Repponen

Resurrected my Time Stretched Camera app I did last year. It’s now 10:01. Updated the rendering mechanism and moved it to Metal. It’s super fast now.

I would totally use it!Especially to control the font size! Via @gsimone

There’s this concentration of hand-painted mural ads in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, around Kent Ave and Wythe. They’ve been there for as long as I’ve lived in Brooklyn, and it’s usually fashion or luxury brands. Basically, people paint these by hand with brushes, based on a provided image. Now Figma, trying to be cool, has one massive mural painted by hand. I feel bad for the people trying to paint “Liquid Glass” and the Inter typeface. To me, all of this feels quite sad.

My design idea from 2019. "Bath Outlet". How convenient that would be!

Time Stretched No. 53 🚧🚏🚸

I had no idea! Since iOS 18 there’s a specific feature on iPhones that helps reduce motion sickness when looking at the screen in a moving car. 🤢 Motion sickness can appear when there’s a conflict in your brain between what is perceived by your eyes and your inner ear’s vestibular system. Your vestibular system tells your brain you’re moving, but staring at a screen that is static in front of you tells it something different. It can also happen in reverse with VR, when your eyes tell your brain you’re moving through space, while your inner ear tells it you’re sitting still. What Apple did is add animated dots along the edges of the screen that use the phone’s motion sensors to represent how the vehicle is moving. So when you’re in a moving car looking at your phone, the dots provide visual cues that correspond to the movement your body is feeling, helping reduce the sensory conflict that can cause motion sickness. I’ve heard on a podcast just this week in context that exact same feature is coming to Android now. [Video Source]

SHIFT+COMMAND+3

How did I spend my Saturday morning? Instead of catching up on mail, I got sucked into browsing this insane illustrated archive of Japanese toys. "Unai no Tomo" (The Child’s Friends) is a series of beautifully illustrated books documenting traditional Japanese toys, dolls, charms and other objects associated with childhood. It was started in 1891 by Shimizu Seifū, an artist, calligrapher and collector of folk toys, who spent years collecting objects from different regions of Japan and drawing them for reproduction as color woodblock prints. When Brooklyn Museum curator Stewart Culin, also a collector and researcher of children’s games and toys, traveled to Japan in 1909 as part of a collecting trip for the museum, he came into direct contact with Shimizu Seifū. While searching for a rare traditional toy called *burri-burri*, Culin eventually asked Shimizu to make him a reproduction to bring back to Brooklyn. Now The Met has seven volumes of "Unai no Tomo" digitized in high resolution, and it’s pure beauty!

☁️ Apparently there was an International Commission for the Study of Clouds and I wasn’t invited. Another gem from the Internet Archive. “International Atlas of Clouds and of States of the Sky” published in 1930 by the National Meteorological Office in Paris. I am pretty sure I’ve seen several graphic design pieces that directly used it as a reference.

This is what happens when you “steal” images from the internet without checking. In 2023, Syria introduced a new biometric passport that included an image of the historic Al-Hamidiyah Souq in Damascus on one of its pages. Except the photograph appears to have been taken from the internet and used without the photographer’s permission. We know this because the original photo happened to have the photographer’s watermark. It’s not instantly noticeable, as it is positioned in perspective within the photo, but it’s visible enough: “Waseem Asmar Photography.” 🤷‍♂️ And that watermark made it all the way into the passport! On the other hand, if something like that were to ever happen to me, I’d be stoked! I need to start adding watermarks now and just wait. [Source]

Important update from the corners of the internet. Emoji to Scale is an interactive web experiment by Javier Bórquez that takes things represented by emojis and displays them according to their approximate real-world size.

Floor Mirrors (2025) by Jolie Ngo

[Source]

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!