Fun Friday Resources
/Our regular grab bag opens with photographer Joel Sartore’s National Geographic Photo Ark, where he is documenting as many of the 25,000 species on earth as he can. (He is up to 18,000!) (Also too, remember that these are copyrighted photos — refer to his terms and conditions for use, please.)
If you need illustrations of animals that are more freely available, check out The Naturalist’s Library (“a complete digital edition of William Jardine’s 40-volume series on natural history published 1833–1843, including more than 1,300 restored hand-drawn illustrations of birds, mammals, insects, and fish”). Those are available under a Creative Commons license.
You know how you’re just designing along and suddenly realize that you really need an all-caps alphabet that looks like it’s made of ribbons? As one does? You do not panic, because at some point you down loaded Alphabet-Album: collection de soixante feuilles d'alphabets historiés et fleuronnés, tirés des principales bibliothèques de l'Europe, which translates as “a collection of sixty sheets of historiated and floriated alphabets, drawn from major European libraries.” Yes, you’re going to have to cut and paste the things, but that’s part of the æsthetic you were going for, right? What else were you going to do, use AI?
Finally, here’s your fun website for the day: Defrag98, a live-action reenactment of defragging the hard drive of your Windows 98© computer. Yes, young people, that’s what all of us — including us Mac users — used to have to do on a semi-regular basis, back when the world was cooling and all computers had physical hard drives and memory issues and you had to “defragment” your hard drive if you didn’t want the thing skipping back and forth over hundreds of fragments that it scattered where it could when it had to, if that makes any sense to you whippersnappers.** Give it a whirl: There is something still extremely satisfying about watching the universe being re-ordered into a tidier, more efficient version of itself.
** And get off my lawn.
