| Posters American Style The National Museum of American Art presents a selection from their traveling exhibit of poster designs: Rosie the Riveter propaganda pieces, chemical cure-all advertisements, psychedelic concert announcements, Hitchcock film promotions. Entries feature detailed artist biographies, historical context, and detailed close-ups. As curator Elizabeth Broun notes, "The strategies of posters -- snappy graphics, punchy titles, humor, irony, shock, artistry -- are designed to stop us in our tracks, draw us in for a closer look, pause for a moment of reflection." |
| Jargon-Free Web (R.I.P.) Marketers, copywriters, and corporate communicators take note -- there's a quiet crusade afoot to "just say no to jargon" on the Web. A recent unsubstantiated study of one week's worth of Business Wire and PR Newswire releases reveals that a new "solution" is hitting the wires roughly every eight minutes. In response, smart and savvy folks at the Gable Group present version 1.0 of the Jargonator, a premier tool for rating the jargon content of copy. Try it yourself and notice how your eyes glaze over as mission-critical hyperbole gets flagged. If you're still not convinced there's life after lame-ass quotes (LAQs), check out the roster of best and worst releases. |
| eblots Every day, eblots posts a simple line drawing on its home page, kind of like a visual haiku. Your job is to type your initial impression, then view similar responses from other sensitive, perceptive souls. Consider it a kind of creative and emotional barometer (e.g., Is that a tulip or a tire tread?). And here's the best part -- everyone is assigned exotic colors as anonymous identifiers: flat teal, mottled chartreuse, shiny lavenderblush, etc. A great site for poets, dreamers, and bored office workers. |
| Degree Confluence Project Confluence means junction or coming together, and that's exactly what some like-minded individuals have done to create this ambitious, grassroots effort to document the real places where degrees of longitude and latitude meet in the world. So far, nearly 400 confluences, from Africa to Antarctica and from Ireland to Indonesia, have been recorded. So, think global, act local, then order the t-shirt. |
| The Commissar Vanishes The Newseum presents a sobering collection of "Before and After" photographs from Stalin's regime. Former government officials, branded as "enemies of the people," magically disappear from propaganda photographs with the help of some deft airbrush work. George Orwell has nothing on this: Trotsky morphs into a dark shadow during a Red Square celebration, propaganda messages mysteriously replace watch advertisements in an urban snapshot, and the commissar in question vanishes into the Moscow-Volga Canal. |
| California Deserts Nine diverse state and federal agencies -- from Caltrans to the National Park Service -- have collaborated on this guide to the desert wilderness of California and southern Nevada. Modern visitors need not face the hazards and hardships that confronted early travelers in a ruggedly beautiful, landscape, but they should come prepared for a hostile environment. Just in time for the winter wildflower season, the site describes three distinct desert ecosystems: the Mojave (hottest and driest), the Colorado (lowest), and the Great Basin Desert (higher and colder). Much like the region it describes, this is a trip planner that's easy to get lost in. |
| Jezebel's Mirror Heather Champ snapped a photo of herself in a bathroom mirror in 1986, and today she's the proud curator of close to 500 self-portraits. From Tribeca to Disneyland, Parma to Austin, Ms. Champ has captured the warped visages of herself and her friends in a dizzying array of motorcycle mirrors, car windows, metallic trucks, and shiny trophies. And she may have instigated a cultural phenomenon -- check out the work of the Friends of Jezebel's Mirror, "a growing collection of like minded individuals who have snapped their likenesses in a variety of reflective surfaces." |
| Writing On Hands Companion to an exhibition from Dickinson College, this homage to the human hand explores the time period just before literacy and the printed word became widespread. Over 80 images from the 15th to the 17th century illustrate ways in which the hand was used as an icon to convey complex ideas and understandings about human intelligence, experience, and perception. A wondrous septet of interactive images animate the past. Don't miss the musical hand, the calculating hand, or Descartes' description of our sensation of heat. |
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