The Élite Heat of “Blackbird Spyplane”

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Thank you to the winner of our redesign contest, Ethan Duke! The background and wordmark are both his work. You can check him out on both Instagram and Twitter at @theduke2442! The dark mode was designed by Gwenanenn.

Recent — Design Inspiration

The best design inspiration on the Internet.

The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet

How Anthropic’s new tool, Claude Design, is creating overnight web-design clichés.

This life gives you nothing

Your attention is all you have. Wasting it is annihilating. Blackbird Spyplane saves literacy in a monumental Year-End Essay.

Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction

Many designers enjoy the interfaces seen in science fiction films and television shows. Freed from the rigorous constraints of designing for real users, sci-fi production designers develop blue-sky interfaces that are inspiring, humorous, and even instructive. By carefully studying these “outsider” user interfaces, designers can derive lessons that make their real-world designs more cutting edge and successful

Daring Fireball, by John Gruber

Commentary on Apple, technology, design, politics, and more.

Designing Imaginative Environments by Nathan Fowkes

Join industry veteran Nathan Fowkes on a deep dive into the hows and whys of designing environments for entertainment. From creating mood with color and light, to exploring different biomes and weather, to crafting architecture and props, he will teach you how to design amazing environments that make your work stand out from the crowd.

BIS Publishers | Convivial Toolbox

This book introduces an emerging domain of design research that is of immense interest today: Generative design research. This is an approach to bring ...

Just Enough Research — MULE BOOKS

The bestselling design research classic. Essential knowledge, also jokes.

Thinking with Type

The essential and bestselling guide to typography from beloved design educator Ellen Lupton—revised and expanded to include new and additional voices, examples, and principles, and a wider array of typefaces. "Thinking with Type is to typography what Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is to physics."—I Love TypographyThe bestselling Thinking with Type in a revised and expanded third edition: This is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication. Covering the essentials of typography, this book explores everything from typefaces and type families to kerning and tracking to grids and layout principles.Ellen Lupton provides clear and focused guidance on how letters, words, and paragraphs should be aligned, spaced, ordered, and shaped. Historical and contemporary examples of graphic design show how to learn the rules and how to break them. Critical essays, eye-opening diagrams, helpful exercises, and dozens of examples and illustrations show readers how to be inventive within systems that inform and communicate.Featuring 32 pages of new content, the third edition is revised and refined from cover to cover: More fonts: old fonts, new fonts, weird fonts, libre fonts, Google fonts, Adobe fonts, fonts from independent foundries, and fonts and lettering by women and BIPOC designersIntroductions to diverse writing systems, contributed by expert typographers from around the worldDemonstrations of basic design principles, such as vi­sual balance, Gestalt grouping, and responsive layoutCurrent approaches to typeface design, including variable fonts and optical sizes; tips for readability, legibility, and accessibility; and stunning reproductions from the Letterform Archive Thinking with Type is the typography book for everyone: designers, writers, editors, students, anyone who works with words on page or screen, and enthusiasts of type and lettering. Readers will also love Ellen Lupton's book Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. Ellen Lupton is a designer, writer, and educator. She has written numerous books about graphic design, including Thinking with Type, Graphic Design Thinking, and Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. She teaches in the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA), where she proudly serves as the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair. She is Curator Emerita at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, where her exhibitions included Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus Master and The Senses: Design Beyond Vision. Lupton loves reading, writing, teaching, and learning new things about design.

The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication

A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication

Clouded skies for open networks

Last week, I finished an essay about platform design affordances and content moderation expectations and community-level context collapse on Bluesky for Tech Policy Press and set it aside to cool before a last read-through. An hour later, the Trump administration brought to Bluesky a propaganda-zombie army made

hacker.makeup - Home

bird.makeup mirrors public Hacker News accounts into ActivityPub. Enter a handle to open its profile page.

The AI Aesthetic

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland

"Tearing down myths and distortions on virtually every page, The Revolution Has Come is the first substantive account of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland chapter—the iconic gathering that birthed the party and held on to its very last breath. Robyn C. Spencer’s incisive attention to gender, state repression, black radical alliances, philosophical and ideological debates, and the organization’s long decline makes this one of the most original studies of the Panthers to appear in years." - Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination