onfocus

Josh made a beautiful thing and shared the process. This is inspiring to read, and if you haven't seen Josh's geometric paintings you should take a look. Also fun seeing discussion of this pop up on Hacker News and MetaFilter (of course).

"...somehow you have been transported to a parallel future where everything is more alien than familiar." I love his limited palette here. They remind me of Masashi Wakui's night photos of Tokyo that I stumbled across on Flickr years ago.

I got this fun nostalgia bomb of a book as a Christmas present. It includes the visual history of iconic D&D monsters, campaign settings, and pop culture crossovers. I'm probably the target market. I grew up in the 80s playing this game and I play the latest version today. Seeing the evolution of the game over time is fascinating.

For an online equivalent, follow Old School FRP which posts art and ephemera from 80s role playing games.

Need some design inspiration? This is a great collection of comic book covers from 2018. I added quite a few to my list of comics to find. It also reminded me that I loved the disorienting Why Art? from earlier this year and I don't think I mentioned it here.

This is a fun article aimed at aspiring visual artists but I think there's good advice here for anyone who makes things. I especially appreciated Embed thought in material and Learn the Difference Between Subject Matter and Content.

I love these corruptions of ornamental patterns by Robert Dawson—especially the motion blur plate. [via mltshp] This reminded me of the fantastic book Grammar of Ornament. You can browse through the book at the Internet Archive: The grammar of ornament.

YouTube is ending its video annotations feature and Andy has rounded up a collection of some of the most innovative uses. It's a great reminder that people are endlessly inventive with any tools they have available to them. Even though most annotations are an annoying distraction, people did interesting things with them and we lose some of our history when companies remove content. Check them out within the next couple weeks—then they'll be gone.