Stüf Stuff

Here it is alongside that year’s official Muni uniforms. Images: ©SFMTA

MLK on “white moderates”. When we don’t join the resistance we are complicit. (Read the full letter.) Here’s a version of the quote image for tall and wide screens. Share it! 2020 update: Added a new version of the graphic set in typefaces by Black type designers: Halyard by Joshua Darden (and the team at Darden Studio) and Martin by Tré Seals.

Marbled end papers from a book of 18th-century type specimens and other printing miscellany. Image via the National Library of France.

Cars with drawers: AMC Gremlin Voyager prototype with “Grem-Bin”, 1972 Ford 021C concept car by Marc Newson, 1999

There was so much anti-immigration rhetoric in the air this summer (as there is still) when Ian McKellen sat down with Marc Maron for an interview, but if only the entire nation could sit still for 4 minutes and reckon with his closing performance of this speech by Sir Thomas More. I trimmed it from the podcast for you, but you should go hear the whole interview which is quite good.

This postcard series was published by VW in 2000, using 1950s artwork, to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of their Transporter line of trucks. (Images via Alden Jewell)

After discovering Frank Grießhammer’s Slightly Tracked Script Fonts I felt obliged to produce this public service announcement.

112 Hours, a specimen book for a font collection from Device Somehow I missed this release from last year. The concept, a set numeral-only fonts derived from various lettering sources, has been done before (see Hoefler & Co.’s Numbers), but Rian Hughes takes it to extensive lengths with 112 Hours. The book is both a showing of the typefaces and — something that is often lacking in typeface promotion these days — a nice documentation of the sources. See the photos of old clockfaces, signs, and trains in the book’s introduction. The fonts are available directly from Device or from MyFonts.

My proposal for the apple.com homepage today. If there’s any time to reprise the rainbow Apple, it’s now.

Minikin, ca.1983–86: “Don’t let its impressive good looks fool you.” The Minikin was a 2-seater fiberglass-bodied three-wheeler by D&A Vehicles Inc. of St. Cloud, Minnesota. It was powered by a 16 HP air-cooled Tecumseh engine. Reportedly only 16–17 Minikins were produced. (Photos and info via Alden Jewell and 3-wheelers.com.)

Floriated Border, a metal font from Central Type Foundry, ca. 1891. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Nintendo, 1991. Map image via Zelda Shrine.

Update: fortunately there is Graham Hicks’ Emoji Finder which uses synonyms to get you lots of related emoji for terms that get no results in the OS X palette.

Behind the Bars Like slaves straining at the bars of their cages, the cars stare out. Surely such a sight would have puzzled the wagon makers who made America’s first automobiles, because they could scarcely have foreseen today’s king-sized problem: Where do you park fifty-five million of them? These glistening, streamlined slaves are thus imprisoned because Salt Lake City has its metropolitan share of this twentieth-century headache. Wide-open suburban shopping centers were drawing off more trade each year. So downtown merchants suffered. Then Zions’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution — the Mormon Church is the principal owner of Salt Lake’s largest department store — struck back: It built this extraordinary $850,000 five-layer cake in its back yard, to receive an automotive filling. Now shoppers can park, 550 at a atime, a few steps from Women’s Clothing or House Furnishings. And, until their mistresses free them to the open road, the cars rest safe in jail.