Hello hello.

You’ve been very productive this week, so as a little reward, here’s some good stuff made by humans:

1. “What aesthetic is this?” Online, images are increasingly treated less as singular works than as pieces of a broader aesthetic puzzle – each with a distinct label. But what gets lost when creativity is compressed into searchable categories? Another cracking It’s Nice That essay from Elizabeth Goodspeed, on the push to categorise visual culture.

2. “I couldn’t keep it a secret because half the publishers in London had literally changed my nappies.” From Naomi Ishiguro to Jess Atwood Gibson, more children of high profile writers are becoming authors themselves. John Self talks to writers and their offspring about the rise of the literary nepo baby and the pressures of measuring up.

3. Over on LinkedIn, Mike Dempsey has started an (ironically evergreen) “it was better in my day” thread on the state of non-fiction book covers. These arguments always rely on a degree of nostalgic rose-tinted cherry-picked survivorship bias (aka NRTCPSB), but it’s an interesting discussion nonetheless.

4. Dan McPharlin’s tiny papercraft synthesisers.

5. Most creative work is made to a brief – so is fake art in film actually ‘fake’? The Christophers, a new Ian McKellan-starring film includes 16 ‘fake’ artworks by painter Barnaby Gorton – Gary Grimes argues that this body of work isn’t so different from the pieces that hang in our galleries.

6. We’ve been studying the work of Eric Carle for homework purposes, so this thorough analysis of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Looking at Picture Books came in handy. I particularly liked this observation:

   “Carle was always zeroing in on how young kids made things. He used materials they would recognize, and even to a certain extent limited his way of using them to things they could do. Ripping paper, cutting kind of rough shapes.… Carle’s work is like: what if you use only what kids use to make a book, but you put that through one of the best designers to ever do it. The tension between a hastily torn piece of paper against some super expert typesetting and planning is the excitement in so much of this, right from the cover, and all the way through. The spontaneous joy of when you first made anything put against the precision machinery of book production. Carle is what happens when you’re insanely good at both.“

7. Frances Abrantes Baca’s Headnotes, a newsletter all about the design and production of cookbooks, is well worth a read.

8. A little obsessed with Moose’s daily How Far Can I Get Round The Corner Before I Meet Someone Coming The Opposite Way And Have To Stop Filming Because It Feels Awkward And Intrusive videos.

9. The set photography of Brigitte Lacombe, just an incredible body of work. I borrowed one of her The Talented Mr. Ripley shots for a little colourising exercise.

10. Here’s an aesthetic that needs a compressed, searchable name: Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji; Henri Rivière’s Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower; Joel Meyerowitz’s Empire State series. Are there any other examples of this kind of thing? What shall we call it?

That is all.