Slightly delayed after a week of deadline madness, it's this week's edition of Observed. We have handcrafted goodness in the form of paper aviation and vintage-inspired type, as well as a book that took me a year to read (I always read Taleb slowly) and fresh cartoons.
Art: Amazing cardboard flying machines by Daniel Agdag
Artist Daniel Agdag has built a collection of beautifully intricate flying machines that look like they came straight out of a Jules Verne novel, out of cardboard.
Video: Manly on Cartoon Hangover
Channel Frederator – the guys behind cartoons like The Powerpuff Girls and Adventure Time – produces edgier, less Nickelodeon-friendly animated fare for their YouTube-only channel Cartoon Hangover. In between seasons of the fantastic Bravest Warriors and the upcoming Kickstarter-funded Bee and Puppycat, they're on a (northern hemisphere) summer release schedule, with a new animated short coming out every Thursday. They're a little hit-and-miss, but Manly is weird in a good, interesting way, while Chainsaw Richard and the just-released Spacebear are great fun.
Reading: Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
Nassim Taleb is as smart as ever. He's always been very dismissive of people he dislikes, like MBAs and economists, but in this book it feels like Taleb has run out of patience and gone full curmudgeon. It gets a bit much and he comes across as arrogant and vindictive, but if you can see past that, the core idea of the book is a great consolidation of the ideas he explored in Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.
Typography: True North font family
Perfect for vintage-inspired hipster packaging and signage, True North is a hand-drawn type family made up of 16 different styles, loads of ligatures, alternate forms, scripts, arrows, symbols, catchwords, animals and plants, making it easy to whip up an authentic-looking hand-crafted design. And for all those features it's quite reasonably priced. I hope I get a brief soon that calls for this style, because True North looks like a lot of fun to use.