Mike Rundle's Weblog

Great Job, Beautiful Scenery, What Else Is There?

My good friend Nicole works at Carroll College in one of the most gorgeous sections of our country — Montana. She's on the lookout for someone with design, web standards, usability, and accessibility chops to come work at her college as a full-timer. That means that you can view beautiful countryside and get your CSS on at the same time, how can you go wrong?

View the employment page for more information, but hurry because application deadlines are about a week away.

Cleaner Than Your Average Typeface

 

The new project I'm working on needed clean, crisp, modern typography — something like DIN or Interstate but without the associated cliche. So I went hunting.

I found exactly what I wanted over at Segura's T.26 Digital Type Foundry. It's a perfect little sans-serif called AAUX Pro A, and is a spitting image cousin of Interstate by Tobias Frere-Jones. The cool thing is that it hasn't the slanted ascender tops like Interstate has — which is always a dead giveaway that you're using one of the most over-used typefaces in the past 5 years.

The similarity to Interstate and FontFont's DIN keeps me comfortable when using it, but then I get excited that it's exactly what I was looking for. A little bit old, a little bit new. Perfect.

Protect Me, Oh Freedom Gundam!

I just bought my first Gundam action figure!

I first learned of them last summer when my buddy Eric had a super cool-looking one sitting on his desk. It was about 7" high, and looked like a cross between a Transformer and a <insert Japanese word here> anime villain. I'm all about desk toys and random junk, so I was immediately intrigued.

There are two different kinds of Gundam figures — the kind you put together like a model car, and the kind that is already built for you (read: more expensive). And there are four different skill levels for the kind you build yourself, so being a beginner, I definitely bought the Level 4 most complicated kit :)

Here's a larger picture of the one I bought, posed in a few different positions.

The official Gundam site said that you do not need glue to put these together, and that the plastic is pre-colored, so I should be ready to build it when it arrives. Anyone build a Gundam before, or know anything else that I should know before starting?

SX-70 Emulsion Manipulation

A few people's blogs that I read often have linked to quite a few unbelievable pictures taken with a Polaroid SX-70 camera. The interesting thing about this particular instant-developing camera is that the chemicals on the photograph itself are more liquified than many others, and you can manipulate the developing image in extremely cool and creative ways to form works of art sans-Photoshop.

Here's a collection of artists and photogs that do some great work with SX-70's:

• Lev Levian — 44 pictures from around the world


• Lev Levian (cont'd)


• London's Millennium Bridge by Kim Glamour


• Rob Gardiner


• Joanne Warfield — gorgeous portfolio site


• Lucas Samaras — extremely creative self-portraits, with reviews

Update: Gay kids lay the smack down on dumbass (from Daily Rotten) and Rush Limbaugh admits to drug-addiction