This small publisher aims to be an “independent platform for graphic art, Illustration and art comics in the U.K. and abroad,” as well as “to become a leading proponent of quality in book design and a standard bearer for original creative content in print publishing.” They have a stable of incredible artists, including the French illustrator Blexbolex (whose children’s book “L’imagier des Gens,” though not from Nobrow, is still a favorite of mine). I received a copy of his Nobrow comic “Dogcrime” as a gift. Here’s a shot of another comic, “Abecederia.”

Find out more or order books at Nobrow.net.

A wonderful project from Spanish artist Angelica Dass: a series of photographic portraits in which she sets her subjects against a background of a specific PANTONE color that matches his or her skin tone.

View the full “Humanæ” project or read the write-up at Designboom. Via Nina Mehta.

Like many inveterate users of Photoshop, I’ve never really known what the blend modes (found on the Layers palette) do. That is, I know the effects they produce, mostly through repeated usage, but I’ve never really understood the operations they perform to achieve those effects. (It doesn’t help that their names, e.g., Color Burn, Linear Dodge, Pin Light, Hard Mix, etc., are not exactly self-evident.) This blog post lists all of the blend modes and offers simplified technical explanations of each. For instance, here’s Pin Light in plain English:

“Pin Light replaces the colors [in the underlying image], depending on the blend color. If the blend color (light source) is lighter than 50% gray, pixels darker than the blend color are replaced, and pixels lighter than the blend color do not change. If the blend color is darker than 50% gray, pixels lighter than the blend color are replaced, and pixels darker than the blend color do not change.”

That’s pretty enlightening and actually very useful. Read the whole post here.

As is common when big box stores close up shop, when the Wal-Mart in McAllen, Texas shut down, the town was left with a 124,500 square foot building. They decided to turn it into a public library, with surprisingly attractive results.

In fact, the project won a 2012 Library Interior Design Award. Read more here.

Now available for pre-order from the graphic design specialty press Unit Editions, this “numbered, limited edition, deluxe monograph of the legendary Herb Lubalin, one of the foremost graphic designers of the 20th Century.” If you’re not familiar with Lubalin, you can read this brief overview here. Unit Editions’ books are impressive; I bought “TD 63-73” and it’s gorgeous. But like a lot of design books, they’re easier to admire or display conspicuously on your shelf than they are to read. Still, I just pre-ordered a copy of “Lubalin” for myself. Find out more and get your own copy here.

Software engineer Vijay Pandurangan surveyed the color trends of movie posters from the past ninety-eight years and found that they have become steadily more blue.

Each row in the graphic above represents a year and the distribution of colors across all of that year’s posters. Read more here.

A study funded by The Online Publishers Association tries to parse some consumer behavior patterns on tablets. Some of the findings: 61 percent of tablet owners have purchased some kind of content online; electronic magazines and books outsell electronic news content by more than twice as much; there is as yet little consensus about whether digital content should be sold on its own or bundled with other offline content, such as print subscription.

The survey also asked those tablet users who have actually purchased a digital newspaper or magazine subscription whether they preferred to get that content delivered via mobile-optimized Web sites or via apps. As it turns out, most prefer the mobile Web. This is the best bit, though:

“That result is remarkable, contradicting conventional wisdom that distributing native apps through app stores is the best way to get consumers to purchase content.”

What’s remarkable is that the OPA still considers it “conventional wisdom” for publications to distribute their content via apps, and not via the Web. I don’t want to say “I told you so,” but I did — eighteen months ago.

Here is the OPA study itself, and here is a summary of it at Poynter.

This is a very good post from the co-founder of Andreesen Horowitz, one of the most influential venture capital firms going at the moment. He describes in detail what it feels like to be at the helm of a startup that is not going as expected. It’s very visceral, and will be familiar to many, many entrepreneurs. Admittedly, it’s not altogether original — this kind of subject matter is a staple of just about every startup-centric blog — but the phenomenon he describes can be so challenging that it’s worthwhile to see the same ideas resurface periodically. And, yes, a lot of what Horowitz writes here is familiar to me from the past year or so of running Mixel. I plan on writing more about this soon, but in the meantime you can read the entirety of Horowitz’s post here.

Cartoonist Adam Koford seems to enjoy the new Twitter logo as much as the old one. Starting in 2009, he’s been blithely reinterpreting the famous bird mark by fitting various pop culture characters from Fred Flintstone to Che Guevara into its silhouette.

That’s just ten of them; there are about sixty more on his Flickr account, and nearly all of them are genius.

From a 1984 issue of Domus Magazine, an interview with seminal industrial designer Dieter Rams. A few of his sketches are included. Keep in mind though that it’s Domus Magazine, so some of the questions will sound exactly like “Can you describe in a nutshell your latest utopia?” Read it here.