Boetti and a collaborator spent seven years researching the lengths of rivers, determined to arrive at a convincingly accurate hierarchy despite the impossibility of absolute measurements. This work presents their findings in a straightforward list in descending order of length, giving no clue to the inexact and contradictory information underlying it.

I’m now more inclined to attribute Looseleaf’s power to its visual texture than to some cognitive media-style abstraction. And the visual texture owes more to the beauty (yes, beauty!) of the original pdfs from the Vasulka Archive. Perhaps the demo is best understood not as a prototype generic tool, but as a specific curated experience in its own right, with form and content claiming equal importance in its overall success.

Even so, I think there are some general lessons that can be drawn from this demo:

• Content is not inert
• Visual texture lets content breathe
• Visual texture lets the eye wander without losing itself

The Art of Looking Sideways is a primer in visual intelligence, an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination. It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, colour and imagery.

This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, colour, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.

On a visit to the British Museum last week, Zihan Guo spotted this captivating relief in the Assyrian collection.

...I asked Hiroshi Kumamoto what's up with writing all over the artwork?

He replied:

The picture seems to be one of the panels in the NW palace of Nimrud. The inscription must be the so-called "Standard Inscription" which is repeated with little variation.

...Chinese officials, scholars, artists, and emperors did the same thing to the most famous art of their land.

Presumably, their imprimaturs (!) enhanced the value of the work.

We rendered over 1 million of the web's top homepages. This is the result.