Before they pass away is a monumental project by photographer (but I would also say ethnographer) Jimmy Nelson. He found and observed some indigenous tribes in various parts of the globe, “smiled and drank their mysterious brews before taking out his camera”, shared “vibrations, invisible but palpable”.

These poses, evoking a sort of paradoxical family portraits, show on the one hand a closer harmony between the original condition of man and the universe, which in some way are the same entity, on the other hand a contamination (e.g. weapons) and a disintegration imposed by an imperialist subtle tendency that considers this people’s condition as a disease to be eradicated.

To me, they’re wayfarers who don’t move to reach a specific goal or destination, but inhabit encountered landscapes as transits to the Place that makes every land a simple stage on the way back.
They dance in circles because if you spin, you never end.

What a sweet discover I made; Laura Jae and the free dowloadable EP Silver Lined Hearts, released just a few days ago. Alongside Gold Nights from White Hex this reached my top underrated albums of 2014, yet.

The electronic/cinematic/soul tag fits well.

Deserves way more likes and followers on Soundcloud, so do your job!

Naturally by photographer Bertil Nilsson reveals a powerful liturgy of Nature, a naturalistic pantheism blending landscapes with bodies through an energetic link, epically sealed by a chromatic form of Chaos.

These perspectives by Philipp Götze (Dresden, Germany) seem to belong to a world too fast for humans, full of cities built in a single solar day, planetary virtual migrations for a period of one week, geological ages of one month.

The oldest living things in the world is a project by Rachel Sussman on organisms 2,000 years old and older.

The work spans disciplines, continents, and millennia: it’s part art and part science, has an innate environmentalism, and is underscored by an existential incursion into Deep Time. I begin at ‘year zero,’ and look back from there, exploring the living past in the fleeting present.

In this gallery:
1. Antarctic Moss (5,500 years old, Antarctica)
2. Welwitschia Mirabilis (2,000 years old, Namibia)
3. Spruce Gran Picea (9,550 years old, Sweden)
4. Jomon Sugi, Japanese Cedar (2,180-7,000 years old, Japan)
5. Bristlecone Pine (more than 5,000 years old, California)
6. La Llareta (up to 3,000 years old, Chile)

The author poses this interesting question:
What does it mean to capture a multi-millennial lifespan in 1/60th of a second?

Icon and web designer Jon Hicks from Hicksdesign.
I will use his MailChimp logo to explain a crucial point in logo visual brand identity over the years that I’m often faced with my students and in work too.

As you can see in the MailChimp logo, the symbol part is very illustrative and you rarely see this treatment in an institutional logo. Why? Because it’s too complex to decline in all the possible, small, variations and that’s why the symbol turns to a “head only” chimpanzee version when it runs out of space. Should Hicks went for a more Swiss-graphic-orthodox version?
Here’s the point, MailChimp has to thank their successful brand identity primarly to the well executed particularized chimp. Plus as you can see on their website, if you need a more formal version of the logo, you can go with the logotype only version, if it’s capable enough to stand-alone.

This leads us to identify better our customers. A web focused company, app studio, etc., which display their logos on a specific hardware and software most of the time, take more advantage off well executed pictogram than a well declinable logo.

There is of course the classic illustrated version of an institutional logo, but I like how icon designers can push it to the main logo directly.

If you want find out more about Jon’s icon creations, here some info + dates and for a detailed reading you can buy The Icon Handbook and check other useful stuff.

By the way, Jon Hicks is a remarkable web designer too, his website was one of the first good responsive ones and he’s very precise in coding as well.