Personal website of Daniël van der Winden
Link: https://bellkiosk.website/blog/reasons-to-website.html?ref=daniel.pizza My favourites? Too many . Related reading from 2018, Laurel Schwulst’s “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?” . Thank you for reading my RSS feed. If you’d like to respond, you can email me or seek me out on Bluesky .
Link: https://youtu.be/4cAt2CAptkw?si=Ci0Mk_Q33ejwa6rS A 26-minute documentary by NYT Cooking on what makes a good restaurant sign, and what they mean to a business. They look at New York City’s iconic lettering with the artists behind Noble Signs , who hand-painted signs all over the city. Wonderful work. Thank you for reading my RSS feed. If you’d like to respond, you can email me or seek me out…
Some twenty-odd years ago I’d spend hours on end in my bedroom, in the attic of our house, my big, boxy, self-built computer humming reassuringly on the floor beside my feet. I hung out on forums, wrote reviews about music, and built little websites about everything that interested me—chucking them out after two weeks to pursue new ways of building things, writing things. I’d spend evenings…
Link: https://www.mclaren.com/cars/gl_en/m6gt-mclaren-special-operations?ref=daniel.pizza The Special Operations team at McLaren restored the McLaren M6GT, a car designed in 1967 by Bruce McLaren, yet never made it past the prototype phase. Details of the McLaren M6GT . This was never going to be a simple rebuild. We took it as an act of custodianship, with an immense responsibility to stay true…
Link: https://arun.is/blog/jr-logo/?ref=daniel.pizza Arun Venkatesan outlines how Japan’s railway companies all carry one logo across thousands of vehicles, maintaining a distinct, shared visual identity for what is actually eight different organisations. [...] the new corporate identity was commissioned as a single system that would apply across all the companies. In just 124 days — beginning…
Link: https://youtu.be/9FKzTblm37g?si=TqFa0f3uEWduK3NH The strangest thing happened in my brain today, where SpaceX’s IPO reminded me of this guitar teacher, who hears Radiohead’s Weird Fishes/Arpeggi for the first time, tries to deconstruct it on the fly, falls for it, and is especially taken by Phil Selway’s drumming like a metronome . Thank you for reading my RSS feed. If you’d like to respond,…
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUJOKwbhJK8 Over the past few years I’ve grown to appreciate Jeff Parker ( virtuoso guitarist from Chicago ) very much. The jazzy, improvised nature of his work—best exemplified on a few of his recent albums, like The Way Out of Easy and Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy —is just phenomenal. The latest album he’s released with his quartet, Happy Today ,…
Link: https://adobe.design/ideas/the-old-typography-is-new-again?ref=daniel.pizza For five centuries, every typeface size was its own unique design. What we now call optical sizing—the practice of adapting a typeface’s design for different sizes to keep it readable—is a modern attempt to preserve that deliberate design choice to honor size-specific type, even though the physical reasons for it no…
Link: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/dawn-of-the-electric-world-order?ref=daniel.pizza Once a climate project, electrification is now a geopolitical insurance policy. Seventy-five percent of the world’s population lives in net fossil fuel importing countries and collectively spends $1.7 trillion a year importing fuels. Many of those governments facing a loss of confidence in global oil…
Link: https://mikemcquade.com/?ref=daniel.pizza The collage work of Mike McQuade. I’ve been drawn to collages recently. A friend shared an article from The Atlantic , a while back, and it featured the work of Mike McQuade , whose work I was familiar with from the Meet Me In The Bathroom posters , but I’d never dug through his portfolio in detail. Well worth your time. Thank you for reading my RSS…
Link: https://youtu.be/q5dqCeNEIFU?is=i7S9sKo0g47XVMJ- A kid introduces his professor, a poet, to Kendrick Lamar. The professor, expertly spinning his pencil, impressively sinks his teeth into Kendrick’s lyric , from across a few albums, and—admiringly—lays out the poetic nature of his work. Thank you for reading my RSS feed. If you’d like to respond, you can email me or seek me out on Bluesky .
Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/25681716@N03/with/3171031441?ref=daniel.pizza An example of a Bibliobus . Back in the days, in small villages in the Netherlands like the one I grew up in, there used to be a Bibliobus : a library bus or van that visited the village at set times so the residents could borrow books to read ( biblio comes from the Dutch word for library, bibliotheek ). This photo…
Link: https://www.terrygodier.com/current/?ref=daniel.pizza I linked to Terry Godier’s thoughts on RSS before . He followed them up by launching his own RSS reader, Current . It has no unread count: new posts arrive, linger for some time, and then quietly fade away. A lot of deep thought went into its creation and, the occassional UX niggle aside, I find it very pleasing to use. I’m glad he turned…
Link: https://www.inconspicuous.info/p/h-bomb-a-frank-lloyd-wright-typographic?ref=daniel.pizza Image from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives . A geeky typographic deep-dive into upside-down H’s. Thank you for reading my RSS feed. If you’d like to respond, you can email me or seek me out on Bluesky .
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT5iDm9XRl8 Apple released a few ads this week and, while I haven’t paid very close attention to their advertising output recently, they are... quite great. I liked the one for the Neo , and the ad for the new iPad Air is particularly well executed. It has a lovely light touch, and is somewhat disorienting amd irksome, but in a good way. The horrendous macOS…
Link: https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it/?ref=daniel.pizza Research by Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye shows that AI doesn’t reduce one’s workload, but increases it. The summary: One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work,…
Link: https://www.terrygodier.com/phantom-obligation/?ref=daniel.pizza Terry Godier on why RSS readers (still) look like email clients, and why that means the design has guilt built-in. He asks Brent Simmons, the designer of the first RSS reader, NetNewsWire , who says: The part I don’t understand and can’t explain is why RSS readers are still mostly following this UI. But every new RSS reader…
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OwLLNPRbUw A lifetime spent protecting Yellowstone National Park . Steven Fuller is a winter caretaker of the park, and has lived there for the past fifty years, hunkering down in a remote mountain cabin, and raising his children there, too—a most idyllic upbringing. Thank you for reading my RSS feed. If you’d like to respond, you can email me or seek me out…
Link: https://audioboom.com/posts/8806348-jonny-greenwood-on-his-score-for-one-battle-after-another/?ref=daniel.pizza Edith Bowman interviews Jonny Greenwood about his score for One Battle After Another , the latest film by Paul Thomas Anderson that’s just plain fantastic. They have collaborated on many films now ( There Will Be Blood , Phantom Thread , Licorice Pizza , Inherent Vice , The Master…
Link: https://vimeo.com/1127617042 I’m a fan of Matt Willey’s work. I found him through INQUE , the large-format annual literary publication he designs, and followed his work since. Here he is speaking at Typographics 2025 about designing TV titles for, among other things, Killing Eve . (He also designed the titles for Landscapers , a great show I had entirely forgotten about.) Cheers to Charlie…