Thinking of Missouri tonight, where I grew up and where I have family and many friends.

Blessed are the peacemakers—may there be more of them. May reconciliation and sacrificial compassion take the place of division and easy anger. Peace doesn’t happen on its own—blessed are those who work to make peace. Blessed are the peacemakers.

Also, my native state is hard to draw.

Update: this is the best thing I have read about the situation in Missouri.

Community

Planets* I’ve Visited

*Some objects pictured may or may not be planets. Moons of Jupiter not pictured.

Which planets have you visited? Take the quiz!

Travel

A friend returned my copy of Ivanhoe last week. They had moved to another city and this little volume (about 4″ x 6″, 670 pages) had been packed away in one of their boxes for almost a year. It was funny how glad I was to see it again–I hadn’t been looking for it and didn’t remember that I’d loaned it out, but seeing it again was like running into an old friend.

This has been one of my favorite physical books for a long time–well-worn, yellowing pages, comfortable margins, with a simple but evocative cover design. The two-color cover illustration conveys a sense of the scene, but it’s simple enough that the imagination still has room to play. Printed in 1944, the book was designed well and built solidly enough that it has lasted for years. It has spent time in many libraries before mine–there are a number of previous owners’ names on the inside cover and faint pencil annotations throughout the text.

The book is more than the text

I could have downloaded and read Ivanhoe at any point in the last year, or found a copy at our bookstore, but seeing the physical book brought back memories and associations that the text alone could not. Reading the same text on a screen or on crisp, anonymous paper would give me the story but not the experience of spending time with my shabby little friend.

Is there an old book on your shelf that has become a friend? I’d love to see pictures of old books that have been with you forever. Tweet them to @PaperbackPage or post them on our Facebook page and (with your permission) I’ll include them here.

From other bookshelves

Songs of Men, Robert Frothingham, 1918

“This is my all time favorite book…a compilation of songs from the 19th century that there is no known music to, but the poetry and lyrics live on. I’ve written some music for a few of my favorites, but never feel it does the words justice.” –DFB

 

The Horatio Hornblower series, C. S. Forester

“I picked up the first book at the library while I was in middle school, which is not a typical book for a 13 year old girl. My grandpa found me reading it and excitedly brought me out to his shed. Turns out the series were a favorite of his growing up and he actually had most of them which he insisted that I keep. I’ve carried them through almost a dozen moving days but I’ve honestly only ever read the first book. I just like having them, they were my grandpa’s, and they are wonderfully yellowed, tempered with age and that amazing old book smell. There is even some dirt on them from shed storage that I don’t have the guts to clean because, you know, grandparent feelings. I do plan on reading them to my baby boy though, when he’s old enough.” –SZ

Book Design, Books

The design of the physical money in our pockets says volumes about us: how we see ourselves as a nation; what we value as a nation (or at least what we say we value); what we consider to be quintessential elements of our national identity. It’s a daunting task to create a design that captures the essence of a country well enough to represent that country on its currency. In the last week we’ve seen two highly imaginative treatments of currency, one real and one hypothetical.

The real…

Norges Bank, the central bank of Norway, unveiled a new set of design concepts for their printed kroner. The final concepts for the currency redesign were chosen from submissions by a number of design agencies.  In a somewhat unusual move, the final designs will be a hybrid of two different teams’ concepts–the front from one design team and the back from another, according to a press release from the central bank:

Norges Bank has decided that a combination of two proposals submitted will go on for further work. The obverse sides of the notes will be developed on the basis of the proposal from The Metric System, Norwegian Living Space. The basis of the reverse sides will be the pixel motifs submitted by Snøhetta Design, Beauty of Boundaries.

The teams involved took visual elements that represented the country and created a series of compositions, one for each denomination– 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000 kroner. One of the challenges was to create a set of images that were easy to differentiate at a glance, but also hung together as a cohesive set. On top of that were all the requirements put in place to foil or frustrate would-be counterfeiters.

Scheduled for a 2017 release, the final designs may look differently than these initial concepts, but the overall approach has been chosen. Here are the combined obverse and reverse of the proposed bills:

You can see more images of the winning designs and read some more of the thought behind those designs in Fast Company’s behind-the-scenes article. You can see also the “B sides” from each design firm, as well as some of the other concepts that were considered in this PDF from the bank. (If you read Norwegian and would like to write a synopsis, I’d be happy to repost it here.)

…And the hypothetical

Just as compelling are these hypothetical redesign concepts for US currency submitted to the public by a Redditor sometime last week. It’s a beautiful reimagining of the printed currency that I would be equally glad to spend or to hang on my wall. I appreciate the subtlety of the set, and the strong geometry in each composition.

I don’t have any illusions that there will be a major redesign of the US currency anytime soon, but they’re beautiful to behold and I’m glad they’re out there.

Tim Murray is a designer based in Sioux Falls, SD. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook to read future posts.

Design

Don’t overcook your good ideas

Design by committee and endless revisions can turn the best idea into a charred, smoking wreck. Most projects begin with a spark of a creative idea, and that spark can grow into a complete, developed finished piece. But the revision process can be brutal on that initial idea, especially if there are a lot of stakeholders.

Some revision and refining is necessary and expected, but the initial creative energy and momentum can only last so long: don’t overcook your good ideas. They should be lightly seared on both sides, to bring out the flavor. And then probably garnished with something.

Creativity, Design, Ideas