Aaron Draplin for Nixon
This Nixon Lost Coast series completely flew over my head (I don't think it's available anymore). But watching Aaron Draplin talk about his designs and his enthusiasm for retro-inspired aesthetics is always fun. This man is one of my favorite designers ever.
This is a great time to remind you that you can pre-order Aaron Draplin's book Draplin Design Co.: Pretty Much Everything right now for May delivery! Lock in the low price through Amazon!
Bad Luck Hot Rocks: Tales of bad luck brought on by stealing from a US National Park
Want a really funny book to read? Pick up Bad Luck, Hot Rocks. The book is filled with real letters from people who have taken petrified wood or other artifacts from The Petrified Forest National Park in Northeast Arizona only to find that their lives have been filled with bad luck because of it. So in order to restore balance and bring back good luck to their lives, they return the rock to The Petrified Forest National Park with enclosed letters apologizing, telling stories of woe, and generally hoping for better days ahead.
It's a pretty hilarious collection of letters coupled with gorgeous photographs of the things taken.
Just a reminder, it is a Federal crime to take things out of any national park. Don't do it or you'll have bad luck! Pick up the book using the link below!
1975 NASA Graphics Standards Manual in book form
It's finally here! The re-issue of the 1975 NASA Graphics Standards Manual is the love project of Jesse Reed & Hamish Smyth, the same guys who brought us that glorious full-size re-issue of the NYCTA Graphics Standards Manual. The NASA book is filled with illustrations, nerdy line drawings, and a ton of old-school graphics that defined an entire era of space exploration.
The 1975 NASA Graphics Standards Manual was initially supported on Kickstarter. If you missed out, you can pre-order a copy online (but obviously, you'll have to wait for your copy).
A video about everyday things
I don't know how people live like this. Having everything perfectly laid out in straight lines; clean desks; pure-white spaces. This just says catalog to me, not home. But I'm getting beyond the point here I guess. This video from John Gordon is just a nice video display of things. Maybe these things get used. Maybe they don't. Maybe he's in a store. Maybe not. But I'll never know because these things are just way too clean for regular life.
The Future Is Now Vol. 2 by Josan Gonzalez
I honestly have no idea what the story is behind this but man do I love the animation promo for it. It's a book called The Future Is Now Vol. 2 by Josan Gonzalez which is currently being funded on Kickstarter. It's wonderfully drawn and colored and gives a really, really bleak look at the future of the world where robots, tech, and humans are fused together in our everyday lives.
Wool by Hugh Howey
I don't know if I can recommend this book. No, wait. Let me clarify that. I don't know if I can recommend this whole book. Wool by Hugh Howey came to me highly recommended, billed as an inventive story of survival in a post-apocalyptic world where people have unknowingly been contained inside underground silo's. The world that Hugh creates is incredibly fascinating but not entirely original. I had a very early sense that this type of story of higher-powers ruling a very segregated lower class has been told before (lately, moreso than ever in books and films).
Still, the book was pretty good, at least until a little past the halfway point when it seemed like Hugh's writing just got shorter and quicker, with huge jumps in the story at intervals that made me lose the flow of storytelling that he so wonderfully set up in the beginning half of the book.
It got so bad by the end of Wool that I more or less lost interest in reading the rest of the series (there are two more books, Shift and Dust). I might get around to them someday, maybe to gather the loose ends of the story in Wool, but for now I'm leaving the world of Wool for something else.
Plus, I hear there's a movie coming out which might just be worth watching if it can skim off some of the non-essential parts.