A new, PDF-like format from the folks at Wolfram Research which aims to make electronic documents more interactive. CDF allows easy authoring and embedding of the sort of elements one typically encounters on the Web but never encounters in PDFs: tabbed content displays, dynamically updated information, manipulable three-dimensional graphics, etc. More information here.

Sandwiches, cut in half, plopped down on a scanner, scanned and then blogged. From the mind and appetite of graphic designer, photographer, writer, and foodie Jon Chonko.

Also, according to Unbeige, Scanwiches will be making its debut in book form this November. See the blog today here.

I’m not sure I’ve seen an illustrative style quite like artist Alvaro Tapia’s before. He uses a bright, almost Technicolor palette and yet his images are dark and even creepy. He also manages to harness randomness and spontaneity in a remarkably deliberate manner.

See his portfolio here.

I like the typeface Clarendon a lot; its warm but orderly serifs are very comforting and evocative of countless schoolbooks from my youth. I think I like this contemporary cut of the typeface even better than the original. It’s by Canada Type who specialize in revivals of mid-Century typefaces.

Available from You Work for Them

I’d hesitate to call it useful, but it certainly seems exhaustive: I Heart Chaos have assembled a timeline of all the comics adaptations ever made, starting with a trickle in the early decades of the last century and turning into an annual flood over the past twenty-five years ago. See the whole mess here. Thanks to Paul for the link.

Photographer Mike Mitchell photographed The Beatles during their first visits to the United States in 1964 when he was just eighteen years old, and then left the images in his basement for decades. They debuted at a gallery show in London last month, and they go up for auction in New York next week.

More on the story here, and many of the images can be viewed here.

The Awl tells the story of Harold von Braunhut, the man responsible for several memorable if outlandish novelties sold in the back pages of comic books for decades. These included X-ray specs and, maybe most famously, a variety of brine shrimp marketed as Sea Monkeys.

These ads are very familiar to me from my misspent, comic book-reading youth. But I had no idea that its inventor was a patron of the Aryan Nation nor that he was born and raised a Jew. Much like the wares he peddled, he was not what he appeared to be. Read the whole story here.

Steve Heller writes about the efforts to secure a rightful place in design history for seminal information designer Ladislav Sutnar, led principally by his son. The younger Sutnar began his efforts in the 1970s, but was stymied by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia which tried to eradicate his father’s works from the history books, owing to his anti-communist activities. Read the full story here.

A rendition of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Mona Lisa’ by graphic artist Gary Andrew Clarke that reduces the original painting’s palette to just 140 colors. Beautiful.

You can see more views and buy prints at Clarke’s online print shop.

Designer Adam Parks has been assembling these mixtapes and producing terrific, illustrated covers for each one since 2007.

There are twenty mixtapes so far, so there’s lots to listen to. The whole presentation is exquisite.

Also related: Designers.mx is a similar project from Blake Allen and Josh Sullivan, where selected designers are invited to create, design and publish mixes of their own.