Show and Tell | March
A Graphic Design Curio Cabinet
Hi friends! Welcome to this new home for my “Show & Tell” newsletter. I’m thinking of this new space as a “graphic design curio cabinet.” According to the Better Homes & Gardens website (lol), a curio cabinet’s main purpose is twofold: practical storage and a visually pleasing display. I’d love for this Substack to be just that, some great visual inspiration from design archives, practical design tips, and design work on display, with some behind-the-scenes content.
Vintage Sewing Needle Packaging Design
I visited my mom earlier this month, and her ephemera collection of matchbooks, cards, notebooks, maps, and more is incredible. We took a deep dive through her bins in the basement, and I wanted to share this vintage 1940s sewing needle pack. Isn’t it beautiful?
Diving into the history of these needles a bit more, I found that the insurance company National Life and Accident would hand these out as promotional items. Can you imagine getting handed something this beautiful at a festival or trade show?
Sewing needles have a rich history, with the first recorded printed advertisement for a needle appearing in China around 1200 AD. However, it wasn’t until the 1640s that the first commercial needles were offered to the public at an affordable price. Here’s a look at some other beautiful needle packaging from the past:
If you want to go on a deep dive and spend your paycheck on some vintage needle packaging, check out this collection.
A Really Good Adobe Illustrator Update
Of all the recent Adobe updates, this color code maker has to be one of my favorite additions. You can now select your color swatches and click "Create Swatch Info," and it does all the laborious work of collecting the HEX, CMYK, and RGB color codes for you! This will save hours of time while building out style guides.
Met Museum Exhibition: The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography
This exhibition was shown at the Met Museum in NYC, and it features some of my favorite types of art. As they state, “The photographs in this exhibition do not depict rare or special things. They show toothpaste, tombstones, and hats. But these familiar trappings of everyday life will be, at times, unrecognizable—so altered by the camera that they constitute something entirely new.”
New Work!
I had the great opportunity to work on the cover art for The Rise of the Railroad with the creative team at DK Publishing (Penguin Random House). I got to dive into the archives for train tickets, create some custom stamps, and explore old-timey train typography for this project. The book is available for pre-order now and will be released in October!
Things to be excited about:
Paul Simon likes to keep telling us he’s retired, but then he comes back, and it’s always the best news. Tour tickets here. (Also, I just went down a rabbit hole about how Carrie Fisher was engaged to Dan Aykroyd, and then Paul Simon swooped in. (You heard it here first…45 years later)
My friend Rachel recently hiked through the surreal Heart Cave. Take a look at these desert sculptures by Ra Paulette
Five fonts for old-timey handwriting
I loved reading through this list of “The Curious 100” from the Eames Institute
Ciao Samin, author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, has a new cookbook coming out!
Paris’s Secret City Hall Library
Thank you for being here! I look forward to connecting more, and I hope you have a beautiful rest of your week.
Love,
Beth