An incredible project from Chris Hytha, documenting the gorgeous art deco architecture scattered across the country:
The prosperity of early 20th century America resulted in a boom of skyscrapers that still tower over cities across the country today. Focusing on the character and craftsmanship on display at the top of these landmark buildings in a way that can’t be seen from street level, the Highrises Collection reveals fascinating details and stories of these distinctly American icons.
An example, the Sun Realty Building in Los Angeles:
I recently was getting our Silhouette vinyl cutter back out, since Colette hasn’t used it in a while. The software for the thing is still ancient and janky — hard to believe anyone uses it at all.
But I found this new tool for creating vector-based designs for any kind of cutting machine — vinyl printers, CNCs, laser cutters. It looks like an excellent general tool for creating SVGs you can import into all manner of cutting machine proprietary applications.
The community around Stable Diffusion, the open source AI project for text-to-image generation, has been buzzing. From nonexistent a year ago to thousands of contributors and forks and spinoffs. There’s even a GUI macOS app.
Lexica is a project to index and make prompts and images from Stable Diffusion searchable. Playing around with it, it’s pretty impressive. So much incredible possibility here. This tech will make the volume of content on the internet literally infinite.
Stable Diffusion images...
This was a livestream from a while back with Maggie Appleton (her work referenced in this past Weekend Reading) going step by step through her illustration process.
She uses a few straightforward but useful techniques, an iPad, ProCreate, and iteration to make some really great creations.
What a cool idea for a new type of “photography”, if you could call it that.
This combines 3D photos, photogrammetry, point clouds, and Unity rendering to fly through the streets of Hanoi.
After recently finishing The Tangled Tree, I was reading about the different domains of the tree of life. Somehow I landed on this work by Ernst Haeckel. Amazing art and even more incredible that nature has produced this diversity by mixing chance and time.
