Transmission #59: Back from hiatus, with Easy Architecture, Bad Hedgehogs, and a Walking Bridge to Nowhere.
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
Hello and welcome back. It’s been a while.
This is Transmissions by me, Marty Brown. It’s usually a fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, and other curios that float my way. But it’s been on hiatus for a few months.
Work (and a little bit of travel) took over my life to a not-quite-healthy degree, but now I’m happy to say that I’m moving on from my role as design director at a B2B scaleup, and I’m looking for pastures anew.
So if you’re searching for someone to help you design wonderful things, then please get in touch.
Today’s edition is going to be somewhat of a ‘best-of’ since the last missive in July, so what it might lack in freshness, it will hopefully make up for in quality. Mercifully, this edition will be free of spicy AI hot takes.
Thanks for bearing with me.
Design
Making Architecture Easy
Samuel Hughes • Works In Progress • Link
If living in London for several years taught me one thing, it’s that a nice row of classic two-story Victorian terraces can be about as good a blend of architectural cohesion, harmony, homeliness and distinctiveness as you’re likely to find in a modern city. And the aesthetic quality of our new build estates are almost irredeemably hideous by comparison.
This article, straight from the shaking-a-fist-at-the-world dept., would tend to agree. It makes the case that architecture, even if it’s good on some conceptual level, by virtue of being an inherently public display, should not be difficult. That is, we should not need to understand the architecture, but should be able to appreciate it by some fairly innate and universal qualities: order, proportion, detail, and the like. It’s a rather stodgy and un-progressive view, but looking at the sorry state of most new builds today – especially our ‘prestige’ civic buildings, I think I’d tend to agree with it.
Pixel f*cked: Inside Hollywood's VFX crisis
Simon Parkin • GQ • Link
A look behind the curtain at the modern day sweatshops that are Hollywood VFX studios. Packed with hair-raising details of the horrifying commodification, insane demands and brutal working conditions of a once ‘creative industry’:
In one scene in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick – a film which touted its use of so-called practical effects over VFX – artists digitally swapped a pair of white trousers worn by Jennifer Connelly’s character with blue jeans. These divine powers to reshape the physical world became the VFX industry’s essential weakness. Once artists could create anything, soon enough, they were asked to create everything.
I’m a fake brand, in a fake world: The secrets behind designing a great fictional brand for TV and film
Ayla Angelos • It’s Nice That • Link
On the flipside to the previous story, this job sounds outrageously fun: designing fake brands for products that live in films. Erica Dorn is the British graphic designer blessed with the talent and opportunity to work in Wes Anderson’s minutely detailed worlds, rounding them out with all manner of invented brands for packaging, posters, cards and yes, dog biscuits. Pure joy.
Ideas
The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
Tyler Vigen • Link
Truly A+ work. A quixotic, obsessive and inane personal quest captured in blog form, recalling the kinds of posts you would find way back in the late aughts on the internet’s goofier, weirder, more joyous version of itself. Here, the author notices a bridge, and wonders;
why is it there? It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?
Cue 9000 words to find out, and a journey that is somehow both incredibly satisfying in it’s doggedness, and strangely hypnotic: you too, will really want to know why this bridge was built.
(Note: The author Tyler Vigen is also known for Spurious Correlations, a collection of graphs that note the tight correlation over time between things like the ‘Divorce Rate in Maine’ and the ‘Per Capita Consumption of Margerine’.)
The Wild Business of Desert Island Tourism
Zachary Crockett • The Hustle • Link
COVID lockdown triggered in me a deep affinity for the kind of punishing isolationist tendencies that are best captured only on reality TV. I’m talking about Alone. Or even it’s absurd sibling, Naked and Afraid. It turns out that I wasn’t the only one. Not only that, there is a thriving business servicing those who want to take it even further: people who will pay thousands of dollars to be left alone on a deserted island… on some kind of demented holiday. The best bit is, like reality TV, there’s a whole arcane backstage production: bribes to keep the local fisherman away, and payoffs to pick up the plastic from the beaches. All to preserve the illusion that total escape from the modern world is really attainable.
Chart of the week
Seen something you’d love to share? Drop me a note in the comments.
Other
🐚 Ornamental Hermits Were 18th-Century England’s Must-Have Garden Accessory. Self recommending headline. Link
🚃 A short history of moquette, the ubiquitous durable, woollen seating material that is used in upholstery on public transport all over the world. Link
Thanks for reading! See you in a fortnight. This time, for real!