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Put simply, the Visual Graphic Tumblr is an unending stream of great design. A day’s worth of images usually includes branding of everything from microbreweries to batteries, typography on posters and flyers, independent publishing, and sometimes album packaging. The images are presented without commentary, but confered with a silent seal of approval. And we're not exactly sure who's behind it.

Like a well-kept notebook, Visual Graphic makes a great resource for anyone with a looming creative project. The sheer quantity of images coupled with a high level of curation make it the perfect place to test your own ideas or take cues from a discipline other than your own. We guarantee it’s a great addition to your dashboard. 

Visual Graphic

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Families in developing countries, says Designboom, often use a system consisting of three rocks and a bundle of firewood to cook food at home. While the three-rock stove can be put together on a small budget, it only uses about 10% of the fire's heat for cooking. When the trip to get more firewood takes an entire day, conserving firewood is essential.

To create a more efficient stove, the designers at Claesson Koivisto Rune worked with families in Kenya to test prototypes and provide feedback at each stage of the design. They mimicked the function of the three-rock stove with a recycled aluminum structure that could concentrate the heat of the fire, and still use a families' existing cookware. The final product, the brightly colored Baker Cookstove, is manufactured locally in Kenya and distributed directly to villages.

In some cases, stoves are available for $29. A crowd-funding campaign is ongoing.





Even if Trevor Crump's photos didn't twitch and shake in animated GIF form, they'd still be impressive compositions. His Tumblr boasts GIFs of bands like Ty Segall, White Lung, and Yo La Tengo slightly moving mid-performance, and charmingly goofy backstage portraits of Bleached and Widowspeak and a ton of others. The limited movement in the GIFs works to Crump's advantage: the stereoscopic format doesn't distract from the photos, and gives the images some tasteful depth. 

Follow Trevor Crump on Tumblr.








Kirra Jamison's modern paintings might seem a bit random, like cast-offs from a Matisse cut-out broken up, but they're actually created through a more intricate, inspired process. Jamison began with scraps of vinyl on the floor of her studio, arranged them into abstract collages and then screenprinted over them for the series "Total Control." For "Locomotor," she took the smaller prints and recreated them in acrylic. The effect is strangely pleasing to the eye even if it isn't even obvious that her creations are drawing from the material world.


"Tenon Cargo"
"Mortise"

"Hum 2012"
"Arch" from "Total Control"

It takes approximately 200 trucks worth of dirt to build a two-acre field of wheat in lower Manhattan. And if farmed correctly, those two acres can grow about 1,000 pounds of healthy, edible wheat.

Those figures are not an estimate. In 1982, directly adjacent to the World Trade Center, artist Agnes Denes planted and farmed two acres of golden wheat as part of an installation called "Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan." The confrontation she describes isn't limited to the visual strangeness of seeing a farmer ride a tractor in front of a city skyline. Instead, the project also speaks to the confrontation of farming wheat on land valued at $4.5 billion, and bigger issues of mismanagement leading to world hunger and food waste. 

After the harvest, Denes took the grain to 28 cities and distributed the seeds for planting in a number of countries.

Photos from Confrontation are on exhibit at MoMa's Ps1 in Queens as part of their #Expo1 series.