Out soon from Harry N. Abrams, Inc.:

From the book description: “Body Type is an eye-opening look into the amazingly creative ways that tattoo artists are utilizing typography. Whereas the majority of tattoo art uses images to convey messages, here the message actually is the image.”

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categories: Art and Design, Books

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Via BibliOdyssey, which is bursting with gorgeous graphical stuff, I just discovered Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, an admirably geeky blog devoted to the history of the bookplate. As the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers explains,

Since the fifteenth century, distinguished artists and their patrons have given serious attention to this art form. It represents a miniature art developed to adorn books and a convenient, individualized way for the book’s owner to be identified. The bookplate, or ex libris, is a label placed on the inside of the front cover of a book.

These celebrity bookplates are apparently from the blogger’s personal collection:

Go here for more of this blogger’s celebrity bookplates.

The website of the Los Angeles-based ReadInk Books contains a bunch of other Hollywood bookplates, along with some historical background about each.

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categories: Art and Design, Books

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This is several months old, and I’m putting it up several days after Jason Kottke linked to it, but it’s so good I’m going to post it anyway. It’s a compilation of clips from The Week in Unnecessary Censorship, a regular segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live in which innocuous TV clips are doctored with well-timed bleeps and pixelation.

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categories: TV and Video

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My good friends Greg and Frankie are getting married next Saturday in Brooklyn. A couple of months ago, they asked me to design their wedding invitation. They came up with the concept, wrote all the copy, and provided the photos, and I designed it and laid it out as four 8” by 10.5” pages (front and back covers with an inside spread). Greg and Frankie are both Canadian, which explains the green card joke, and our pal Clive got a pastor’s license so he can perform the ceremony, which explains the line at the top of the cover. (For the “good enough to eat” part, see the end of this post.)

The back cover was an intentionally cheesy photo of Greg and Frankie with the wedding details underneath it. New York photos by Melissa Hribar; Paris photo by Michel Bourque. The main font used throughout is Relay Comp Black, which you can buy here for $40.

Wait, there’s more! Earlier this month one of Frankie’s co-workers asked me for a high-res graphic of the cover, because people at work wanted to print it onto marzipan for a party for Frankie. Who was I to refuse? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first-ever edible Panopticist cover:

(The cake was made by Regina at Grandma’s Secrets in Harlem.)

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categories: Magazines, Miscellany

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Check out this awesome Quicktime VR image that was taken during a recent Pixies show at a medium-size club in Prague. You can spin around and see the whole club; you can zoom in and zoom out; you can look at the ceiling. Follow this link or click on the image below to check it out. (Heads up: The site will resize your browser window, but not too much.)

How cool will it be when someone finally develops a system that can handle full-motion video with these kinds of controls? It’ll be years before that’s possible, I’m guessing, but I’m sure it’ll happen eventually.

The photographer, Jeffrey Martin, has lots of other great panoptic images on his website.

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categories: Music and Audio

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Here's a YouTube gem: the rarely seen 2002 short film Ernest and Bertram, which tells the sad and ultimately violent tale of the doomed relationship between those two closeted Muppets. Lawyers at Sesame Workshop forced the eight-minute film out of circulation right after its well-received showing at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. The minor-key rendition of the Sesame Street theme song is hilarious.

[via one of the smart people on Echo.]

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categories: TV and Video

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