notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

variety by twak on Flickr:

Sity was my master’s thesis project. It’s a procedural city generator.

cartophile (via hammerandcode):

Some people look at cold metal type and see words to print on paper. New York artist Hong Seon Jang looks at metal type and sees a miniature cityscape. Labyrinth, a current exhibition of Jang’s installations is on view at the David B Gallery in Denver through June 16th. Among his contemporary works on display, Type City is Jang’s sprawling metalopolis seaport made of tall lead type buildings and boulevards bisecting the city into a topographic and typographic landscape. With the patience of a skilled hand typesetter, he set the tall buildings of metal type upright so they are capped with individual letters. 

NYTimes.com: A Digital Manhattan in ‘The Avengers’ (via mappeal):

We also had a team doing something called LIDAR, which is being able to create geometry of the city by scanning it,” Mr. White said. “We take those spheres of photographs and we project them onto the geometry.

Everyone likes LIDAR and 3D flat-textured 3D renderings, right?

party outings 1964 front cover by smallritual on Flickr:

‘party’ here means a group of people. this is a book of suggestions for day trips to tourist destinations

Soviet poster, 1931 (text: “We Are Building a Fleet of Airships in the Name of Lenin”) from The Dead Dream of the Dirigible by Megan Garber in The Atlantic.

Proposed flag designs for a “Great Britain” in the early 1600s, when James became king of both still-independent countries, as covered in BBC Radio 4’s The Flag That Failed, part of the Shakespeare’s Restless World season.

Handily, there’s a transcript available:

Looking at our flag designs, you can see the intractable politics of union being played out in graphic form. All the designs stumble on the one key problem facing James’s project: how do you combine two kingdoms, but allow each to retain equal status? Crudely put, which national cross gets to be on top, St George or St Andrew’s, and does size matter?

If you’ve never seen a Union Jack, it is surprisingly difficult to come up with an even-handed solution to this particular problem.

The programme page has a zoomable image of the designs. As it was, in 1606 a recognisable Union Flag that has evolved into the current design was used, although England and Scotland were not formally joined as a single country until 1707, after the failure of the Darien Scheme (as covered by CP Grey in one of his informative videos).

Studio Parris Wakefield:

Tasked with the brief of ‘deep space and nebulae’, Howard Wakefield researched through the collection of Nasa imagery at SpaceImages. While tempted with a nebula called Factory, its name was too good to be true, for it didn’t compare with the more expansive deep blue nebula of Hubble NGC 346 SMC. Peter Saville was keen to see how it could be transformed from being purely documentary, so suggested an inverted, monochrome version.

A Week in the Life of London’s Public Transit System, by Jon Reades (via):

This visualisation shows average entries at each and every Underground, Overground, and DLR station over the course of a week using a 10-minute interval. So in theory there are some 300 * 7 * 24 * 6 data points in this image.

Oyster Card signed by William Gibson at the Zero History blog.

Oyster, Transport for London’s smart card, was introduced in July 2003, but for the first eight years of its life it was wonderfully change-free. The top row of these Oyster card images shows that the only changes were to the TfL roundel, first from red (associated with buses) to white, and then adding the old British Rail logo (now used by National Rail) once ATOC finally allowed sorted out allowing pre-pay on their services.

As early as 2007 there were Oyster visitor cards co-branded with the Tutankhamun exhibition at the O2. There are still visitor travelcards, and there was also an attempt to fuse a debit card and NFC payment system with an Oyster card, although apparently that’s no longer available.

It was last year, however, after TfL took control of the Oyster brand, that they were really able to let rip with custom designs. After the success of last year’s Royal Wedding cards, as predicted, this year sees special cards for 2012 and Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee.

Me? I’ll be happy using my 2003 vintage, red-roundel card, even if nobody gets to see the front any more. (The nice thing about NFC cards? You don’t even have to take them out of your Tube map holder.)