We’re building a non-profit, free repository of pure, immersive natural soundscapes as a fundraising platform for local, grassroots charities that support the restoration of our natural world.
The website earth.fm is “like Spotify, but for natural soundscapes”. I love everything about this.
© Vox (via YouTube)
Beginning in January 2021, advances in AI research have produced a plethora of deep-learning models capable of generating original images from simple text prompts, effectively extending the human imagination. Researchers at OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and others have developed text-to-image tools that they have not yet released to the public, and similar models have proliferated online in the open-source arena and at smaller companies like Midjourney.
Vox not only does share this interesting video on how AI is able to create imagery based on a short descriptional text —and some of the implications this technology has, but they also include a list of current free AI Art tools in the video description for anyone willing to dive deeper;
Self-publishing on the internet is a rewarding and powerful experience – you can very quickly produce work that is accessible to billions of people for very low cost.
Building websites is often seen as an uncreative, mathematics-based task undertaken by coders. This library encourages you to learn how to design and build interactive experiences and to consider this a tool in your design toolkit.
If you want to publish something online for the first time, this website is a great starting point. As a matter of fact, even if you’ve been building websites for a while already you might discover one or the other nugget –like the already linked idea of Web Design as Architecture– to pick up.
Welcome to our library of original guides to the world of typography, which the Google Fonts team is producing in collaboration with typographic experts from around the world. Google Fonts Knowledge enables designers and developers of all skill sets to choose and use type with purpose.
— from Google Fonts Knowledge
I’ve been an admirer of the great (typographic) work¹ of Elliot Jay Stock for quite a while already, so I was thrilled to learn about his recent collaboration on Google Fonts Knowledge. After consulting his blog –like the article series on ‘Advanced web typography’– for years now, this might become my new go-to resource when it comes to web typography.
¹ Amongst other things he created the beautifully designed magazine Lagom, which unfortunately was discontinued after ten issues. I still browse my copies from time to time –not only for the interesting content and the beautiful photography but particularly for layout and typographical inspiration. Even though the Lagom store is offline nowadays, there are apparently still back issues available to buy: There’s a dedicated contact button for this purpose on the about page of elliotjaystocks.com.
Better to know a knot and not need it, than need a knot and not know it.
— the motto of Animated Knots
Nothing fancy, just a well-structured website with a lot of different knots explained with neat little stop-motion clips accompanied by short descriptions. Bookmarked:
PS.: Why not wrap your Christmas Gifts with a ‘French Sinnet One’ this year for example!?
Curious people become smart by accident.
Their curiosity simply pushes them into various rabbit holes.
Guided by a childish desire to understand why something is the way it is, they end up exploring webs full of strange to them, initially, things.
The relentless desire to explore the world we live in. To understand why people behave the way they do. To investigate what caused something to work makes them read articles, books, even old newspapers and look for solutions outside their field of work.
This essay on Why Curiosity Is Better Than Being Smart? sent me down the rabbit hole that is the website of Ivaylo Durmonski. A huge collection of long-form essays and book summaries “for avid readers and thinkers alike”. Bookmarked.
durmonski.com/life-advice/curiosity-is-better-than-being-smart/
© Nippon Design Center
© Nippon Design Center
Experience Japan Pictograms are a novel set of visual symbols developed for people of all cultures and ages to enhance their tourism experience in Japan. These uniquely simple and easy-to-understand pictograms are designed under the key concept of “second encounter with Japan” to invite visitors to explore and enjoy Japan a little deeper than before.
The studio of renowned graphic designer Kenya Hara, the Nippon Design Center, has released a free set with more than 250 pictograms primarily intended for the tourism sector in Japan. Even though the collection naturally has multiple rather specific icons, there’re some nice basic and universally applicable ones among them, too. Definitely worth a glance.
© ibi / creative commons license (via YouTube)
© ibi / creative commons license (via YouTube)
© ibi / creative commons license (via YouTube)
Another YouTube channel with beautiful music accompanied by beautiful, atmospheric imagery, fitting my current autumn mood extremely well. What’s more, the music by ibi is published under the creative commons licence (CC BY, to be precise), so you are allowed to use it for your own projects if you credit the Berlin musician. The free wav files are available via bandcamp.com.
Nature Track is a podcast that opens a window on the beautiful sounds of the Australian wilderness. […] Each unique track is carefully recorded on location in a different part of Australia by the ABC’s nature specialist Ann Jones.
The beautiful podcast Nature Track by ABC Radio collects different sounds from Australian nature (so no music or humans), which reminds me a lot of ‘Sanctuaries of Silence’ and the amazing work of Gordon Hempton I’ve mentioned before.
The radio station furthermore has another podcast –among many others– called ‘Off Track’, which combines equally soothing sounds of nature with fascinating stories of environmental science recorded in the outdoors.
Both series are great alternatives for the very handy background noise app noisli, that I’ve been using occasionally for some time now.
The Accessibility Developer Guide is an initiative of Access for all, Swiss Foundation for technology adapted to people with disabilities. … The vision behind the Accessibility Developer Guide is to bridge the gap between providers of websites and users with special needs.
The Accessibility Developer Guide addresses a very important, but unfortunately often neglected component of website and web application design. Based on the experience of users with special needs as well as the knowledge of experienced web developers it provides help with the setup of tools, the basic knowledge needed for development, and code examples to get things started.
… a starting point for a more expansive, and more critical discourse on website design. The engagement of liberal arts, humanities and engineering present in the architectural discourse is more timely than ever. Considering and expanding upon these aspects when building and critiquing websites may help us fulfilling our responsibility as contributors to the global digital infrastructure today.
A very interesting and quite different approach to thinking of web design as architecture. It actually makes complete sense considering the ten associated statements by Malte Müller, though. Definitely, something to keep in mind for future online projects.