Pitch, Bank and Yaw

Over on Telstar Logistics there’s a great post on the book “Flight thru Instruments” which has some of the best information graphics I’ve ever seen. There is, as ever, a Flickr gallery of images from the book, which are a great source of inspiration, especially the seemingly simple ones like this and this. Go and take a look. There’s a nice bit of background on the production of the book:

It turns out, “Flight thru Instruments” is so beautiful because it was created by the General Motors “Graphic Engineering” Staff under the leadership of Harley Earl. And who was Harley Earl?  Earl worked as a designer at General Motors from 1929 until 1959, where he rose to become the postwar chief of GM’s styling section. He drew styling inspiration from airplanes throughout his career, and Earl’s most famous design innovation was a little trick he cribbed from the swooping rear fins of the P-38 Lighting fighter flown during World War II.

The illustration below caught my eye especially. I’ve read definitions of pitch, bank and yaw in the past, and yes, they’re fairly straightforward concepts, but they never really seemed to stick in my mind. I always had to draw a little diagram to make it clear, and while the diagram below is much more complex (and I think it’s the least successful of the set for being hard to interpret) it contains a fantastic visual description of pitch, bank and yaw. I’ve redrawn them at right, a bit larger, mainly because I like redrawing things and I wanted to make a wallpaper of it (which you can get here: widescreen, square/4:3, and even iPhone). Yes, I know the text is a bit wonky, but I was trying to match the original, honest.

And, because I like the cover too:

The Nonist

I used to read the Nonist ages ago, and then it went ‘on sabbatical’ for ages. I’ve only just noticed that it’s back (despite posting a link to it recently - I thought it was an old post).

Anyway, this post brought me to a great selection of interesting bindings from the British Library. Worth a look through the site as there are lots of inspirational links and posts.

Oded Ezer

I’ve been meaning to write something about Oded Ezer for ages, ever since seeing his contribution to the Urban Forest Project (at right). Unfortunately I know only a little about Hebrew typography and calligraphy so I can’t write from any qualified angle on it. Ezer’s work is just amazing though, and so I add another entry to my ever-expanding Things To Learn Or Find Out More About list - Hebrew! Recently I saw a link on Notcot about his recent Ketubah project, which looks great, but I’m having a little difficulty working it out. The closeups show what appear to be cut out letterforms folded over to form new shapes, but the photos don’t say whether they’re printed to look like that or they’ve actually been cut out and stuck down again. I’m hoping the former. Below are some images of his work that I’ve saved for inspiration. Take a look at his site for more, and here for some samples of his poster work.

From Ketubah:

Other inspirational images from Oded Ezer’s site. These really are lovely.

Ambigrams

I came across these ambigrams by Tiffany Harvey during the big Christmas/New Year break. There are some great examples in the gallery (on Flickr, of course), but these two caught my eye especially. I’m fascinated by ambigrams, and always thought words suitable for making them were fairly rare, but Harvey seems to promise any word can be made into an ambigram, even two, three or four words. Fascinating.

Ex Ljbris

This is an interesting strategy. Jos Buivenga is a type designer producing high quality, fully-featured fonts and releasing them for free through his website. Perhaps realising the seemingly universal attitude that it’s perfectly OK to steal fonts, rather than accepting that they are licensed software products, he allows you to download his fonts with no restriction and just providing an option to donate through Paypal. I don’t know what the solution is to software and digital media piracy, but I’m not sure the honour system is the right way to go about it. I hope Jos Buivenga gets lots of donations, because the quality of his work deserves reward.

I’m particularly liking Fertigo. I think I can make use of that at work (and yes, we will donate):

And I just like this image: