Cosmic Discoveries: The Universe in Your Pocket

We love space, so we’re thrilled about the release of Cosmic Discoveries, the third excellent iPhone/iPad app from the American Museum of Natural History.

Fittingly described as “a mosaic of the universe in your pocket,” Cosmic Discoveries is the first app to offer nearly 1,000 breathtaking images of the Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy and beyond on a mobile device. From refreshing social features like sharing and commenting on photos to the home screen picturing a collage of all the photos stitched together into one of the most iconic astronomy images of all time — Saturn and its rings — reminiscent of National Geographic‘s Infinite Photograph, the app is an absolute treat, as visually stunning as it is educationally fascinating.

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FORM+CODE: Eye & Brain Candy for the Digital Age

Computational aesthetics, or what typography has to do with Yoko Ono and Richard Dawkins.

Yes, we’re on a data visualization spree this week, but today’s spotlight taps into an even more niche obsession: data viz book candy.

This season, Princeton Architectural Press, curator of the smart and visually gripping, brings us FORM+CODE — an ambitious, in-depth look at the use of software across art, design and illustration for a wide spectrum of creative disciplines, from data visualization to generative art to motion typography.

The nature of form in the digital age is trapped in the invisible realm of code. Form+Code makes that world visible to the community that stands to gain the most from it: artists and designers.” ~ John Maeda

Elegant and eloquent, compelling yet digestible, the tome — dubbed “a guide to computational aesthetics” — offers a fine piece of eye-and-brain stimulation for the age of digital creativity. It features more than 250 works spanning over 60 years of innovation in art, architecture, product design, cinema, photography, interactive media, typography, game design, artificial intelligence, graphic design, data mapping and countless other manifestations of creative culture.

From fascinating historical background to visually mesmerizing showcases to practical guides, the book talks the talk and walks the walk — its website is a digital treat in and of itself, featuring a treasure trove of extras, including code examples and a remarkable library of links to related projects.

FORM+CODE features work by some of our favorite creators and thinkers: Aaron Koblin, Jonathan Harris, Martin Wattenberg, Stefan Sagmeister, and many more across the various facets of culture, including Yoko Ono and Richard Dawkins. Yes, in the same book.

Thanks, Julia

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PICKED: IDEO Imagines The Future of Books

PICKED is a new series of short-form interestingness we’re adding to our usual one-item-daily menu — every day, in addition to the main Brain Pickings article, we’ll also curate a couple of quick, often self-explanatory tidbits of noteworthiness from around the web. Think of it as the takeout to Brain Pickings’ full-service fine dining — same curatorial yardstick and quality of content, served to go.

We’ve previously looked at the evolution of magazines. Now, design and innovation powerhouse IDEO is reimaging the book as an interactive, non-linear storytelling experience.

We’ve got a weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.