The 1855 Map That Revolutionized Disease Prevention & Data Visualization: Discover John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

in Data, Design, Health, History, Science | July 15th, 2019

No, he didn’t help defeat an implaca­ble zom­bie army intent on wip­ing out all life. But Eng­lish obste­tri­cian John Snow seems as impor­tant as the sim­i­lar­ly-named Game of Thrones hero for his role in per­suad­ing mod­ern med­i­cine of the germ the­o­ry of dis­ease. Dur­ing the 1854 out­break of cholera in Lon­don, Snow con­vinced author­i­ties and crit­ics that the dis­ease spread from a con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed water pump on Broad Street, lead­ing to the now-leg­endary info­graph­ic map above show­ing the inci­dences of cholera clus­tered around the pump.

Snow’s per­sis­tence result­ed in the removal of the han­dle from the Broad Street pump and has been cred­it­ed with end­ing an epi­dem­ic that claimed 500 lives. The Broad Street pump map has become “an endur­ing fea­ture of the folk­lore of pub­lic health and epi­demi­ol­o­gy,” write the authors of an arti­cle pub­lished in The Lancet. They also point out that, con­trary to pop­u­lar retellings, the “map did not give rise to the insight” that the pump and its germ-cov­ered han­dle caused the out­break. “Rather it tend­ed to con­firm the­o­ries already held by the var­i­ous inves­ti­ga­tors.”

Snow him­self pub­lished a pam­phlet in 1849 called “On the Mode of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion of Cholera” in which he argued that “cholera is com­mu­ni­cat­ed by the evac­u­a­tions from the ali­men­ta­ry canal.” As he remind­ed read­ers of The Edin­burgh Med­ical Jour­nal in an 1856 let­ter, in that same year, “Dr William Budd pub­lished a pam­phlet ‘On Malig­nant Cholera’ in which he expressed views sim­i­lar to my own.” Germ the­o­ry had a long, dis­tin­guished his­to­ry already, and Snow and his con­tem­po­raries made sound, evi­dence-based argu­ments for it.

But their posi­tion “large­ly went ignored by the med­ical estab­lish­ment,” notes Randy Alfred at Wired, “and was opposed by a local water com­pa­ny near one Lon­don out­break.” The accept­ed, main­stream sci­en­tif­ic opin­ion held that all dis­ease was spread through “mias­ma,” or bad air. Pol­lu­tion, it was thought, must be the cause. After the pump handle’s removal, Snow pub­lished an 1855 mono­graph on water­borne dis­eases. This was the first pub­lic appear­ance of the leg­endary map—after the removal of the han­dle.

Help­ing to inform Snow’s map, anoth­er inves­ti­ga­tor, parish priest Hen­ry White­head had “con­clud­ed that it was the wash­ing of soiled dia­pers into drains which flowed to the com­mu­nal cesspool that con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed the pump and start­ed the out­break,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra. White­head, a for­mer crit­ic of germ the­o­ry, lat­er point­ed out that the removal of the pump han­dle didn’t actu­al­ly stop the epi­dem­ic, which, he said, “had already run its course” by that point.

Nonethe­less, Snow and oth­er pro­po­nents of the the­o­ry were vin­di­cat­ed, White­head had to admit, and Snow’s inter­ven­tion “had prob­a­bly every­thing to do with pre­vent­ing a new out­break.” The sim­ple, yet sophis­ti­cat­ed data visu­al­iza­tion would lead to rad­i­cal new ways of con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing dis­ease out­breaks, help­ing to stop or pre­vent who knows how many epi­demics before they killed hun­dreds or thou­sands. Snow’s map also deserves cred­it for giv­ing “data jour­nal­ists a mod­el of how to work today.”

It was hard­ly the first or only data visu­al­iza­tion of cholera out­breaks of the time. “As ear­ly as the 1830s,” Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist points out, “geo­g­ra­phers began using spa­cial analy­sis to study cholera epi­demi­ol­o­gy.” But Snow’s was by far the most influ­en­tial, and effec­tive, of them all. In his TED talk above, jour­nal­ist Steven John­son (author of The Ghost Map:The Sto­ry of Lon­don’s Most Ter­ri­fy­ing Epi­dem­ic and How It Changed Sci­ence, Cities, and the Mod­ern World) tells the sto­ry of how the out­break, and Snow’s the­o­ry and map, “helped cre­ate the world that we live in today, and par­tic­u­lar­ly the kind of city that we live in today.”

Read a Q&A with John­son here; head over to The Guardian’s Data Blog to see Snow’s visu­al­iza­tion recre­at­ed over a mod­ern, satel­lite-view map of Lon­don and the Soho neigh­bor­hood of the famous Broad Street pump; and learn more about Snow and dead­ly cholera out­breaks in the crowd­ed Euro­pean cities of the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry at the John Snow Archive and Research Com­pan­ion online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Flo­rence Nightin­gale Saved Lives by Cre­at­ing Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Visu­al­iza­tions of Sta­tis­tics (1855)

Napoleon’s Dis­as­trous Inva­sion of Rus­sia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visu­al­iza­tion: It’s Been Called “the Best Sta­tis­ti­cal Graph­ic Ever Drawn”

The Art of Data Visu­al­iza­tion: How to Tell Com­plex Sto­ries Through Smart Design

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Napoleon’s Disastrous Invasion of Russia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visualization: It’s Been Called “the Best Statistical Graphic Ever Drawn”

in Data, Design, History | July 11th, 2019

It’s tempt­ing to asso­ciate data visu­al­iza­tions with Pow­er­Point and online graph­ics, which have enabled an unheard-of capac­i­ty for dis­sem­i­nat­ing full-col­or images. But the form reach­es much fur­ther back in his­to­ry. Fur­ther back, even, than the front pages of USA Today and glossy side­bars of Time and
Newsweek. In 1900, for exam­ple, W.E.B. Du Bois made impres­sive use of sev­er­al full-col­or data visu­al­iza­tions for the First Pan-African Con­fer­ence in Lon­don, with no access what­so­ev­er to desk­top pub­lish­ing soft­ware or a laser print­er.

Almost fifty years before Du Bois turned sta­tis­tics into swirls of col­or and shape, Flo­rence Nightin­gale used her lit­tle-known graph­ic design skills to illus­trate the caus­es of dis­ease in the Crimean War and John Snow (not Jon Snow) illus­trat­ed his rev­o­lu­tion­ary Broad Street Pump cholera the­o­ry with a famous info­graph­ic street map.

Around this same time, anoth­er data visu­al­iza­tion pio­neer, Charles Joseph Minard, pro­duced some of the most high­ly-regard­ed info­graph­ics ever made, includ­ing the 1869 illus­tra­tion above of Napoleon’s march to, and retreat from, Moscow in the War of 1812. View it in a large for­mat here.

Made fifty years after the event, when Minard was 80 years old, the map has been called by the bible of data visu­al­iza­tion studies—Edward Tufte’s The Visu­al Dis­play of Quan­ti­ta­tive Infor­ma­tion—“prob­a­bly the best sta­tis­ti­cal graph­ic ever drawn.” Over at thoughtbot.com, Joanne Cheng sums up the con­text, if you need­ed a his­tor­i­cal refresh­er: “The year is 1812 and Napoleon is doing pret­ty well for him­self. He has most of Europe under his con­trol, except for the UK.”

Angered by Czar Alexander’s refusal to sup­port a UK trade embar­go to weak­en their defens­es, Napoleon “gath­ers a mas­sive army of over 400,000 to attack Rus­sia.” The cam­paign was dis­as­trous: over­con­fi­dent advances on Moscow turned into dev­as­tat­ing win­ter­time retreats dur­ing which the Grande Armée only “nar­row­ly escaped com­plete anni­hi­la­tion.” So, how does Minard’s 1869 Tableau Graphique tell this grand sto­ry of hubris and icy car­nage? And, Cheng asks, “what makes it so good?”

Cheng breaks Minard’s series of jagged lines and shapes down into more con­ven­tion­al XY axis line graphs to show how he coor­di­nat­ed a huge amount of infor­ma­tion, includ­ing the loca­tions (by lon­gi­tude) of dif­fer­ent groups of Napoleon’s troops at dif­fer­ent points in time, their direc­tion, and the pre­cip­i­tous­ly falling tem­per­a­tures in the stages of retreat. He drew from a list of the best his­tor­i­cal sources he could con­sult at the time, turn­ing dense prose into the spare, clean lines that set data sci­en­tists’ hearts a‑flutter.

Minard began his career in a much more rec­og­niz­ably 19-cen­tu­ry design field, build­ing bridges, dams, and canals across Europe for the first few decades of the 1800s. As a civ­il engi­neer “he had the good for­tune to take part in almost all the great ques­tions of pub­lic works which ush­ered in our cen­tu­ry,” not­ed an obit­u­ary pub­lished in Annals of Bridges and Roads the year after Minard’s death in 1870. “And dur­ing the twen­ty years of retire­ment, always au courant of the tech­ni­cal and eco­nom­ic sci­ences, he endeav­ored to pop­u­lar­ize the most salient results.”

He did so by ven­tur­ing out­side the sub­ject of engi­neer­ing, while using the “inno­v­a­tive tech­niques he had invent­ed for the pur­pose of dis­play­ing flows of peo­ple” on paper, writes Michael Sand­berg at DataViz. In order to tell the trag­ic tale” of Napoleon’s crush­ing defeat “in a sin­gle image,” Minard imag­ined the event as a dynam­ic phys­i­cal struc­ture.

Minard’s chart shows six types of infor­ma­tion: geog­ra­phy, time, tem­per­a­ture, the course and direc­tion of the army’s move­ment, and the num­ber of troops remain­ing. The widths of the gold (out­ward) and black (return­ing) paths rep­re­sent the size of the force, one mil­lime­tre to 10,000 men. Geo­graph­i­cal fea­tures and major bat­tles are marked and named, and plum­met­ing tem­per­a­tures on the return jour­ney are shown along the bot­tom.

This was hard­ly Minard’s first info­graph­ic. In fact, he made “scores of oth­er graph­ics and charts,” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic writes, “as well as near­ly 50 maps. He pio­neered sev­er­al impor­tant the­mat­ic map­ping tech­niques and per­fect­ed oth­ers, such as using flow lines on a map.” (See oth­er exam­ples of his work at Nation­al Geographic’s site.) Minard may not be much remem­bered for his infra­struc­ture, but his abil­i­ty, as his obit­u­ar­ist wrote, to turn “the dry and com­pli­cat­ed columns of sta­tis­ti­cal data” into “images math­e­mat­i­cal­ly pro­por­tioned” has made him a leg­end in data sci­ence his­to­ry cir­cles.

Again, view Minard’s visu­al­iza­tion of Napoleon’s failed inva­sion in a large for­mat here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Flo­rence Nightin­gale Saved Lives by Cre­at­ing Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Visu­al­iza­tions of Sta­tis­tics (1855)

W.E.B. Du Bois Cre­ates Rev­o­lu­tion­ary, Artis­tic Data Visu­al­iza­tions Show­ing the Eco­nom­ic Plight of African-Amer­i­cans (1900)

Napoleon’s Eng­lish Lessons: How the Mil­i­tary Leader Stud­ied Eng­lish to Escape the Bore­dom of Life in Exile

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The First Museum Dedicated Exclusively to Poster Art Opens Its Doors in the U.S.: Enter the Poster House

in Art, Design, History, Museums | July 1st, 2019

How times have changed since our late 80s col­lege days. Under­grads do research online, upload assign­ments to a serv­er, stream music, down­load affir­ma­tive sex­u­al con­sent con­tracts, and turn to Face­book when it’s time to find a ride home for the hol­i­days.

But one aspect of the col­le­giate lifestyle remains unchanged.

They still fes­toon their dorm rooms with posters—the actu­al paper arti­cle, affixed to the walls with blue put­ty, a care­ful­ly curat­ed col­lec­tion of taste and aspi­ra­tion.

As Cait Munro writes in Refin­ery 29:

Fresh­man, already scram­bling to find and loud­ly artic­u­late an iden­ti­ty, can leave the poster sale with two or three plas­tic tubes hous­ing scrolls that rep­re­sent the very essence of their new, par­ent-free, on-cam­pus selves. Posters become an afford­able, demon­stra­ble expres­sion of who they are as a per­son — or, in the tra­di­tion of peo­ple eager to leave behind their home­town selves, who they want to be.

Legions of style blogs have decreed that these posters should be giv­en the heave-ho along with the plas­tic milk crate shelv­ing, come grad­u­a­tion.

Per­son­al­ly, I would rather gaze upon the tat­tered repro­duc­tion of the first paint­ing that spoke to me at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go than any­thing the design experts float as an accept­ably grown up alter­na­tive.

Is Alphonse Mucha’s Byzan­tine 1896 ad for Job rolling papers some­how unwor­thy because legions of dewy eyed under­grads have giv­en it a peren­ni­al place of unframed hon­or?

The dri­ving forces behind the new­ly opened Poster House in New York City would say no. The first Amer­i­can muse­um ded­i­cat­ed exclu­sive­ly to poster art, its cura­tors cast a wide net through the form’s 160 year his­to­ry, whether the end goal of the work was war bond sales, pub­lic health edu­ca­tion, or straight-up box office sales. As the Poster House writes:

For a poster to suc­ceed, it must com­mu­ni­cate. By com­bin­ing the pow­er of images and words, posters speak to audi­ences quick­ly and per­sua­sive­ly. Blend­ing design, adver­tis­ing, and art, posters clear­ly reflect the place and time in which they were made.

What did the best-sell­ing poster of actress Far­rah Faw­cett in a red tank suit say to—and about—teenage boys in 1976? What did it say about Amer­i­can val­ues and gen­der norms in that Bicen­ten­ni­al year? Why no posters of Bet­sy Ross?

How does the offi­cial poster for Juras­sic Park, above, com­pare to the hand-paint­ed, pre­sum­ably unau­tho­rized image used to mar­ket it to audi­ences in Ghana?

(End­less grat­i­tude to illus­tra­tor and mon­ster movie fan Aeron Alfrey for bring­ing this and oth­er Ghan­ian spins on Amer­i­can film releas­es to our atten­tion.)

Some posters have remark­able stay­ing pow­er, reap­pear­ing in a num­ber of guis­es. Wit­ness Rosie the Riv­et­er and James Mont­gomery Flagg’s Uncle Sam-themed WWI recruit­ment poster, to say noth­ing of the Barack Oba­ma “Hope” poster by Shep­ard Fairey, the poster that launched a thou­sand par­o­dies, most­ly dig­i­tal, but even so.

To learn more about vis­it­ing Poster House, its inau­gur­al Alphonse Mucha exhib­it and upcom­ing events such as Drink and Draw, click here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Film Posters of the Russ­ian Avant-Garde

10,000 Clas­sic Movie Posters Get­ting Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Down­load

Chill­ing and Sur­re­al Pro­pa­gan­da Posters from the NSA Are Now Declas­si­fied and Put Online

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

The Library of Con­gress Makes Thou­sands of Fab­u­lous Pho­tos, Posters & Images Free to Use & Reuse

Vin­tage 1930s Japan­ese Posters Artis­ti­cal­ly Mar­ket the Won­ders of Trav­el

100 Great­est Posters of Film Noir

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

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Watch Battered & Bruised Vintage Toys Get Mesmerizingly Restored to Near Mint Condition

in Design, History, K-12 | June 26th, 2019

They say that toys were once built to last. But though met­al and wood did­n’t break quite so eas­i­ly in the hands of chil­dren in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry as plas­tic does in the hands of their great- or great-great-grand­chil­dren today, time still has­n’t been espe­cial­ly kind to the play­things of yes­ter­year. Enter the toy restor­er, who can return even the most fad­ed, rust­ed, beat­en-up spec­i­mens to a bur­nished, gleam­ing con­di­tion that would turn the head of even the most smart­phone-addled young­ster. At least the toy restor­er behind the Youtube chan­nel Res­cue & Restore seems to pos­sess skills of this kind, and in its chan­nel’s videos you can see them put to use.

Over the past two months, Res­cue & Restore has tak­en on such projects as a 1960s Ton­ka Jeep, a 1930s Wyan­dotte air­plane, a 1920s Day­ton train, and oth­er such minia­tures as a piano, a cash reg­is­ter, and even a func­tion­al oven. Most of them start out look­ing like lost caus­es, and some bare­ly resem­ble toys at all.

For­tu­nate­ly, Res­cue & Restore pos­sess­es all the spe­cial­ized tools need­ed to not just dis­as­sem­ble and (to the amaze­ment of many a com­menter) reassem­ble every­thing, but to clean, resur­face, and repaint each and every part, and in some cas­es fab­ri­cate new ones from scratch. Apart from the occa­sion­al explana­to­ry sub­ti­tle, the “host” does all this work with­out a word.

Despite their sim­plic­i­ty, the videos of Res­cue & Restore have drawn mil­lions upon mil­lions of views in a rel­a­tive­ly short time. This sug­gests that the num­ber of peo­ple dream­ing of a bet­ter future for their clos­ets full of long-dis­used toys might be large indeed, though we should nev­er under­es­ti­mate the appeal of see­ing the old made new again — an expe­ri­ence whose audio­vi­su­al sat­is­fac­tion seems to be height­ened by high-res­o­lu­tion shots and clear­ly cap­tured sounds of all the dremel­ing, sand­blast­ing, and buff­ing involved.

Toys orig­i­nal­ly opened six­ty, sev­en­ty, eighty Christ­mases ago have gone through a lot in their long lives, but after Res­cue & Restore gets done with them, they could well find their way under the tree again this year.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary

Watch a 17th-Cen­tu­ry Por­trait Mag­i­cal­ly Get Restored to Its Bril­liant Orig­i­nal Col­ors

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

The Art of Restor­ing Clas­sic Films: Cri­te­ri­on Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitch­cock Movies

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Atlas of Space: Behold Brilliant Maps of Constellations, Asteroids, Planets & “Everything in the Solar System Bigger Than 10km”

in Astronomy, Design, Science | June 20th, 2019

A great deal remains to be learned about our solar sys­tem, but a great deal has already been learned about it as well. Yet huge amounts of data such as those pro­duced by out­er-space research so far can’t do much for us unless we can inter­pret them. Luck­i­ly, the age of the inter­net has made pos­si­ble unprece­dent­ed­ly easy access to data as well as unprece­dent­ed­ly easy dis­tri­b­u­tion of inter­pre­ta­tions of that data. Eleanor Lutz, a biol­o­gy grad­u­ate stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton and the cre­ator of the sci­ence illus­tra­tion blog Table­top Whale, has tak­en advan­tage of both con­di­tions to wow her ever-grow­ing fan base with her maps of the realms beyond Earth.

“Atlas of Space, her lat­est project, is all about the solar sys­tem,” writes Wired’s Sara Har­ri­son. “She plumbed the depths of pub­licly avail­able data sets from agen­cies like NASA and the US Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey and used them to cre­ate vivid maps of con­stel­la­tions, aster­oids, and plan­ets. In one image, lumi­nes­cent bands of fuch­sia and aqua­ma­rine aster­oids swirl around the bright, white point of the Sun. In anoth­er, Earth seems to pul­sate as an ani­ma­tion of Arc­tic sea ice shows how it extends down the con­ti­nents dur­ing the win­ter and then retracts back to the poles in sum­mer.”

Lutz plans to release all the images she has cre­at­ed for her Atlas of Space over the next few weeks, along with instruc­tions teach­ing read­ers how to cre­ate sim­i­lar illus­tra­tions them­selves. In her intro­duc­to­ry post to the project, she promis­es “an ani­mat­ed map of the sea­sons on Earth, a map of Mars geol­o­gy, and a map of every­thing in the solar sys­tem big­ger than 10km.”

Lutz also briefly describes her plans to write about every­thing from “work­ing with Dig­i­tal Ele­va­tion Mod­els (DEMs) in Bash and Python” to “using the NASA HORIZONS orbital mechan­ics serv­er and scrap­ing inter­net data” to “updat­ing vin­tage illus­tra­tions and paint­ing in Pho­to­shop.” That last ele­ment has already made the project par­tic­u­lar­ly eye-catch­ing: you’ll notice the Atlas of Space pages pub­lished so far, “An Orbit Map of the Solar Sys­tem” and “A Topo­graph­ic Map of Mer­cury,” both pos­sess a strong retro design sen­si­bil­i­ty, though each of a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent kind. Levi Wal­ter Yag­gy would be proud — and no doubt aston­ished by just how much more infor­ma­tion we’ve man­aged to gath­er about the solar sys­tem over the past 130 years.

via Wired

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Strik­ing­ly Beau­ti­ful Maps & Charts That Fired the Imag­i­na­tion of Stu­dents in the 1880s

A Plan­e­tary Per­spec­tive: Tril­lions of Pic­tures of the Earth Avail­able Through Google Earth Engine

3D Map of Uni­verse Cap­tures 43,000 Galax­ies

A Mas­sive, Knit­ted Tapes­try of the Galaxy: Soft­ware Engi­neer Hacks a Knit­ting Machine & Cre­ates a Star Map Fea­tur­ing 88 Con­stel­la­tions

The Solar Sys­tem Quilt: In 1876, a Teacher Cre­ates a Hand­craft­ed Quilt to Use as a Teach­ing Aid in Her Astron­o­my Class

The Solar Sys­tem Drawn Amaz­ing­ly to Scale Across 7 Miles of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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A New Photo Book Documents the Wonderful Homemade Cat Ladders of Switzerland

in Architecture, Design, Travel | June 7th, 2019

There are days when Cal­gon is not escape enough…

Days when one longs to be a cat, specif­i­cal­ly a free-rang­ing feline of Bern, Switzer­land, as fea­tured in graph­ic design­er Brigitte Schus­ter’s forth­com­ing book, Swiss Cat Lad­ders…

Some Amer­i­can cats come and go freely through—dare we say—doggie doors, those small aper­tures cut into exist­ing points of entry, most com­mon­ly the one lead­ing from kitchen to Great Out­doors.

The cit­i­zens of Bern have aimed much high­er, cus­tomiz­ing their homes in align­ment with both the feline com­mit­ment to inde­pen­dence and their fear­less­ness where heights are con­cerned.

As Schus­ter doc­u­ments, there’s no one solu­tion designed to take cats from upper res­i­den­tial win­dows and patios to the des­ti­na­tions of their choos­ing.

Some build­ings boast sleek ramps that blend seam­less­ly into the exist­ing exte­ri­or design.

In oth­ers, sure­foot­ed pussies must nav­i­gate ram­shackle wood­en affairs, some of which seem bet­ter suit­ed to the hen house.

One cat lad­der con­nects to a near­by tree.

Anoth­er start­ed life as a drain spout.

Humans who pre­fer to out­source their cat lad­ders may elect to pur­chase a pre­fab­ri­cat­ed spi­ral stair­case online.

Pre-order Swiss Cat Lad­ders for 45 € using the order form at the bot­tom of this page. The text, which is in both Ger­man and Eng­lish, includes dia­grams to inspire those who would cater to their own cat’s desire for high fly­ing inde­pen­dence.

All pho­tographs © Brigitte Schus­ter

Via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

Two Cats Keep Try­ing to Get Into a Japan­ese Art Muse­um … and Keep Get­ting Turned Away: Meet the Thwart­ed Felines, Ken-chan and Go-chan

Meet Fred­die Mer­cury and His Faith­ful Feline Friends

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City this June for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. And con­grat­u­la­tions to her home­schooled senior, Milo Kotis, who grad­u­ates today! Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Download Iconic National Park Fonts: They’re Now Digitized & Free to Use

in Design | June 6th, 2019

Fonts put in the ser­vice of the pub­lic good, like road signs, and street names, try to be invis­i­ble most of the time. They’re here to do their job and noth­ing else. But cer­tain fonts accu­mu­late some­thing else, a sense of famil­iar­i­ty, a feel­ing of com­fort and affec­tion. That’s the think­ing behind this recre­ation of America’s Nation­al Park font, which a team of five design­ers has cre­at­ed after much lov­ing research.

Jere­my Shel­horn, the font studio’s founder, pin­points exact­ly that kind of com­fort:

Any­way I wasn’t fish­ing for some rea­son and was wan­der­ing around  fol­low­ing a deer trail turned into fisherman’s trail then back to anoth­er trail as some­time fish­er­man do.  I had trekked pret­ty far that day and wasn’t exact­ly lost, but I need­ed a lit­tle reas­sur­ance that I was head­ing the right direc­tion when I came across one of those ubiq­ui­tous signs you see in a nation­al park. You know the ones that have the text carved or “rout­ed” into it. Enter­ing Rocky Moun­tain Nation­al Park.

The font is “rout­ed” into wood­en signs and fol­lows famil­iar rules: round­ed ser­ifs, sim­ple angles. Shel­horn began to won­der:

…if it actu­al­ly was a type­face or “font” that any­one could down­load and use? Do park rangers have this as a type­face on their com­put­ers to set in their word docs, pdfs and pow­er point slides?…Turns out it isn’t a type­face at all but a sys­tem of paths, points and curves that a router fol­lows.

The Nation­al Park Type Face was cre­at­ed by Shel­horn, his part­ner Andrea Her­stows­ki, two stu­dents from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas– Chloe Hubler and Jen­ny O’Grady–and an actu­al NPS Ranger Miles Barg­er. It looks like the real thing and comes in three weights and one out­line font. Research was done by tak­ing pen­cil rub­bings of var­i­ous signs. And now you can down­load the fonts here.

Out­side this font, Jere­my Shell­horn and asso­ciates work on oth­er projects involv­ing our Nation­al Parks (always under threat from big indus­try and rapa­cious cap­i­tal­ists). You can check their var­i­ous work here.

Mel­bourne typog­ra­ph­er Stephen Ban­ham once described the cul­tur­al bag­gage that comes with Gil Sans:

When­ev­er I read text set in Gill Sans, I can’t help but hear the voice of an Eng­lish nar­ra­tor read­ing along with me.

With that in mind, what does the Nation­al Park font (down­load here) sound like to you? A friend­ly ranger? The sound of hik­ing boots on a trail? Bird­song? A bab­bling brook? The voice of nature itself? Let us know in the com­ments.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent

Font Based on Sig­mund Freud’s Hand­writ­ing Com­ing Cour­tesy of Suc­cess­ful Kick­starter Cam­paign

Braille Neue: A New Ver­sion of Braille That Can Be Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly Read by the Sight­ed and the Blind

The His­to­ry of Typog­ra­phy Told in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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The Bauhaus Bookshelf: Download Original Bauhaus Books, Journals, Manifestos & Ads That Still Inspire Designers Worldwide

in Art, Design, History | May 21st, 2019

The Bauhaus, Bar­ry Bergdoll writes in the New York Times of the Ger­man design school found­ed a cen­tu­ry ago last month, “last­ed just 14 years before the Nazis shut it down. And yet in that time it proved a mag­net for much that was new and exper­i­men­tal in art, design and archi­tec­ture — and for decades after, its lega­cy played an out­size role in chang­ing the phys­i­cal appear­ance of the dai­ly world, in every­thing from book design to house­hold light­ing to light­weight fur­ni­ture.” Cel­e­bra­tions of the Bauhaus’ cen­te­nary have tak­en many forms, includ­ing the doc­u­men­tary series Bauhaus World, the reimag­in­ing of mod­ern cor­po­rate logos in the clas­sic Bauhaus style, and now the free online resource Bauhaus Book­shelf.

Bauhaus Book­shelf cre­ator Andrea Riegel calls the site “my mod­est con­tri­bu­tion to #bauhaus100 and beyond: (almost) all Bauhaus books and jour­nals in a vir­tu­al book­case — with the pos­si­bil­i­ty to down­load and take a clos­er look at the media and orig­i­nal sources, sup­ple­ment­ed by short excerpts and con­tri­bu­tions by Bauhaus peo­ple and con­tem­po­rary wit­ness­es or oth­er con­tent in con­text.”

In oth­er worlds, you’ll find there not just the orig­i­nal Bauhaus man­i­festo, but sec­tions on the series of “Bauhaus books” pub­lished by Wal­ter Gropius and Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy; Bauhaus-asso­ci­at­ed cre­ators and teach­ers like Paul Klee; Bauhaus adver­tis­ing; the women of the Bauhaus (a sub­ject pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture); and mate­ri­als from the 1938 exhi­bi­tion at New York’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art that intro­duced the Bauhaus to the world.

And 100 years after its found­ing, the world is still think­ing about the Bauhaus, which, in Bergdol­l’s words, “pro­duced one of the most pow­er­ful expres­sions of a view that design was every­thing. It served, in a way, as the embassy of mod­ernist design. But its suc­cess has often led to a reduc­tion­ism in our under­stand­ing of the rich nexus of artis­tic move­ments that criss­crossed at the school itself, as well as the diverse devel­op­ments it helped inspire.” For a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the Bauhaus, per­haps we must go back to the Bauhaus itself, not just in the sense of look­ing at the art, craft, design, and build­ings its teach­ers and stu­dents pro­duced, but the doc­u­ments it issued on its mis­sion and ideals. Whether in its Eng­lish or Ger­man ver­sions, Riegel’s Bauhaus Book­shelf serves as an intel­lec­tu­al­ly and aes­thet­i­cal­ly stim­u­lat­ing place to find them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books & Jour­nals for Free: A Dig­i­tal Cel­e­bra­tion of the Found­ing of the Bauhaus School 100 Years Ago

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Avail­able Online by Har­vard Muse­um Web­site

How the Rad­i­cal Build­ings of the Bauhaus Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

Mod­ern Cor­po­rate Logos Reimag­ined in a Clas­sic Bauhaus Style: Cel­e­brate the 100th Anniver­sary of the Bauhaus Move­ment Today

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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