Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.
Simulmatics as a company was established in 1959 and declared bankruptcy in 1970. The founders picked this name as a mash of ‘simulation’ and ‘automatic’, hoping to coin a new term that would live for decades, which apparently didn’t happen! They worked on building what they called the People Machine to simulate and predict human behavior. It was marketed as a revolutionary technology that would completely change business, politics, warfare and more. Doesn’t this sound familiar?!
A search engine for images and audio that’s either under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.
Lara’s superb book on public speaking is now available in its entirity for free as a web book!
And a very beautiful web book it is too! All it needs is a service worker so it works offline.
All of these graphic design books, magazines, and type specimens are available for perusal on the Internet Archive.
Is making your design system public worth the effort? In short: yes, it is.
I agree with Dan. But I wish that more people would make their design system mistakes and misteps public, like Robin talked about.
A new online publication from Julia Angwin:
Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech.
The dominant narrative for the growth of the World Wide Web, the graphical, user-friendly version of the internet created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, is that its success has been propelled by Silicon Valley venture capitalism at its most rapacious. The idea that currently prevails is that the internet is best built by venture-backed startups competing to offer services globally through category monopolies: Amazon for shopping, Google for search, Facebook for social media. These companies have generated enormous profits for their creators and early investors, but their “surveillance capitalism” business model has brought unanticipated harms.
It doesn’t have to be this way, says Ethan Zuckerman:
A public service Web invites us to imagine services that don’t exist now, because they are not commercially viable, but perhaps should exist for our benefit, for the benefit of citizens in a democracy. We’ve seen a wave of innovation around tools that entertain us and capture our attention for resale to advertisers, but much less innovation around tools that educate us and challenge us to broaden our sphere of exposure, or that amplify marginalized voices. Digital public service media would fill a black hole of misinformation with educational material and legitimate news.
Books in the public domain, lovingly designed and typeset, available in multiple formats for free. Great works of fiction from Austen, Conrad, Stevenson, Wells, Hardy, Doyle, and Dickens, along with classics of non-fiction like Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Shackleton’s South!
Chris ponders the motivations behind companies sharing their design systems publicly. Personally, I’ve always seen it as a nice way of sharing work and saying “here’s what worked for us” without necessarily saying that anyone else should use the same system.
That said, I think Chris makes a good poin here:
My parting advice is actually to the makers of public design systems: clearly identify who this design system is for and what they are able to do with it.
A free and open source neutral sans-serif typeface, released as part of version two of the design system for the US federal government.
This well-researched in-depth piece doesn’t paint a pretty picture for archiving online news:
Of the 21 news organizations in our study, 19 were not taking any protective steps at all to archive their web output. The remaining two lacked formal strategies to ensure that their current practices have the kind of longevity to outlast changes in technology.
A nice counterpoint to the last time I linked to Paul’s weeknotes:
However, there’s another portion of the industry, primarily but not exclusively within the public sector, where traditional development approaches (progressive enhancement, server-side rendering) remain prevalent, or less likely to be dismissed, at least. Because accessibility isn’t optional when your audience is everyone, these organisations tend to attract those with a pragmatic outlook who like to work more diligently and deliberately.
Fuck yeah, libraries!
Even more radically, your time at the library comes with absolutely no expectation that you buy anything. Or even that you transact at all. And there’s certainly no implication that your data or your rights are being surrendered in return for the services you partake in.
This rare openness and neutrality imbues libraries with a distinct sense of community, of us, of everyone having come together to fund and build and participate in this collective sharing of knowledge and space. All of that seems exceedingly rare in this increasingly commercial, exposed world of ours. In a way it’s quite amazing that the concept continues to persist at all.
And when we look at it this way, as a startlingly, almost defiantly civilized institution, it seems even more urgent that we make sure it not only continues to survive, but that it should also thrive, too.
I tried very hard in that book, when it came to social media, to be platform agnostic, to emphasize that social media sites come and go, and to always invest first and foremost in your own media (website, blog, etc.) and mailing list.
I still stand by that advice, but if I re-wrote the book now, I would encourage artists to use much more caution when it comes to using social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
A smart look back at historical examples of regulation and what we can learn from them today, by Justine Leblanc:
- Railways in the UK: Public interest as a trigger for regulation
- Engineering in Canada: Accountability as a trigger for regulation
- The automotive industry in the USA: Public outrage as a trigger for regulation
A terrific piece by Rob that is simultaneously a case study of Pro Publica work and a concrete reminder of the power of separating structure and presentation (something that I worry developers don’t appreciate enough).
Don’t get stuck on what different types of information are “supposed” to look like. They can take whatever shape you need them to.
This forthcoming sci-fi quarterly publication looks intriguing:
Each issue contains a part of a previously untranslated novel as well as essays looking at the world through the lens of different writers.
I’m loving their typeface. It’s called Marvin. It was specially made for the magazine, and available to download and use for personal use for free.
Marvin gets its distinctive voice not only from its Art Nouveau vibe but also from its almost geometrically perfect construction. Its roundness and familiarity with Bauhaus typefaces shows its roots in geometric sans serifs at the same time.
The story of its (re)construction is fascinating. (Thanks for the heads-up, Jason.)
Given my experience publishing Resilient Web Design as a web book, I think I should take a good look at this nascent spec.
What we envision for Packaged Web Publications is similar to the goals and techniques of Progressive Web Apps: breaking the boundaries between web sites and mobile apps, an emphasis on “offline” paradigms, and so on. The time is right to broaden the scope and power of the web to include publications.
I’m not going to be around for this, but I wish I could go. If you’re in Brighton, I highly recommend this one-day workshop from Matt. He’s been doing some internal workshops at Clearleft and he’s pretty great.