Link roundup for May 2020

An old PowerPoint or Keynote slide deck won’t protect you in a pandemic. But an old poster can.

Hat tip to Janet Stemwedel for realizing:

Thing I haven't seen yet this pandemic but which I suspect already exists: cloth face masks made from old cloth conference poster.
Possibly with matching sundresses.

When I tweeted I would pay money for that, Alexandria Hughes replied with the picture above. Outstanding!

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And the end of April, Amy Frietag posted some art that cropped up in her neighbourhood, saying “Sure is a sign of the times.”

I’m fascinated by this, because it shows the power of a visual.

The sculpture is obviously showing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. But SARS-CoV-2 didn’t really exist in the public imagination even a few months ago. If you had put up a white ball with red spikes in February or even March, I doubt people would have thought, “coronavirus.” It’s because of the illustration made by CDC illustrators Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins that we now have a shared visual “identity” for the virus.

And it is definitely the Eckert and Higgins illustration that is the source material here. Because a virus doesn’t have colours. There is no particular reason to make a sculpture of the virus white with red spikes, except because the CDC illustration is white and red. Eckert and Higgen chose those colours to signal that the virus was a serious threat, not because there was any scientific reason to pick them.

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So research conferences are cancelled. Now what?

Hat tip to Melissa Vaught.

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How to use bold type effectively.

That’s only one example; the article has more!

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Make your own Penguin Classic book cover.

This was only done as a demonstration! I have been loving working with Pelagic Publishing!