The Tremendous 10 link roundup, #158

1. The Art of Noticing | “When Tim and I first started the Noticing newsletter, I got a note from Rob Walker, a design and technology journalist whose work I’ve followed for some years. He said he was working on a book about paying attention and that the book and an affiliated newsletter were going to have a similar name to “Noticing”. Name collisions like that are always a bummer, but we didn’t challenge each other to a duel or anything.”
2. Character, process, & heart: Creating Slack’s illustration voice | “A behind-the-scenes look at researching, concepting, and creating an illustration voice, system, and custom 40+ asset library.”
3. Evolution of the Alphabet | “This is a limited edition print. Only 975 have been produced and it will not be printed again. All are numbered and hand-signed by the designer. The chart shows how the letters used to write English (and many other languages) evolved from Proto-Sinaitic, through Phoenician, early Greek and early Latin, to their present forms. You can see how some letters were dropped and others ended up evolving into more than one letter. Please note that this chart focuses on the evolution of the letter shapes, not their sounds.”
4. Mapping and Visualization | By Scott Reinhard.
5. Four Principles of Being a Working Visual Artist | “Seattle-based illustrators Don and Ryan Clark are succeeding at a balancing act many creative pros have found impossible.”
6. The Route of a Text Message | “This is the third post in my full-stack dev (f-s d) series on the secret life of data. This installment is about a single text message: how it was typed, stored, sent, received, and displayed. I sprinkle in some history and context to break up the alphabet soup of protocols, but though the piece gets technical, it should all be easily understood.”
7. The surprising habits of original thinkers | “How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies ‘originals’: thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals — including embracing failure. “The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most,” Grant says. ‘You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.'”
8. Forget Screen Time Rules — Lean In To Parenting Your Wired Child, Author Says | “The overuse of technology has overtaken drugs, sex and bullying as the biggest parental worry, according to the annual Brigham Young and Deseret News American Family Survey.”
9. How to Actually, Truly Focus on What You’re Doing | “Tired: Shallow work. Wired: Deep work.”
10. blank vhs covers were kinda beautiful | The 80s, animated.

Image: poster by Useful Charts, link #3.