I love this photo series documenting Shanghai’s late-night food stalls from Florian Mueller. Although I can imagine these streets are busy and full of noise – horns, bikes, passing trucks, talking – there's a wonderful sense of peace to these images. Each stall is framed by darkness, the owner quietly attending in the shadows; each feels almost like a side chapel in a shadowy (skyscraper-filled) cathedral.

This is a really interesting story about Nike’s sponsorship deal with Colin Kaepernick and the winding road that led to their new campaign.

It’s a striking example of how much ads still matter, as a cultural influencer and as a design medium. They’re still a lightening rod for the conflicting motivations of politics, money, principles, and ideas. When those forces converge in the right ways, advertising is still a powerful platform.

To be honest, this story kind of sums up everything I love and hate about the industry. Props to Wieden & Kennedy and Nike for having the spine to stand behind Colin Kaepernick in the end¹ – although, as with all things advertising, it’s hard to tell what their real motivations were. Because it was the right thing to do? Or because it might be profitable? Or (most likely) both? A funny thing about the industry is that, much of the time, it seems impossible to tell the difference between integrity and opportunism. But it’s often this naked opportunism that keeps the advertising industry oddly "honest"; it keeps us off the high horses. And when there’s a chance to say something true, it shines all the more brightly.

I found this nice interview in Juxtapoz with artist Kenichi Hoshine and I really love his work. I’ve always been fascinated by painting that toes the line between representation and abstraction, and his work feels especially interesting in this way. Abstraction opens up all kinds of expressive possibilities unique to the medium of painting but, sometimes, when you abandon the constraints of concrete life you also lose the ability to speak to an audience in terms they recognize; to tell stories; to give people a way in. The baby and the bathwater can be hard to tell apart here.

The other day I ran across this lovely series of articles in the New York Times called "Why I love…". Here’s a great one breaking down a bit by Robin Williams.

The articles are fascinating and super fun to read, but the "editorial UI" design here is brilliant (and subtle) as well. The way video clips, stills, and references are mixed with the text make it feel almost like cross-cutting B-roll in a documentary: you read a paragraph or two of the author’s comments, then see what they’re talking about. This sounds maybe simple or even obvious but getting it right on a webpage (that has to work on many devices, in many browsers, at many sizes) is an awful lot harder than it looks. The Gray Lady’s designers have struck a perfect balance in their layouts between text and illustration that allows each to enrich the other instead of distracting.

This is genius too: when they quote a line from the bit, they make the text into a button for an actual audio clip:

The way the text background becomes a progress bar for playback is just… oof. I wish I’d thought of that.

I ran across this short film this morning. I saw this for the first time a couple years ago and it was really nice to watch it again.

I’ve been kind of obsessed with Carl Sagan for most of my life; Pale Blue Dot (the book the voiceover comes from) is an all-time favorite, one I reread more or less like it was scripture. Hearing his voice reading from it over these images honestly gets me a little choked up every time I watch it.

Also! There’s a website with stills! I’ve found my new desktop wallpaper.