Design History | the mehallo blog. beta.

Chocolate Stock

Click for larger view/jump.

Tags: cool finds, design, design history, illustration by steve
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Jessica’s initials

HE incredible Jessica Hische is also from Hazleton, PA.

Knows what a good Eastern Pennsylvania snack pitza is. Knows about this thing called Root Liquor (which I didn’t know about; I just know about Birch Beer, my favorite beverage from back there). And she’s been doing a drop cap a day for a few months now.

Drop caps, initial caps go wayyyy back – mainstays of illuminated manuscripts, and they’re part of the reason we’re still using caps today (for beginnings of sentences, names).

Jessica provides code to add caps to your own blog. Grab em here.

ND, as of last month, the caps are available as prints. Archival, on velvet coated fine art paper.

But that’s not all. Jessica has a bunch of other cool stuff in her store, including this wonderful ‘Day-Runining’ notepad (pics below). The pad has individual sheets one can send to unruly clients who don’t pay for your services, waste your time and – of course – ruin your day.

Order the pad here. Order the Drop Cap prints here.

And
Visit Jessica’s complete store here.

Tags: art, cool finds, design history, typography by steve
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Trajan: The movie font

‘Try playing the Trajan drinking game’

Tags: cool finds, design history, education, fonts, typography by steve
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Meatballs, worms and bugs

NASA Meatball

Here’s a brief history of NASA’s logos, including the ‘meatball’ (above) and the ‘worm’ (below).

The worm was put to rest in 1992. If you wish, condolences can be left here.

NASA Worm

When it comes to official type, NASA is Helvetica, Futura, Times, Garamond and something . . . Victorian?

Article here.

Plus
Here’s a look at some goofy names for some other classic ‘bugs.’

Tags: design history, education, typography by steve
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50 years of space exploration

Click on the images to explore/make bigger/jump.

Interactive edition here.

Art by Sean McNaughton, National Geographic Staff; Samuel Velasco, 5W Infographics

Tags: cool finds, design history, education, illustration by steve
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Historic rocket science

NASA STS-1, April 12, 1981

In 1981, I woke up in the middle of the night to watch the launch of the first space shuttle.

And then they scrubbed the mission.

Had to wake up a second night to see the actual launch (above). I recorded the whole thing on a cassette tape (my first VCR was still a year away). Frank Reynolds of ABC did the blow by blow. It was the Columbia. Got the mission patch when visiting NASA in Mountain View. Star Wars-like lettering for the name (below).