Digital Ephemera for Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Another Wednes­day has rolled around, so here’s my weekly col­lec­tion of inter­est­ing dig­i­tal ephemera I’ve found pok­ing around the vast Inter­net waste­land. Think of me as your guide through the eclec­tic dig­i­tal desert…

Today’s Menu

• Art & Design
• Motion Graph­ics & Video
• Mar­ket­ing
• Social Media
• Some­thing Cool
• Some­thing Strange
• Some­thing Terrible
• Three Sites Worth Check­ing Out (Chess Edition)

Art & Design

The Evo­lu­tion of Base­ball card Design 1887–2011
This is a fun col­lec­tion of Base­ball Cards from designer Stacy David Walling­ford. Just like the play­ers, I’d have to say that even the graph­ics seem to have beefed up dra­mat­i­cally. I’m guess­ing they’d test pos­i­tive for PhotoShop.

Case Study: The Revenger’s Tragedy Ini­tial Design
Okay a bit of a shame­less plug for my own arti­cle, but it’s a nice post that exposes my design phi­los­o­phy and method­ol­ogy. Take a look at how I came up with a design for GreenStage’s pro­duc­tion of The Revenger’s Tragedy.

Motion Graph­ics & Video

Teal and Orange — Hol­ly­wood, Please Stop the Mad­ness
A great rant on the overuse of color cor­rec­tion from film­maker Todd Miro on the desat­u­ra­tion of the palette in Hol­ly­wood films of late. I don’t totally agree, but it’s a great rant nonetheless.

L.A. Time­lapse
This is beau­ti­ful, and as John Nack says: “Colin Rich has done the nearly impos­si­ble: He’s made me find Los Ange­les beau­ti­ful.“

LA Light from Colin Rich on Vimeo.

Table 7
A very cute, clever and well exe­cuted short film. –via Neatorama

John Dies at the End
Okay, I don’t know what this is about even after read­ing this arti­cle. But I sure want to see it!

Mar­ket­ing

Seth Godin’s Blog

Many peo­ple have heard of Seth Godin, if you haven’t you should! His daily mis­sives on mar­ket­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tions and human­ity are not to me missed. A truly invalu­able inspi­ra­tion for those nav­i­gat­ing the murky waters of mod­ern marketing.

Social Media

What Was There?

This site is an exper­i­ment in col­lec­tive his­tory. Using google maps and user sub­mit­ted pho­tographs they aim to cre­ate build a visual his­tory of the world. A wor­thy goal!

Some­thing Cool

Dig­i­tal Dead Sea Scrolls

After over 24 cen­turies, the work of archae­ol­o­gists, schol­ars and his­to­ri­ans the Dead Sea Scrolls will be acces­si­ble to every­one thanks to Google’s tech­nol­ogy. Google and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem have teamed up and are cel­e­brat­ing the launch of the Dead Sea Scrolls online. As reported on Google’s Blog:

Now, any­one around the world can view, read and inter­act with five dig­i­tized Dead Sea Scrolls. The high res­o­lu­tion pho­tographs, taken by Ardon Bar-Hama, are up to 1,200 megapix­els, almost 200 times more than the aver­age con­sumer cam­era, so view­ers can see even the most minute details in the parch­ment. For exam­ple, zoom in on the Tem­ple Scroll to get a feel for the ani­mal skin it’s writ­ten on—only one-tenth of a mil­lime­ter thick.”

Some­thing Strange

Cthulhu vs. the Sith (or the Car­rot Mon­ster Revenge)
A cute, if strange stop motion ani­ma­tion involv­ing veg­eta­bles, legos and the unmen­tion­able hor­ror from beyond the stars.

Some­thing Terrible

Worst Band Ever Butch­ers Pink Floyd
So bad, it’s almost good… almost!

Three Sites Worth Check­ing Out (Chess Edition)

• It’s Your Turn. My favorite online chess (and other board game) site. If you want to chal­lenge me at chess chal­lenge Ulysses 2004.
• The Chess Web­site YouTube Chan­nel. Great video chess lessons and lectures.
• US Chess. The US Chess Fed­er­a­tion offi­cial site.

A Map of the Underworld according Virgil’s Aeneid Rendered as a Subway Map

Design Some­thing Every­day 11/365: In honor of my love of maps, infor­ma­tion graph­ics and Vir­gil, I decided to imag­ine Aeneas jour­ney as if it were a sub­way map. So enjoy. Don’t for­get your sub­way token’s for Charon!

I have always loved maps, as a child I would look at our world atlas and pon­der the far flung reaches of the globe. Then I dis­cov­ered a his­tor­i­cal atlas at my school and real­ized that maps could not only take you hor­i­zon­tally across the globe but also ver­ti­cally in to the dis­tant past.

A period I found par­tic­u­larly fas­ci­nat­ing was the Roman Empire. I’d gaze at the maps show­ing the roads stretch­ing out from Rome like a web unit­ing the dis­parate cor­ners west­ern world under the the ban­ner of The Sen­ate and Peo­ple of Rome — SPQR.

The great poet Pub­lius Vergilius Maro, bet­ter known to us today as Vir­gil wrote his mas­ter­piece the Aeneid at the same time Rome was near­ing the apex of it’s power and con­fi­dence. This mag­nif­i­cent poem was writ­ten to, amongst other things, cre­ate a mythol­o­gized past for the Romans of the first cen­tury CE, par­tic­u­larly for Virgil’s patron, the Emperor Augus­tus. As such, the poem depicts the Romans  as a peo­ple not great at skill in art, des­tined to rule.

Let oth­ers bet­ter mold the run­ning mass
Of met­als, and inform the breath­ing brass,
And soften into flesh a mar­ble face;
Plead bet­ter at the bar; describe the skies,
And when the stars descend, and when they rise.
But, Rome, ‘t is thine alone, with awful sway,
To rule mankind, and make the world obey,
Dis­pos­ing peace and war by thy own majes­tic way;
To tame the proud, the fetter’d slave to free:
These are impe­r­ial arts, and wor­thy thee.“
–The Aeneid, Book 6 Trans­lated by John Dryden

This pas­sage takes place dur­ing a con­ver­sa­tion between Aeneas and his dead father Ancheises in the under­world. This is direct allu­sion to Homer and The Odyssey. In Homer’s work must his hero Odysseus must visit a cave where he will sum­mon the dead seer Tire­sias (amongst other dead celebs). By doing this he will gain the knowl­edge to com­pete his quest and finally reach the far shores of Ithica.

In the Aeneid, Aeneas has the same quest but he actu­ally has to travel through the land of the dead, instead of just wait­ing at the gate like Odysseus. This is one of the most impor­tant and vivid parts of the poem. His jour­ney has inspired artists and poets for cen­turies, now it has inspired a daily design and under­world sub­way map!

Links & Sources:

• The basic out­line of the map was taken from Alice K. Turner’s truly amaz­ing book A His­tory of Hell. It would be dev­il­ish of me not to rec­om­mend it.
• The Aeneid trans­lated by John Dry­den via The Inter­net Clas­sics Archive at MIT. The recent Robert Fagels trans­la­tion looks really good too.
• Free Audio Ver­sion of  The  Aeneid via Libravox.org (also the Dry­den ver­sion… yeah Pub­lic Domain!)
• Under­world & the After­life: A good arti­cle about Greco-Roman ideas of, well the under­world & the after­life via Car­los Parada of Greek Mythol­ogy Link. I used a lit­tle of this for the sub­way of the under­world map.