Fashion That Changed the World

Fifty Dresses That Changed the World from London’s Design Museum is a collection of iconic dresses, such as the 1915 Delphos Pleated dress and Hussein Chalayan’s 2007 LED dress.
The book is part of a design series that also covers shoes, cars and chairs. Read about them on Dexigner.

Periodic Table of Typefaces

If you are looking for the perfect font for your proposal but find the drop down box in Word unwieldy, check out the periodic table of typefaces that lays out the most “popular, influential and notorious” typefaces.

Design for Health

UK design firm Priestmangoode believe that healthcare could be improved by applying the same design principles to hospitals and clinics that are applied in the luxury travel trade and first class cabins in airplanes.
They have written a manifesto, which revolves around the following principles:

Healthcare doesn’t need to be in a hospital;
Buildings need to be planned [...]

Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields

Head on over to SXSW in March, 2010,  for the world premiere of the music doc Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields a ten-year labour for its directors Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara (and a much shorter – by about 9 years and 49 weeks – labour of love for TV Mole in [...]

Homes for Haiti

Flavorwire reports that architects are trying to help Haiti by designing new temporary homes  ranging from re-purposed shipping containers to lightweight Ikea-esque ‘pods’.  Andrés Duany, a Miami-based architect who developed the pretty Katrina Cottage in the aftermath of Hurriacane Katrina in New Orleans, as a dignified alternative to disaster trailers provided by FEMA. But are [...]

My Way and Die

Frank Sinatra’s My Way is off the karaoke menu in the Philippines – or it is if you don’t have a death wish. Over the last decade at least half a dozen deaths have been connected to someone singing My Way. Some put it down to bad singing, hogging the microphone or choosing a song [...]

Looking into the Past

Looking into the Past is a fascinating Flickr group that features historical photographs that have been blended with the modern world in some way.
Take a look at:
Dam Square shooting 1945 Amsterdam, then & now;
Then in now Brandenburg gate;
Looking Into the Past: Loudoun Street, Leesburg, VA;

The Paris Review

The Paris Review has an extensive archive of Q&A interviews with authors dating back to 1953. Interviewees include Lawrence Durrell (1959),  Ernest Hemingway (1958) and James Baldwin (1984).
Explore more in The Paris Review Archive.

Author Interviews

Treat yourself to some vintage black and white TV and listen to some author interviews from the archives: Boldtype has put together their favourite five sites featuring charming or combative author interviews. Clips include Paul Auster, Toni Morrisson, Isabel Allende and Ayn Rand. See them here.

Architectural Follies

The good folks at Flavorwire have come up with a list of architectural designs that make you go, err…. They are (in ascending level of offensiveness according to Flavorwire):

Crystals retail centre, Las Vegas;
Zaha Hadid’s Villa D in the Turks and Caicos;
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art expansion;
Federation Island in the Black Sea;
Goldman Sachs HQ, NYC;
Hydropolis, [...]