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The days are dark, the nights are long, the weather is cold. So that must mean it’s the perfect time to curl up inside with a warm mug of tea and some of the best articles on the web. If you get the tea, I’ve got your reading material sorted.

stop watch illustration

SHORT READS, IF YOU’VE ONLY GOT A FEW MINUTES:

These UX designers are rethinking the voter ballot

It’s been a big month for elections. At these big moments, I can’t help but turn on the bit of my brain that wants to be a service designer and wonder why arguably the biggest service of any democracy, voting, is always so questionably designed. Clearly and thankfully, I’m not the only one thinking about it. (If anyone knows how I can get a job doing this please let me know!)

In Praise of Mediocrity

“The pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure.” We need to get comfortable with the fact that sometimes just being okay is okay.

 

30 costumed dogs from the Topkins Square dog parade 2018

Okay I know this isn’t technically within the remit of what I share in this roundup but these dog costumes are definitely works of art and oh so adorable. You can thank me later.

 

Are public parks and unalloyed good?

I love my local park, walking through it on a daily basis has brought a world good to my year. “Cities need parks, but not just any parks will do. How they’re designed plays a crucial role in determining whether they benefit surrounding communities.”

Dentures illustration

LONG READS, IF YOU WANT SOMETHING TO GET YOUR TEETH STUCK INTO:

12 Authors Write About the Libraries They Love

One of my biggest sadnesses coming out of uni was that (despite spending an awful lot of money on my education) I didn’t get continued access to the bodleian library. So I loved this piece in The New York Times where Susan Orlean asked several authors to tell her about their local public library or to share a memory of a library from their past.

How Instagram Saved Poetry

The likes of Rupi Kaur and Charly Cox have undoubtedly changed the face of modern poetry, and they’ve done it by harnessing the power of social media, The Atlantic delves into how.

 

How to successfully pitch The New York Times (or, well, anyone else)

I want to be more proactive with my work. There are some bigger things I want to make and som platforms I want to approach, so this piece from Nieman lab on pitching was super interesting. If you’re interested in pitching (of any kind to any outlet) I think it’s a great starter for 10.

 

Craftfulness: Meet the life-long friends who say making things can mend your mind

Crafting is good for everyone. “People are tough on themselves. So many of us are working hard, raising kids and running a house. I know I certainly felt like crafting was taking time out of something I should be doing instead. But it’s not self-indulgent, it’s good for you.”

 

Going to Paris. What Van Gogh’s arrival in Paris can teach us about timing.

Van Gogh, supposedly, once said “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”. He’s right. But this post from Marcy Pederson suggests that sometimes we have to learn when to attempt things and when to find our crowd.

 

How to talk to people, according to Terry Gross

It’s not necessarily design based, but my design job requires talking (and mainly listening) to people all day. Plus we’re in the season of small talk, so I thought I’d share some wisdom from an expert. It’s fair to say Terry Gross knows some things about talking to people. The host and co-executive producer of NPR’s “Fresh Air” has interviewed thousands of personalities over the course of her four-decade career.

WHO TO FOLLOW, IF YOU WANT TO SPRUCE UP YOUR INSTAGRAM FEED:

@littledoodles

Everything Kate Wilson, AKA Little Doodles, shares brings a smile to my face. I think sometimes we just need some goodness and she delivers in spades.

 

@emsutton1983

Emma Sutton is a wonderful illustrator from my hometown. I’d seen her work before in the window of iconic tea room Betty’s but I’d never known who she was until the lovely people at One & Other mag did a video feature on her. I’m so glad they did because I’m obsessed with her richly detailed illustrated worlds.

 

@alicedes_illustration

Alice Des’s illustrations are just so stylish. I love how she draws hair in particular, there’s just something so nice about the waves on waves. She also balances positive and negative space brilliantly in her monochrome pieces, definitely something I personally want to work on.

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I have lots of little stashes of blog posts and advice I love, squirreled away like acorns across the internet. Recently I dug my way through my Bloglovin collections, and stumbled back across a piece from Darling Magazine about the difference between hibernation and hiding. It was something that really resonated with me last year, and it’s still ringing true.

 

In the post they talk about how hibernation is different to hiding because, “hibernation is an adaptation that helps […] conserve energy by remaining inactive”. It’s not running away but slowing down to recoup.

 

What really struck me when I was rereading the post wasn’t how well they’ve articulated that difference, but that I think I could really do with a period of hibernation. I’ve been feeling more and more like the pace I’m currently moving isn’t sustainable unless I take a moment to restock properly. I’ve tried taking small breaks, but I need to hit reset. If for no other reason than I’m pretty sure everyone is bored of me saying I’m tired and busy, because that’s all that I am right now.

 

So, in order to preserve what’s left of my sanity and my stability. I’m thinking of taking a period of hibernation over this winter.

 

But what does that mean?

Here’s what I’m planning for my hibernation:

  • I’m going to feed my body and my mind – when animals hibernate, they build up big stocks of food to keep them nourished throughout the winter. I’m not going to build a pile of seeds and nuts, but I am going to try to look after myself a little bit better. I also want to take some time to just consume arts, and media, and new experiences, without necessarily having to create off the back of it.
  • I’m going to rest – this is the big one. I just want to sleep and relax. I don’t want to worry about scavenging for my next instagram post or my next blog idea.
  • I’m going to slow my rhythm – animals who hibernate slow down their metabolic rate to survive not eating and being cold for so long. I want to take a bit of inspiration out of that and set myself up with a new, slower schedule.
  • I’m going to nest – I always imagine well stocked burrows when I think of hibernators and I want to take this opportunity to clean up my space a little. As much as I try to keep on top of things both my physical and digital spaces need some TLC and that takes time, and it takes being prioritised.

 

This post is also something of a forewarning that I’m going to be taking a good chunk of January away from blogging. I don’t think I’m going to completely retreat into my cave nest away from social media, but expect a quiet period on here at least.

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I realised the other day that I haven’t made a downloadable wallpaper all year. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve really made anything you guys can take away in a good long while. But I pulled out the 6 of Pentacles from my deck, and so I’m acting on the spirit of generosity.

 

So I’ve created 3 desktop wallpapers featuring 3 cards which will hopefully prompt you to consider things a little more deeply. Each features a brand new card illustration and a short bit of information about its meaning, based on Caitlin Keegan’s Illuminated Tarot deck and The Everyday Tarot as well as some of my own reading.

 

I’ve included a few links to help you learn more about each card, if you want to, below each wallpaper.

The Hanged Man

The Hanged Man is often seen as a negative, but it’s really a card about peace away from distraction and focus. It symbolises insight, calm, and the ability to view the world from a different perspective. If you need some clarity, take the hanged man with you.

Learn more

Knight of Pentacles

The Knight of Pentacles represents hard work. It’s a card of consideration but also of action. If you need to knuckle down and just get stuff done to realise your dreams, take this as your reminder.

Learn more

The Magician

The Magician is linked to new beginnings and opportunities. This card links the spiritual realm and the material realm, so it’s about making things real for me. If you’re looking to challenge yourself to try new things and learn new skills, or if you’re just about to embark on a new endeavour this is for you.

Learn more

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When I was looking for inspiration for another design story, I tipped out the contents of the font pocket of my bag, where many treasures can be found. One of the many things that poured out was my emergency safety pin, and I realised I had no idea how something I’ve turned to in moments of clothing strife and was so common in my childhood as the daughter of a frequent fun-runner came to be.

 

People have been using pins to hold their clothes in place for centuries. In Homer’s Odyssey there’s a wonderful description of Odysseus wearing a pin which holds great symbolic value within the text:

“Odysseus wore a woolen purple cloak,

a two-fold one, and in it was a pin of gold,

with double grooves, and on the front was a marvelous design”  (Odyssey 19.225–227)

These pins had great significance as both a marker of social status and spiritual connection. While changes in fashion may have made the pin less useful in the mediterranean as the years moved on, by the time ancient Rome was flourishing so was the humble clothing pin. These pins were known as fibulae and came in a number of pieces: the body, the pin, the spring and the hinge. The body of the fibulae was typically made of bronze, but just like Odysseus’s pin they were often made of finer metals and adorned with jewels as decoration.

 

Those ancient pins are absolutely wonderful to look at, they were always some of my favourite objects to spend time with at the Ashmolean. But they’re quite a step away from the humble safety pin. For that simple single wire design we need to turn to New York in 1849.

There we find Walter Hunt. Walter Hunt was a masterful inventor, he has several patents to his name including the sewing machine, the ice plough, a forerunner of the winchester repeating rifle and the street car bell amongst many more, including our beloved safety pin. But Walter wasn’t a great business man. In 1849 he owed a peer $15 (about $500 in today’s money) and he head debt collectors knocking at his door. So, Walter turned to his natural talent for invention and started playing with the only material he had to hand, a piece of wire. He turned that piece of wire into a shape which could safely clasp. He quickly patented his idea and sold that patent to W.R. Grace for what seemed to be a great sum at $400 (about $13,000 today), which was more than enough to pay off his debt.

 

W.R. Grace were able to turn that $400 investment in Walter’s idea into millions once they started manufacturing the “dress pin” as it was then known. This was just one example in a long string of many where Walter didn’t quite get to reap the rewards of his work.

 

It took a little while for the safety pin to become the ubiquitous clasp we all know and love. In 1870s another group of inventors added the safety guard to protect the users fingers properly. They also worked out how to mass produce the pin, which is always a major turning point in these design stories. “By 1914, American factories alone were making over 1.33 billion safety pins annually at a cost of $0.007 each, a stunning example of the industrial order’s democratization of an ancient and medieval luxury product.”

While the need for the use of the safety pin started to wane as we moved into the late 1900s. There were better ways to secure nappies and diapers, clothes were being mass produced, there were just generally fewer things to secure. That was until the safety pin, which had once been a symbol of spirituality became a punk rock icon. Punks turned to the safety pin to hold their ripped clothes together after big nights and to attach patches signifying their favourite bands of the era. Famously, Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols wore a shirt held together with safety pins in the video for God Save the Queen. As Adam Wray writes for Billboard “as a result, the safety pin has come to symbolize punk’s scrappy, DIY ethos, even when it appears outside of a punk context.”

 

Today, we have plenty of ways to secure our clothes, but the safety pin prevails. Thousands of them were used in the last Olympics because we’ve still not found a better way to quickly secure a numbered bib to a jersey. Mum’s across the world have a secret stash in sewing boxes. Not only that they still endure as a political symbol, even if it’s one quite different to the statement Odysseus was making in ancient Greece.

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I’ve been writing this blog for over 2 years now. I’ve been making things and sharing them online for much longer, perhaps much longer than I should have. That means I’ve shared a lot of myself. It’s inevitable. We’re a part of everything we make, and even more so when what we’re making is a essentially a string of short personal essays.

 

Over the years I’ve put a lot of those up on here. I’ve touched on my work, my taste, my fears, my hopes, and even a fair bit of my mental health. It’s all documented and available for anyone to see.

 

I think because I grew up online. Pouring my feelings out on the internet has always been the most natural thing in the world. I’ve spoken about it in more length before but the internet felt safe when I was 13.

 

But as I get older, I’m not sure it should be. I’m not sure how healthy it is if I’m honest.

 

There seems to be a move to share more and more in an effort to seem ‘authentic’. We watch the minutiae of other people’s lives in vlogs. We read their deepest feelings in blogs. We want to see their raw unedited selves in photos.

I have a number of ideas about why, all centred on this new age of isolation on our craving for connection. But whatever the reason, we’re blurring more and more boundaries to make the internet versions of ourselves as “real” (whatever that may mean) for an audience.

 

The fact that it’s for an audience is what’s really started to unsettle me. I know I’m writing this while still actively seeking an audience for what I make, the irony hasn’t escaped me. I want to be honest and I want to share information that helps people, but I don’t want to feel like I’m having to trade in pieces of myself in order to do that.

 

I’m trying to find a way of making content that’s personable and relatable without it feeling like I’m oversharing, because I want to keep some of myself just for myself. If that makes sense. I don’t want all of my innermost demons to be out here where they can come back and haunt me, and I don’t want to sell off my best moments either.

 

In short, after all of that meditative moaning, I want to be more conscious of how much I’m sharing here and why I’m sharing the personal details I do bake into my writing and my illustration. Does anyone have any ways of working through this? I know I can’t be the only one struggling with it.