Over at The New Yorker, architecture and design writer Alexandra Lange writes about the phenomenon of Instagram accounts that capture design ephemera like matchbooks, clothing labels, postage stamps, machine badges and more.

These examples of tiny graphic-design ephemera are brought to our full attention in obsessive, single-serving Instagram accounts. This is not the Instagram of artistically arranged purse contents or filtered selfies but one that more closely resembles the olden days of Tumblr, when people, archives, and institutions realized that they could add their humble masterpieces into the digital image river that people look at every day.

Lange points to a number of these wonderful accounts in the article. It’s a nice piece that draws attention to how social media is in many ways an opportunity for the easily overlooked artifacts of the design trade to shine. It’s not clear to me whether the article is exclusive to the Web site or if the editors think highly enough of the subject matter to include it in the printed magazine itself.

Read the full piece at newyorker.com.

This is a homebrewed proposal from editor Maia Weinstock for a set of LEGO toys based on the female justices of the U.S. Supreme Court: Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Weinstock submitted the idea to LEGO, but it was rejected in accordance with the company’s rule against politics or political symbols. Weinstock then penned this open letter appeal.

More at maiaw.com.

I hesitate to post this here because in general I don’t endorse my generation’s excessive devotion to the Star Wars franchise. I enjoy the original films and characters, but the nearly religious devotion that they inspire in others is lost on me. That said, this short tribute to Star Wars from animator Paul “OtaKing” Johnson is a stunning piece of work. It imagines a Star Wars film in the mold of 1980s-style Japanese anime works like the Macross series, and its interpretation is pitch perfect.

For the past few weeks I’ve been using beta versions of Flexbit’s Fantastical 2. It sports a handsome new interface with a dark left pane that flanks a light reworking of the standard iCal day/week/month/year view. There’s also a natural language engine for freeform creation of new events—these are becoming standard for calendar software, but Fantastical uses a clever animation to visually parse your words as you enter them.

My actual calendar data is powered by Google Apps, and Fantastical has synced with that service almost perfectly—I did catch one bug where it wasn’t saving an event’s location data, but the Flexbits team was incredibly responsive in working with me to diagnose the problem and correct it on their end.

When it comes to mail, contacts and calendars, I’m less adventurous than a lot of folks and generally stick to Apple’s stock applications. I just haven’t found that much benefit from the alternatives I’ve tried, but after a few weeks of Fantastical I was surprised that I was still sticking with it. It’s an elegant, almost seamless replacement for Apple’s calendar.

Fantastical 2 is in the App Store starting today. More at flexibits.com.

Jeremiah Shoaf put a ton of work into assembling this comprehensive single-page overview of most everything you need to know to get the finer points of typography right—including keyboard shortcuts for Mac and Windows, HTML entities, FAQs about when to use certain characters, and even a downloadable, 1-page PDF that you can print out as a handy reference. It’s a wonderful, meticulously prepared resource, and it’s free. Send Jeremiah a note to thank him.

See the full cheat sheet at typewolf.com.

This project from designer Alasdair Monk is intriguing. Bind takes as its premise the idea that the design tools we have today suffer for their inability to support truly robust collaboration. Where developers benefit from rich technical ecosystems optimized for multiple contributors to any given project, the software that designers use is essentially isolated and oriented to a single user at a time. ”Designing together” is essentially impossible, he argues.

The root of this problem is version control. Git just doesn’t work for our binary files that our tools create. If you move a single pixel in a Sketch document and commit the change to Git, it acts as if you’ve created a whole new file and can’t discern the change you’ve made. There’s other problems as well, most of these tools allow us to layout an interface but only with a fixed, bitmap representation. We can’t easily try them out and see how they feel without coding them up into prototypes.

Monk’s solution is Bind, a project that he is developing that prioritizes versioning as a core use case. It’s also purpose built for user interface design; it’s native to the desktop (i.e., does not live in a browser); and it has at its core Grid Style Sheets, an alternative approach to the presentation of layout elements.

There’s no release for Bind yet but Monk’s notion of re-examining the design workflow on a holistic level is an excellent one. And he’s correct to identify version control as the crux of the problem. As the demise of LayerVault sadly demonstrated, version control for designers is a very difficult nut to crack, especially at scale. What works for one team rarely works for another team, whether as a result of fundamental incompatibilities in production methods or broad disinterest on the part of most designers for conforming to someone else’s way of organizing things.

At its heart though this should be a problem that’s within the realm of technology to fix—there are limits to what technology can solve, but software can surely fix problems that arise from using other software. The question is finding the right approach.

Or rather, the question is whether there are enough people like Monk interested in finding the right approach. The LayerVault team tried to solve this at the storage layer; they allowed designers to continue using their preferred tools but changed up the way work is stored. Bind apparently tries to solve it at the authoring layer; it changes the design tool for maximum compatibility with Git. To my knowledge, no one has yet tried to solve the problem at the file layer; a universal wrapper to which any application can write that stores its version control in a rich metadata file. For each of these layers there are innumerable possible approaches and variants. It will likely take several more attempts like LayerVault and Bind for us to find the right solution.

This is a very nice project from designer Lucas Heinrich. He uses the Random Article button Wikipedia to come across books he’s never heard of before, and then he designs jackets for them. It’s a totally self-initiated endeavor, intended in part to get him professional work designing book jackets. Here are a few examples.

I emailed Heinrich to get more background on it, and he was nice enough to answer a few questions.

Where did the idea come from?

Lucas Heinrich: Book cover design has been an obsession of mine for a while and I’ve always been someone prone to falling down the Wikipedia rabbit hole for hours at a time. I also liked the idea of simulating how real world book design works—the topics aren’t chosen by the designer and may be something they know nothing about, so there’s a period of research before you even begin. Which, of course, Wikipedia is great for!

Do you keep hitting the Random Article button until you get an article about a book, or do you use the first reference to a book that you come across?

Lucas Heinrich: I tried to stay faithful to what the Random Article button spit out. If it was a completely unusable topic—like a page about a small German town with two lines of info about it—I let myself hit the button again. I made up the book titles myself and pulled the “author” names from the references section. Sometimes I just kept the article title, sometimes I went with something a bit more playful that looked good on a book cover.

Is it your goal to be a book designer?

Lucas Heinrich: Book design is very much where I want to be going forward. I spent the past year at Chicago Portfolio School to build up new projects—like this one—so that I can transition out of marketing work. I’m moving to New York in early April and have spoken with a few publishers and book designers there. I’ve gotten good feedback, but I’m definitely still available for any opportunities in the field. Hopefully this project shows off my abilities and my enthusiasm for book design as I try to get a foot in the door!

More at randombookcovers.tumblr.com.

Designer Scott Savarie created this iOS app that lets you compose design comps entirely on your iPhone. At heart, Napkin is not too dissimilar from Project LayUp, the iPad app that I’ve been collaborating with Adobe on for the past year-plus. Or, at least, it shares some of the same goals: creating a touch-optimized interface that makes the design process viable on a mobile device.

Napkin is an impressive piece of work for a solo production—Savarie created it after taking a class called “iOS for Designers.” A Flash video of the interface in action at designwithnapkin.com demonstrates that it’s straightforward and intuitive to use.

Nevertheless, Napkin runs into the fundamental challenge of building productivity apps on touch devices: the absence of a keyboard and mouse can significantly impede task completion. That core problem has consumed tons of design and development cycles for LayUp; it took lots of trial and error with simplified tools and controls before we realized that a drawing engine was necessary to allow touch manipulation to keep pace with a designer’s brain. It’s not an exact replacement for a keyboard and mouse, but for some aspects of the design process drawing the elements that you want to work with and having them instantly translated into live objects can be liberating. I’m looking forward to getting LayUp into lots of people’s hands so they can see for themselves if it works or not.

The Wildcard offices are located in downtown Manhattan, where what’s left of Little Italy blends into Chinatown. I’ve worked in a lot of neighborhoods in New York City but this one is by far my favorite of them all. It’s got the best blend of historical character and the widest variety of authentically prepared cuisines in Manhattan—deciding on where to eat lunch each day is an embarrassment of riches. Also, the neighborhood is deeply urban, full of all the quirkiness of congested, ad hoc populations of people trying to get ahead in life.

There are infinite ways for artists to capture a place this interesting, but photographer Lisa Weatherbee, who lives in Chinatown, has one of the most novel. Her series “Chinatown in $5” documents what can be bought in Chinatown for a five dollar bill. The results are extremely charming.

See more in the series at chinatowninfive.com.