NASA Creates Movie Parody Posters for Its Expedition Flights: Download Parodies of Metropolis, The Matrix, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and More

For just over eigh­teen years now, NASA has been con­duct­ing expe­di­tions to the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion. Each of these mis­sions has not just a name, or at least a num­ber (last week saw the launch of Expe­di­tion 58), but an offi­cial poster with a group pho­to of the crew. “These posters were used to adver­tise expe­di­tions and were also hung in NASA facil­i­ties and oth­er gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tions,” says Bored Pan­da. “How­ev­er, when astro­nauts got bored of the stan­dard group pho­tos they decid­ed to spice things up a bit.”

And “what’s a bet­ter way to do that oth­er than throw­ing in some pop cul­ture ref­er­ences?” As any­one who has ever worked with sci­en­tists knows, a fair few of them have some­how made them­selves into liv­ing com­pen­dia of knowl­edge of not just their field but their favorite books, movies, and tele­vi­sion shows — not always, but very often, books, movies, and tele­vi­sion shows sci­ence-fic­tion­al in nature.

The prime exam­ple, it hard­ly bears men­tion­ing, would be Star Trek, but the well of fan­dom at NASA runs much deep­er than that.

You’ll get a sense of how far that well goes if you have a look through the Expe­di­tion poster archive at NASA’s web site. There you’ll find not just pop cul­ture ref­er­ences but elab­o­rate­ly designed trib­utes — down­load­able in high res­o­lu­tion — to the likes of not just Star Trek but Star WarsThe MatrixThe Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy (the sole pos­si­ble theme, Dou­glas Adams fans will agree, for Expe­di­tion 42), and even Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, which first gave dystopi­an sci-fi its visu­al form in 1927 (and which you can watch here). Albums are also fair game, as evi­denced by the Abbey Road poster for Expe­di­tion 26.

Bored Pan­da calls these posters “hilar­i­ous­ly awk­ward,” but opin­ions do vary: “I love them,” writes Boing Boing’s Rusty Blazen­hoff. “I think they’re fun and cre­ative.” And what­ev­er you think of the con­cepts, can you fail to be impressed by the sheer atten­tion to detail that has clear­ly gone into repli­cat­ing the source images? It’s all more or less in line with the for­mi­da­ble graph­ic design skill at NASA, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, that has gone into its posters cel­e­brat­ing space trav­el and the 40th anniver­sary of the Voy­ager mis­sions.

Going through the Expe­di­tion poster archive, I notice that none seems yet to have paid trib­ute to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solarissure­ly one of the most pow­er­ful pieces of out­er space-relat­ed cin­e­ma ever made. Grant­ed, that film has much less to do with team­work and cama­raderie than the intense psy­cho­log­i­cal iso­la­tion of the indi­vid­ual, which would make it tricky indeed to recre­ate any of its mem­o­rable images as proud group pho­tos. But if NASA’s poster design­ers can’t take on that mis­sion, nobody can.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 14 Free Posters from NASA That Depict the Future of Space Trav­el in a Cap­ti­vat­ing­ly Retro Style

NASA Lets You Down­load Free Posters Cel­e­brat­ing the 40th Anniver­sary of the Voy­ager Mis­sions

How the Icon­ic 1968 “Earth­rise” Pho­to Was Made: An Engross­ing Visu­al­iza­tion by NASA

NASA Presents “The Earth as Art” in a Free eBook and Free iPad App

Won­der­ful­ly Kitschy Pro­pa­gan­da Posters Cham­pi­on the Chi­nese Space Pro­gram (1962–2003)

“Glo­ry to the Con­querors of the Uni­verse!”: Pro­pa­gan­da Posters from the Sovi­et Space Race (1958–1963)

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 or on Face­book.

Buckminster Fuller Documented His Life Every 15 Minutes, from 1920 Until 1983

If you’ve heard of Buck­min­ster Fuller, you’ve almost cer­tain­ly heard the word “Dymax­ion.” Despite its strong pre-Space Age redo­lence, the term has some­how remained com­pelling into the 21st cen­tu­ry. But what does it mean? When Fuller, a self-described “com­pre­hen­sive, antic­i­pa­to­ry design sci­en­tist,” first invent­ed a house meant prac­ti­cal­ly to rein­vent domes­tic liv­ing, Chicago’s Mar­shall Field and Com­pa­ny depart­ment store put a mod­el on dis­play. The com­pa­ny “want­ed a catchy label, so it hired a con­sul­tant, who fash­ioned ‘dymax­ion’ out of bits of ‘dynam­ic,’ ‘max­i­mum,’ and ‘ion,’ ” writes The New York­er’s Eliz­a­beth Kol­bert in a piece on Fuller’s lega­cy. “Fuller was so tak­en with the word, which had no known mean­ing, that he adopt­ed it as a sort of brand name.” After the Dymax­ion House came the Dymax­ion Vehi­cle, the Dymax­ion Map, and even the two-hour-a-day Dymax­ion Sleep Plan.

“As a child, Fuller had assem­bled scrap­books of let­ters and news­pa­per arti­cles on sub­jects that inter­est­ed him,” Kol­bert writes. “When, lat­er, he decid­ed to keep a more sys­tem­at­ic record of his life, includ­ing every­thing from his cor­re­spon­dence to his dry-clean­ing bills, it became the Dymax­ion Chronofile.” The Dymax­ion Chronofile now resides in the R. Buck­min­ster Fuller Col­lec­tion at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, a place that has mer­it­ed the atten­tion of no less a guide to the fas­ci­nat­ing cor­ners of the world than Atlas Obscu­ra.

“The files go back to when he was four-years-old, but he only seri­ous­ly start­ed the archive in 1917,” writes that site’s Alli­son C. Meier. “From then until his death in 1983 he col­lect­ed every­thing from each day, with ingo­ing and out­go­ing cor­re­spon­dence, news­pa­per clip­pings, draw­ings, blue­prints, mod­els, and even the mun­dane ephemera like dry clean­ing bills.” Fuller added to the Dymax­ion Chronofile not just every day but, from the year 1920 until his death in 1983, every fif­teen min­utes.

In 1962 Fuller described the Dymax­ion Chronofile as what would hap­pen “if some­body kept a very accu­rate record of a human being, going through the era from the Gay ’90s, from a very dif­fer­ent kind of world through the turn of the cen­tu­ry — as far into the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry as you might live.” Using him­self as the case sub­ject for the project (as he did for many projects, which led him to nick­name him­self “Guinea Pig B”) meant that “I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put every­thing in, so I start­ed a very rig­or­ous record.” Open Cul­ture’s own Ted Mills has writ­ten else­where about the rig­ors of stor­ing and main­tain­ing that record in archive form over the decades since Fuller’s death, and now, as with so much Fuller did, the Dymax­ion Chronofile stands as both a com­pelling odd­i­ty and proof of real, if askew, pre­science. After all, how many of us have tak­en to doc­u­ment­ing our own lives online with near­ly equal inten­si­ty — and how many of us do it even more often than every fif­teen min­utes?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vig­or­ous” and “Alert”

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

Watch the Mak­ing of the Dymax­ion Globe: A 3‑D Ren­der­ing of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Map

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

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 or on Face­book.

Discover Isotype, the 1920s Attempt to Create a Universal Language with Stylish Icons & Graphic Design

How long has mankind dreamed of an inter­na­tion­al lan­guage? The first answer that comes to mind, of course, dates that dream to the time of the Bib­li­cal sto­ry of the Tow­er of Babel. If you don’t hap­pen to believe that human­i­ty was made to speak a vari­ety of mutu­al­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble tongues as pun­ish­ment for dar­ing to build a tow­er tall enough to reach heav­en, maybe you’d pre­fer a date some­where around the much lat­er devel­op­ment of Esperan­to, the best-known lan­guage invent­ed specif­i­cal­ly to attain uni­ver­sal­i­ty, in the late 19th cen­tu­ry. But look ahead a few decades past that and you find an intrigu­ing exam­ple of a lan­guage cre­at­ed to unite the world with­out using words at all: Inter­na­tion­al Sys­tem Of Typo­graph­ic Pic­ture Edu­ca­tion, or Iso­type.

“Near­ly a cen­tu­ry before info­graph­ics and data visu­al­iza­tion became the cul­tur­al ubiq­ui­ty they are today,” writes Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va, “the pio­neer­ing Aus­tri­an soci­ol­o­gist, philoso­pher of sci­ence, social reformer, and cura­tor Otto Neu­rath (Decem­ber 10, 1882–December 22, 1945), togeth­er with his not-yet-wife Marie, invent­ed ISOTYPE — the vision­ary pic­togram lan­guage that fur­nished the vocab­u­lary of mod­ern info­graph­ics.”

First known as the Vien­na Method of Pic­to­r­i­al Sta­tis­tics, Iso­type­’s ini­tial devel­op­ment began in 1926 at Vien­na’s Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmu­se­um (or Social and Eco­nom­ic Muse­um), of which Neu­rath was the found­ing direc­tor. There he began to assem­ble some­thing like a design stu­dio team, with the mis­sion of cre­at­ing a set of pic­to­r­i­al sym­bols that could ren­der dense social, sci­en­tif­ic tech­no­log­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal, and his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion leg­i­ble at a glance.

Neu­rath’s most impor­tant ear­ly col­lab­o­ra­tor on Iso­type was sure­ly the wood­cut artist Gerd Arntz, at whose site you can see the more than 4000 pic­tograms he cre­at­ed to sym­bol­ize “key data from indus­try, demo­graph­ics, pol­i­tics and econ­o­my.” Arntz designed them all in accor­dance with Neu­rat’s belief that even then the long “vir­tu­al­ly illit­er­ate” pro­le­tari­at “need­ed knowl­edge of the world around them. This knowl­edge should not be shrined in opaque sci­en­tif­ic lan­guage, but direct­ly illus­trat­ed in straight­for­ward images and a clear struc­ture, also for peo­ple who could not, or hard­ly, read. Anoth­er out­spo­ken goal of this method of visu­al sta­tis­tics was to over­come bar­ri­ers of lan­guage and cul­ture, and to be uni­ver­sal­ly under­stood.”

By the mid-1930s, writes The Atlantic’s Steven Heller in an arti­cle on the book Iso­type: Design and Con­texts 1925–1971, “with the Nazi march into Aus­tria, Neu­rath fled Vien­na for Hol­land. He met his future wife Marie Rei­de­meis­ter there and after the Ger­man bomb­ing of Rot­ter­dam the pair escaped to Eng­land, where they were interned on the Isle of Man. Fol­low­ing their release they estab­lished the Iso­type Insti­tute in Oxford. From this base they con­tin­ued to devel­op their unique strat­e­gy, which influ­enced design­ers world­wide.” Today, even those who have nev­er laid eyes on Iso­type itself have exten­sive­ly “read” the visu­al lan­guages it has influ­enced: Giz­mod­o’s Alis­sa Walk­er points to the stan­dard­ized icons cre­at­ed in the 70s by the U.S. Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion and the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Graph­ic Arts as well as today’s emo­ji — prob­a­bly not exact­ly what Neu­rath had in mind as the lan­guage of Utopia back when he was co-found­ing the Vien­na Cir­cle, but nev­er­the­less a dis­tant cousin of Iso­type in “its own adorable way.”

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs

Say What You Real­ly Mean with Down­load­able Cindy Sher­man Emoti­cons

The Hobo Code: An Intro­duc­tion to the Hiero­glyph­ic Lan­guage of Ear­ly 1900s Train-Hop­pers

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 or on Face­book.

The Impossibly Cool Album Covers of Blue Note Records: Meet the Creative Team Behind These Iconic Designs

If you stepped into a record store in the 1950s and 60s, you would like­ly be drawn almost imme­di­ate­ly to a Blue Note release—whether or not you were a fan of jazz or had heard of the artist or even the label. “If you went to those record stores,” says Estelle Caswell in the Vox Ear­worm video above, “it prob­a­bly wasn’t the sound of Blue Note that imme­di­ate­ly caught your atten­tion. It was their album cov­ers.”

Now those designs are hal­lowed jazz iconog­ra­phy, with their “bold typog­ra­phy, two tone pho­tog­ra­phy, and min­i­mal graph­ic design.” Of course, it should go with­out say­ing that the sound of Blue Note is as dis­tinc­tive and essen­tial as its look, thanks to its founders’ musi­cal vision, the fault­less ear of pro­duc­er and engi­neer Rudy Van Gelder, and the ros­ter of unbe­liev­ably great musi­cians the label recruit­ed and record­ed.

But back to those cov­ers….

“Their bold use of col­or, inti­mate pho­tog­ra­phy, and metic­u­lous­ly placed typog­ra­phy came to define the look of jazz” in the hard bop era, and thus, defined the look of cool, a “refined sophis­ti­ca­tion” vibrat­ing with rest­less, sul­try, smoky, classy, moody ener­gy. The rat pack had noth­ing on Blue Note. Their cov­ers “have today become an epit­o­me of graph­ic hip,” writes Robin Kin­ross at Eye mag­a­zine. (And lest we fetishize the cov­ers at the expense of their con­tents, Kin­ross makes sure to add that they “are no more than the vis­i­ble man­i­fes­ta­tion of an organ­ic whole.”)

Flip over any one of those beau­ti­ful­ly-designed Blue Note records from, say, 1955 to 65, the label’s peak years, and you’ll find two names cred­it­ed for almost all of their designs: pho­tog­ra­ph­er Fran­cis Wolff and graph­ic design­er Reid Miles. Wolff, says pro­duc­er and Blue Note archivist Michael Cus­cu­na in the Ear­worm video, shot almost every Blue Note ses­sion from “the minute he arrived.”

“One of the most impres­sive, and shock­ing things” about Wolff’s pho­to shoots, “was that the aver­age suc­cess rate of those pho­tos was real­ly extra­or­di­nary. He was like the jazz artist of pho­tog­ra­phy in that he could nail it imme­di­ate­ly.” Once Wolff filled a con­tact sheet with great shots, it next came to Miles to select the per­fect one—and the per­fect crop—for the album cov­er. These sat­u­rat­ed por­traits turned Blue Note artists into immor­tal heroes of hip.

But Reid’s exper­i­ments with typog­ra­phy, “inspired by the ever present Swiss let­ter­ing style that defined 20th cen­tu­ry graph­ic design,” notes Vox, pro­vid­ed such an impor­tant ele­ment that the let­ter­ing some­times edged out the pho­tog­ra­phy, such as in the cov­er of Joe Henderson’s In ‘n Out, which fea­tures only a tiny por­trait of the artist in the upper left-hand cor­ner, nes­tled in the dot of a low­er-case “i.”

Miles pushed the excla­ma­tion point to absurd lengths on Jack­ie McLean’s It’s Time, which again rel­e­gates the artist’s pho­to to a tiny square in the cor­ner while the rest of the cov­er is tak­en up with bold, black “!!!!!!!!!!!”s over a white back­ground. It’s “star­tling­ly get­ting your atten­tion,” Cus­cu­na com­ments. On Lou Donaldson’s Sun­ny Side Up, Miles dis­pens­es with pho­tog­ra­phy alto­geth­er, for a strik­ing black and white design that makes the title seem like it might up and float away.

But Miles’ type-cen­tric cov­ers, though excel­lent, are not what we usu­al­ly asso­ciate with the clas­sic Blue Note look. The syn­the­sis of Wolff’s impec­ca­ble pho­to­graph­ic instincts and Miles’ sur­gi­cal­ly keen eye for fram­ing, col­or, and com­po­si­tion com­bined to give us the pen­sive, mys­te­ri­ous Coltrane on Blue Train, the impos­si­bly cool Son­ny Rollins on the cov­er of Newk’s Time, the total­ly, wild­ly in-the-moment Art Blakey on The Big Beat, and so, so many more.

Reid Miles had the rare tal­ent only the best art direc­tors pos­sess, says Cus­cu­na: the abil­i­ty to “cre­ate a look for a record that was high­ly indi­vid­ual but also that fit into a stream that gave the label a look.” Learn more about his work with Wolff in Robin Kinross’s essay, see many more clas­sic Blue Note album cov­ers here, and make sure to lis­ten to the music behind all that bril­liant graph­ic design in this huge, stream­ing discog­ra­phy of Blue Note record­ings. To view them in print for­mat, see the defin­i­tive book, The Cov­er Art of Blue Note Records: The Col­lec­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream a 144-Hour Discog­ra­phy of Clas­sic Jazz Record­ings from Blue Note Records: Miles Davis, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Ornette Cole­man & More

The Ground­break­ing Art of Alex Stein­weiss, Father of Record Cov­er Design

Enter the Cov­er Art Archive: A Mas­sive Col­lec­tion of 800,000 Album Cov­ers from the 1950s through 2018

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

Hundreds of Wonderful Japanese Firework Designs from the Early-1900s: Digitized and Free to Download

The Japan­ese term for fire­works, han­abi (花火), com­bines the words for fire, bi (), and flower, hana (). If you’ve seen fire­works any­where, that deriva­tion may seem at least vague­ly apt, but if you’ve seen Japan­ese fire­works, it may well strike you as evoca­tive indeed. The tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese way with pre­sent­ing flow­ers, their shapes and col­ors as well as their scents, has some­thing in com­mon with the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese way of putting on a fire­works show.

Not that the pro­duc­tion of fire­crack­ers goes as far back, his­tor­i­cal­ly, as the arrange­ment of flow­ers does, nor that fire­crack­ers them­selves, orig­i­nal­ly a prod­uct of Chi­na, have any­thing essen­tial­ly Japan­ese about them.

But as more recent­ly with cars, com­ic books, con­sumer elec­tron­ics, and Kit-Kats, when­ev­er Japan re-inter­prets a for­eign inven­tion, the project amounts to rad­i­cal re-inven­tion, and often a daz­zling one at that.

These Japan­ese ver­sions of non-Japan­ese things often become high­ly desir­able around the world in their own right. It cer­tain­ly hap­pened with Japan­ese fire­works, here proud­ly dis­played in these ele­gant and vivid­ly col­ored Eng­lish cat­a­logs of Hiraya­ma Fire­works and Yokoi Fire­works, pub­lished in the ear­ly 1900s by C.R. Brock and Com­pa­ny, whose found­ing date of 1698 makes it the old­est fire­work con­cern in the Unit­ed King­dom.

These Brocks cat­a­logs been dig­i­tized by the Yoko­hama Board of Edu­ca­tion and made avail­able online at the Inter­net Archive. Though I’ve nev­er seen a fire­works show in Yoko­hama, that city, dot­ted as it is with impec­ca­bly designed pub­lic gar­dens, cer­tain­ly has its flower-appre­ci­a­tion cre­den­tials in order.

Orga­nized into such cat­e­gories as “Ver­ti­cal Wheels,” “Phan­tom Cir­cles,” and “Col­ored Flo­ral Bomb Shells,” the cat­a­logs present their import­ed Japan­ese wares sim­ply, as var­i­ous pat­terns of col­or against a black or blue back­ground. But sim­plic­i­ty, as even those only dis­tant­ly acquaint­ed with Japan­ese art have seen, sup­ports a few par­tic­u­lar­ly strong and endur­ing branch­es of Japan­ese aes­thet­ics.

No mat­ter where you take in your dis­plays of fire­works, you’ll sure­ly rec­og­nize more than a few of these designs from hav­ing seen them light up the night sky. And as far as where to look for the next fire­work inno­va­tor, I might sug­gest South Korea, where I live: at this past sum­mer’s Seoul Inter­na­tion­al Fire­works fes­ti­val I wit­nessed fire­works explod­ing into the shape of cat faces, whiskers and all. Such elab­o­rate­ness many vio­late the more rig­or­ous ver­sions of the Japan­ese sen­si­bil­i­ty as they apply to han­abi — but then again, just imag­ine what won­ders Japan, one of the most cat-lov­ing coun­tries in the world, could do with that con­cept.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Down­load Clas­sic Japan­ese Wave and Rip­ple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japan­ese Artists from 1903

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

What Hap­pens When a Japan­ese Wood­block Artist Depicts Life in Lon­don in 1866, Despite Nev­er Hav­ing Set Foot There

A Firework’s Point of View

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 or on Face­book.

A Database of Paper Airplane Designs: Hours of Fun for Kids & Adults Alike

Though we can trace the his­to­ry of paper air­craft back 2000 years to the Chi­nese and their kites, and into the 19th cen­tu­ry with the French and their imag­i­nary air­ships, the ori­gin of the mod­ern paper air­plane is shroud­ed in mys­tery. A San Diego Read­er arti­cle placed the birth some­where in 1910. By 1915, most Amer­i­can kids were already tor­ment­ing teach­ers. And Jack Northrup used paper mod­els to work on aero­dy­nam­ics at Lock­heed in the 1930s, but even that doesn’t do much to explain how such a ubiq­ui­tous object has con­tin­ued to be so hum­ble and ordi­nary while inspir­ing a recent upsurge of inter­est.

The data­base at Fold’n’Fly shows how much vari­ety there is beyond the basic “dart” style, and each air­plane comes with step-by-step fold­ing instruc­tions, a print­able pat­tern page, and a help­ful video.

You can choose by dif­fi­cul­ty lev­el, whether or not you will need scis­sors, or sort by dis­tance, acro­bat­ics, time aloft, or pure­ly dec­o­ra­tive.

One of the rea­sons for the renewed inter­est in paper air­planes is the use of CAD (com­put­er aid­ed design) in con­struct­ing pro­to­types, and that in itself is a response to the chal­lenge set by var­i­ous Guin­ness world records.

The cur­rent dis­tance record is 226 feet, 10 inch­es, set in March 2012 by a for­mer col­lege quar­ter­back Joe Ayoob. The plane was designed by tele­vi­sion pro­duc­er John Collins, who used Ayoob’s throw­ing arm strength to break the pre­vi­ous record hold­er by near­ly 20 feet.

The longest time a paper air­plane has been in the air is cur­rent­ly 27.6 sec­onds, set in 1998 by Ken Black­burn at the Geor­gia Dome. He was break­ing his own record for the third time.

Last­ly, the record for largest paper air­plane is 40 ft 10 inch­es, designed by stu­dents from the Tech­nol­o­gy Uni­ver­si­ty of Delft in 1995.

So, now you know what you’re up against. If you think you can do bet­ter, dive into this web­site and get fold­ing.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sci­ence of Beer: A New Free Online Course Promis­es to Enhance Your Appre­ci­a­tion of the Time­less Bev­er­age

NASA Puts 400+ His­toric Exper­i­men­tal Flight Videos on YouTube

NASA Releas­es a Mas­sive Online Archive: 140,000 Pho­tos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Down­load

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.

157 Animated Minimalist Mid-Century Book Covers

Graph­ic and motion design­er Hen­ning M. Led­er­er can’t get enough of those min­i­mal­ist mid­cen­tu­ry book cov­ers.

Appar­ent­ly, the over-the-top pulp sce­nar­ios that inspire fel­low peri­od cov­er enthu­si­ast Todd Alcott leave Led­er­er cold.

He’s drawn to the stark, the geo­met­ric, the abstract. No heav­ing bosoms, no for­bid­den love, though there’s no deny­ing that sex was a top­ic of great clin­i­cal inter­est to sev­er­al of the authors fea­tured above, includ­ing psy­chi­a­trists Charles Rycroft, H. R. Beech, and R.D. Laing.

Visu­al­ly, the psy­cho-ana­lyt­ic titles appear inter­change­able with the more straight­for­ward texts in this, Lederer’s third in a series of light­ly ani­mat­ed peri­od book cov­ers:

The Intel­li­gent Woman’s Guide to Atom­ic Radi­a­tion

Med­ical Com­pli­ca­tions Dur­ing Preg­nan­cy

Gen­er­al­ized Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics

Pin­wheels, rip­ples, and scrolling har­le­quin pat­terns abound. Stare at them long enough if you want to cure your insom­nia or become one with the uni­verse.

Tilman Grundig’s sound­track ensures that the play­ing field will stay lev­el. No title is sin­gled out for extra son­ic atten­tion.

That said, Noise by Rupert Tay­lor, an expert con­sul­tant in acoustics and noise con­trol, stands apart for the humor and nar­ra­tive sen­si­bil­i­ty of its visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

Per­haps that’s why Led­er­er saved it for last.

To date, he’s ani­mat­ed 157 cov­ers. Enjoy them all above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Songs by David Bowie, Elvis Costel­lo, Talk­ing Heads & More Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

French Book­store Blends Real People’s Faces with Book Cov­er Art

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Novem­ber 12 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Buckminster Fuller Creates Striking Posters of His Own Inventions


In addi­tion to his for­mi­da­ble body of work in archi­tec­ture, design, and the­o­ry of the kind the world had nev­er known before, Buck­min­ster Fuller also knew how to pro­mote him­self. Some­times this meant appear­ing on late-night new-age talk shows, but at its core it meant com­ing up with ideas that would imme­di­ate­ly “read” as rev­o­lu­tion­ary to any­one who saw them in action. But how to put them before the eyes of some­one who has­n’t had the chance to see a geo­des­ic dome, a Dymax­ion House and Car, or even a Geodome 4 tent in real life?

The ascent of graph­ic design in the 20th cen­tu­ry, a cen­tu­ry Fuller saw begin and lived through most of, pro­vid­ed one promis­ing answer: posters. The ones you see here show off “Fuller’s most famous inven­tions, with line draw­ings from his patents super­im­posed over a pho­to­graph of the thing itself,” writes Fast Com­pa­ny’s Katharine Schwab.

“While they look like some­thing Fuller afi­ciona­dos might have cre­at­ed after the man’s death to cel­e­brate his work, Fuller actu­al­ly cre­at­ed them in part­ner­ship with the gal­lerist Carl Sol­way near the end of his career.”

These posters, “strik­ing with their two-lay­er design, are Fuller’s visu­al homage to his own genius — and an attempt to bring what he believed were world-chang­ing utopi­an con­cepts to the mass­es.” They’re also now on dis­play at the Edward Cel­la Art + Archi­tec­ture in Los Ange­les, whose exhi­bi­tion “R. Buck­min­ster Fuller: Inven­tions and Mod­els” runs until Novem­ber 2nd. “Fuller’s objects and prints func­tion not only as mod­els of the math­e­mat­i­cal and geo­met­ric prop­er­ties under­ly­ing their con­struc­tion but also as ele­gant works of art,” says the gallery’s site. “As such, the works rep­re­sent the hybrid­i­ty of Fuller’s prac­tice, and his lega­cy across the fields of art, design, sci­ence, and engi­neer­ing.”

You can see more of Fuller’s posters, which depict and visu­al­ly explain the struc­tures of such inven­tions as the geo­des­ic dome and Dymax­ion Car, of course, but also less­er-known cre­ations like a “Fly­’s Eye” dome cov­ered in bub­ble win­dows (indi­vid­u­al­ly swap­pable for solar pan­els), a sub­mersible for off­shore drilling, and a row­boat with a body reduced to two thin “nee­dles,” at Design­boom. Edward Cel­la Art + Archi­tec­ture has also made the posters avail­able for pur­chase at $7,000 apiece. That price might seem in con­tra­dic­tion with Fuller’s utopi­an ideals about uni­ver­sal acces­si­bil­i­ty through sheer low cost, but then, who could look at these and call them any­thing but works of art?

via Curbed

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Three-Minute Intro­duc­tion to Buck­min­ster Fuller, One of the 20th Century’s Most Pro­duc­tive Design Vision­ar­ies

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Buck­min­ster Fuller Cre­ates an Ani­mat­ed Visu­al­iza­tion of Human Pop­u­la­tion Growth from 1000 B.C.E. to 1965

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Col­lab­o­ra­tion with The North Face Cul­mi­nates with a New Geo­des­ic Dome Tent, the Geodome 4

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 or on Face­book.

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