handlettering and its debt to the computer. Check the full read here.

You may have noticed it, or maybe not. It may not be perceptible to the layman’s eye. After all, type and typography are supposed to be a crystal goblet — transparent — seen and read but not heard. Type should not be boisterous or distracting, though it must be appealing. In recent years there has been a veering away from the exclusive use of traditional typefaces (or fonts) to an increase in hand or custom lettering for advertisements, magazines, children’s books, adult book jackets and covers, film title sequences and package designs. Hand lettering is not just used, as it once was, for D.I.Y. youth-cult concert posters and T-shirts.

Owing to its infinite capacity for perfection, the computer has made this kind of hand lettering possible and inevitable. Incidentally, this is not the beautiful hand-crafted calligraphy celebrated by scribes and hobbyists and used for wedding invitations and diplomas. On the surface, this riotously raw lettering looks like it was produced by those who are incapable of rendering letters with any semblance of accuracy or finesse. And while this may or may not be true, a decade or so ago, this lettering was a critical reaction to the computer’s cold precision. It was also, in certain design circles, a means of rebelling against the purity and exactitude of modernism. Eventually it became a stylistic code for youthful demographics (the poster and title sequence for the film “Juno” stands out as a high-water mark in hand lettering, and before that, the TV series “Freaks & Geeks” used the trope), before being embraced by the mainstream (like the aforementioned IBM advertisements).