Fun Friday Resources

Welcome back! Technically, it is I who have returned, but you take my meaning, I’m sure.

I have a couple of useful visual resources for STEALING FROM THE BEST:

The Iconographic Encyclopædia of Science, Literature, and Art is extensive — this is a complete web-dump of J.G. Heck’s 1851 publication, with more than 13,000 illustrations. Key tip: After selecting your topic, click on that Plates Only slider. That will ditch the 19th-c. text and give you just the pictures.

via the Internet Archive

Here’s a blast from the past — my past, in any case: a Paratone catalog of all the image transfers you could buy from them, carefully cut out, and rub down onto your comps, hopefully without wrinkling and in the right place.

Now for some completely silly aids for TASK AVOIDANCE.

First, 404 Page Found, a wonderful collection of ancient websites from back when we were all handcoding our World Wide Web. My favorite so far? Sporks.

(I will remind everyone that only 20 years ago I was still handcoding the theatre’s website, up to and including frames. (Are those still a thing??))

At The Museum of Endangered Sounds you can call up extinct mating calls from the past, such as the siren call of the modem as you logged onto America Online to see if you got mail.

Finally, an essay by David Moldawer on a very useful concept for those who are starting projects but who think they need to plan it all in order: Filling your bucket. Twyla Tharp does a similar thing with her projects — just snag everything that enters your field of vision and dump it into a literal box for future organization. If you click on one link this week, make it this one.