Repponen

Not sure I had ever heard of Peter Halley, an American artist born in New York in 1953, until I came across his old monograph at the Strand. I actually liked some of his work! But the book itself was so overdesigned and had this entire 2000s vibe, with text all over the place and weird rectangles, that I decided not to buy it. It was published exactly in 2000, so I should not be surprised. But one thing was absolutely amazing. All the way at the end, there are multiple spreads that document, in a visual infographic way, exactly which artwork affected the next one. They branch into multiple paths but are organized as a timeline. I have never seen such a clear representation from any other artist. I spent way more time studying this “index” at the end than looking at the rest of the book.

Less than a month ago, I published a story, “I Don’t See Faces” about how designers tend to avoid any resemblance to a human face in both graphic and product design. Naturally, the next step felt obvious, AI products would start adopting avatars, mascots and characters, not just as random symbols, but as something integrated directly into the interface. Since then, in just the past three weeks, Grok has been pushing further into character-based interfaces, with AI represented through cute animated characters. Jack Dorsey, the original Twitter founder and someone who seems to release a random new product every other month, launched Berd, where AI agents are represented by rather creepy-looking characters. Today I came across an entire tool for creating a character and defining how it expresses different emotions. It was made by front-end developer _smontlouis, who also builds Bible apps, which explains why the URL for this character thing is incredibly confusing.

And a quick website explaining the app. layerloops.com

☝️I completely reworked my LayerLoops app from scratch. The app lets you draw and record video loops inside your drawings. New UI, new export pipeline, and some new features. Currently in testing on TestFlight. Once completed, it will be available on the App Store.

🍏 What's new in EMA • YouTube objects on canvas • Custom file extension .ema for projects • Updated dark theme • Select multiple objects and ask AI • Stable groups I keep using EMA on a daily basis to keep track of some of the projects I do.

New York this week.

Swedish photographer Oliver Kolding Palm takes photographs on the street, then loads them onto an iPad and photographs the screen through water, glass vases, and other objects that distort the original images. The results look absolutely stunning!

This screenshot is just an iPad connected to an Apple Studio Display with a single USB-C cable. I always thought I would just get a huge version of my iPad on a 5K display. But apparently I can run multiple apps, each in its own floating window, and it looks much cleaner than macOS.

Sleepdrunk Vademecum (2008–2013) by Tania Blanco. A series of paintings that explore the overlap between nature, science and human-made things.

Man shows eclipse to his fish [Source]

Wall-mounted reliefs by Justin Adian (b 1976, Texas). Stretched oil enamel or spray painted canvas around foam cushions.

Came across this gem on the Internet Archive: The Way Things Work, Volume 2 published in 1971. An illustrated technical encyclopedia that explains everything from how screws are cut and planes fly to how propulsion engines work, how ships are stabilized, and even how electronic music works. One thing I notice more and more is how tightly text used to be set. In most books today and especially on digital screens, we are used to much more generous line spacing, often 1.5x or even more. Being exposed to this everywhere, we now associate that extra space with good readability. Looking back at older books, the much tighter setting can suddenly feel dense and harder to focus on, even though it was completely normal at the time.

SHIFT+COMMAND+3

I often record screen videos of apps and websites, both on my laptop and phone. But posting them as is rarely looks good, especially when a white interface ends up on a white background. So I usually put the recording on a canvas in After Effects, adjust the background and dimensions, and render separate versions for my website, social media, or Keynote. Doing this in After Effects is super annoying. So I decided to make a small app for myself where I can do all of that in seconds. I called it FORMA. I can just drag in any video and place it nicely on whatever background I need, control the size of the canvas, add rounded corners and shadows, trim and crop, and quickly export a nice video that I can share or post anywhere. It took me one evening to design (around 3 hours), one evening to build with Codex (around 3 hours), and 1 hour of troubleshooting and fixing bugs. In the end, this tool will save me hours that I would otherwise spend in After Effects.

Series of paintings titled Sink (since 2016) by Helene Appel. Painted on canvas at life size. ❤️ I have a similar painting every time I have lunch at home.

Indirect Flights by Joe Hamilton. “Raw materials, satellite images, organic textures, brush strokes and architectural fragments are all blended together into a dense panorama extending in all directions. As you pan across the terrain like Google Maps the layers move at different speeds giving the illusion of depth, constantly changing what is hidden and exposed.”

People of Barcelona. Photos from last and this weeks.

Work by Kento Iida

My EMA app is becoming better and better!

Came across a tweet that posted this image stating “i can’t believe someone solved recipe design decades ago and everyone just decided to ignore it” This is quite nice actually. The funny thing is it was “solved” by an engineer, not a designer. Michael Chu came up with this format and had a website Cooking for Engineers launched back in 2004. Take any type of complex information and make its structure visually obvious. Before I even start reading, I already understand what needs to happen, in what order, and what depends on what. The text fills in the details, but the layout does most of the work. Sure, some complex recipes probably wouldn’t fit this structure, but I imagine it would work for 90% of what most people cook.