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Stewart’s article on the 1974 Arecibo Message (as it inspires Stewdio) will appear in the premiere print issue of design blog It’s Nice That this April. For more information on the journal’s format and contributers, or to pre-order the issue, see It’s Nice That (Publication).
Eleanor Weber has written up the Terre Natale exhibition on Raddest Right Now. Regarding our exhibition piece she writes “Virilio’s second part is an amazing visualization of global migration in graph- and stat- form. It’s so clever and surprisingly easy to follow [. . .] it’s one of the coolest things I’ve seen since An Inconvenient Truth, and possibly more effective. It is an astounding piece of work to experience in a gallery context.” See Terre Natale on Stewdio at http://stewdio.org/work/terrenatale/.
HistoFace, Stewdio‘s histogram typeface, received mention on the Adobe blogs today via John Nack in a post titled Slick typographic apps: Hidden Messages & More. HistoFace is a form of steganography, the art of hiding messages within another medium. The medium in this case is a digital image and the vehicle for revealing the message is the Photoshop Levels tool. Don’t rely on it for security, however, as HistoFace makes for horribly weak cryptography. Its purpose was more process driven: How does one craft a unique set of letterforms that handle the impossibly tight constraints of histogram imagery? Visit HistoFace at http://stewdio.org/histoface.
Stewart is currently writing a short essay on Frank Drake’s Arecibo Message as it relates to Stewdio design ethos. In 1974 Drake broadcast a carefully crafted digital message into space from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The contents were designed to be legible to intelligent extraterrestrial neighbors. So far . . . no response. Fermi’s paradox?
Arc is Paul Graham‘s new dialect of the Lisp programming language, originally designed by John McCarthy in 1958. Today Stewdio is adding Arc to our list of active languages and pursuing Web frameworks written in it. Could an Arc-based framework pull the rug from under Django (written in Python) and Rails (written in Ruby)? It’s going to need some evangelists to write those libraries and tutorials. Join in.
This morning David Friedman wrote about HistoFace on his blog Ironic Sans. HistoFace is a histogram typeface designed for use in the Photoshop “Levels” window. The character shapes articulate the tight constraints of histogram imagery: Each figure must be constructed from bottom-flush vertical lines, rendering compound paths and concave cantilevers impossible.
It’s a particular honor for this project to be featured on Ironic Sans because it was inspired by an Ironic Sans article on Histogram Hacking and an I.S. reader, Josh Millard. (Thanks to Lan Lan Liu for originally bringing Ironic Sans to our attention.) HistoFace was also recently linked from The Moon Goons.
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