Greetings from the desert, where I’ve already forgotten about snow. I returned to Tucson from a lovely (read: exhausting) holiday vacation in New England, where I tried to snowboard for the first time. I brought a camera to document the situation but fell too many times to actually take a picture.

Anyway, just before the break, I was commissioned by CEDO to design their 2011 Tide Calendar using the banner illustrations created for them in the beginning of last year. Before the project, I didn’t know what a tide calendar was and they’re pretty interesting. They tell you all of the times and measurements for the tides (here, in the Gulf of California) throughout the year. The information is important to scientists (particularly those studying the tide pools) and visitors alike, for knowing where the water will be when.

In 2009, I had the opportunity to visit the CEDO headquarters in Sonora, Mexico. The trip proved critical to my understanding of the place and efforts of the organization (which I’ve rambled on about here). Because of it (and because of their excellent/kind/smart founders), I was better able to align the visual solution with their intent in terms of audience and aesthetics (mixing science with play). All of which is simply to point out the essential-ness of integrated research to the design process.

To get your own calendar (and support the conservation efforts of CEDO), go to their Eco-Shop.

John Gilbert Wilkins’ Research: Design in Nature, 1931.

The book was created by Wilkins for the Art Institute of Chicago, particularly for the Field Museum, founded in 1893 (as the Columbian Museum) in Chicago with a mission of accumulating and disseminating knowledge, and preserving and exhibiting objects illustrating art, archaeology, science and history.

A detail of the cover.

The museum was founded to house biological and anthropological collections assembled for the Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1893, also known as the Columbian Exposition, as the event was in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the “new world.” Fun Factoid: 716,881 people attended the fair.

F.A. Brockhaus, Berlin und Wien, birds’ eye view of the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893.

The structure of the book is beautifully made and well-integrated to the loosely didactic, exploratory nature of the content, allowing readers to leaf through pages at will, changing the order of pages and organization of information. While the enclosed content isn’t indexed, causing obvious problems for scientists, it works as a kind of an informational art piece.

The book is bound with loose pages and housed in a cloth-covered case.

In 1905, the name of the museum changed to the Field Museum in honor of Marshall Field, the first major benefactor. This name change also illuminated the museum’s focus on the natural sciences.

The book is bound with loose pages and housed in a cloth-covered case.

In the 1920s and 30s (and maybe, and probably longer), Stanley Field, nephew of Marshall, was the museum president. And wouldn’t you know it, this book is inscribed from the prolific author to our very own Stanley Field, thereby elevating to unknown sums the value of the book, clearly indicating that I have no business with it.

The book is bound with loose pages and housed in a cloth-covered case.

Ellen, who has an undergraduate degree in ecology and a Masters in Scientific Illustration (in addition to her MFA in Visual Communications) acquired this book from a professor here at the University of Arizona. The professor, a collector of things, simply handed it to her. There apparently existed a second volume, however it has been lost. Without further ado, some of the book’s pages:

Sea Life (on left) and Shells, Construction & Design (on right).

A detail of the lovely page designs. Reminds me of a certain Alphonse Mucha.

The book is apparently available from Amazon for the whopping sum of $500 (a second copy is noted for $780). Wow. Anyway, my next project is to scan these pages, so they’ll be preserved in dots and pixels and TIFF files for digital eternity (so, a few years). Enjoy!

National Geographic just released their Top Lists of 2009, and my favorite is the Top Ten Discoveries, one of which includes this six-inch barreleye fish with a transparent head. Awesome.

Well, while we’re looking at lists, Wired Magazine recently posted 1,000 Comic Books everyone must read.

More books I haven’t yet read but NPR says we should read are the Year’s Best Memoirs and Nancy Pearl’s Under-the-Radar Books.

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