Jeff Desjardins: Mapped: Visualizing the True Size of Africa (Visual Capitalist)
The reason for this is that the familiar Mercator map projection tends to distort our geographical view of the world in a crucial way — one that often leads to misconceptions about the relative sizes of both countries and continents.
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The African continent has a land area of 30.37 million sq km (11.7 million sq mi) — enough to fit in the U.S., China, India, Japan, Mexico, and many European nations, combined.
CSA Images: Free Design Elements
Borders, dingbats, ornaments, diagrams, patterns, words, letters, numbers.
To thank all of our loyal customers for decades of support in helping us create the CSA Images collection, we've decided to give away Free CSA Design Elements (with a daily download limit). Our hope is that this free collection will become a useful and constantly expanding design resource for many years to come. -Charles S. Anderson
Everest Pipkin: Tools List
Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup
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This is a list of smaller tools that might be useful in building your game/website/interactive project. Although I’ve mostly also included ‘standards’, this list has a focus on artful tools & toys that are as fun to use as they are functional.
The goal of this list is to enable making entirely outside of closed production ecosystems or walled software gardens.
Coronagrifting: A Design Phenomenon (McMansion Hell)
PR-chitecture is architecture and design content that has been dreamed up from scratch to look good on instagram feeds or, more simply, for clicks. It is only within this substance-less, critically lapsed media landscape that Coronagrifting can prosper.
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You may be asking, “What’s the harm in all this, really, if it projects a good message?” And the answer is that people are plenty well encouraged to stay home due to the rampant spread of a deadly virus at the urging of the world’s health authorities, and that these tone-deaf art world creeps are using such a crisis for shameless self promotion and the generation of clicks and income, while providing little to no material benefit to those at risk and on the frontlines.
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There is something truly chilling about an architecture firm, in order to profit from attention seized by a global pandemic, logging on to their computers, opening photoshop, and drafting up some lazy, ineffectual, unsanitary mockup featuring figures in hazmat suits carrying a dying patient (macabrely set in an unfinished airport construction site) as a real, tangible solution to the problem of overcrowded hospitals; submitting it to their PR desk for copy, and sending it out to blogs and websites for clicks, knowing full well that the sole purpose of doing so consists of the hope that maybe someone with lots of money looking to commission health-related interiors will remember that one time there was a glossy airport hospital rendering on designboom and hire them.
Smithsonian Open Access
Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
