Anne Quito

For its more than 1 billion users, Google announced a design update to Google Maps yesterday, July 25.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump knows exactly how he likes his fonts.

In North Lawndale, Chicago, a public basketball court is changing the way people relate to local police. Built just last October, it’s a half court built right next to the West 10th district police station, and it’s designed to get cops to shoot hoops with young men and women they might otherwise never meet.

Long before it became the world’s go-to, online source for virtually anything, Amazon.com was strictly a bookseller. And before the arrival of its slick, obsessively considered menus, navigation bars, and search algorithms, the $250 billion operation’s homepage was much more basic. A screen capture from a month after its July 1995 launch is a relic from the early days of web design and branding history.

No one wants to live behind barricades and barbed wire, but everyone wants to feel safe, particularly in the wake of horrifying, unforeseeable massacres like last week’s July 14 truck attack in Nice, France. The problem is that erecting fortress-like protections is, in a way, giving into terror—it allows fear to dictate how we live.

A collective aiyeeeeeeeeeeee reverberated across the planet.

In Turkey, Twitter is ablaze with a hashtag: #Idamistiyorum or “I want the death sentence.” As the country emerges from a dramatic failed coup last night, July 15, the country is debating whether to reinstate capital punishment for the military men behind the attempted overthrow.

Donald J. Trump just gave internet logo critics a gift this Friday: A new WASPy logo ripe for mockery.

Woe to Britain’s fine tradition of typographers, calligraphers and graphic designers.

The US Holocaust Museum has a Pokémon problem. Three areas in the austere Washington, DC, memorial to victims of the Nazi regime have been designated PokéStops, where players collect treasures like potions, pokéballs and Pokémon eggs in the new augmented reality game Pokémon Go.

Seven years ago, chemistry researchers accidentally created a brilliant new blue pigment, while testing the electronic properties of chemical compounds. This month, the vivid substance—called YInMn, after the elements yttrium, indium and manganese that compose it—is finally commercially available as paint. Some artists and conservators have already started experimenting with it.

Back-to-school angst isn’t just for kids. To keep senior citizens up with the times, several Nordic countries are currently debating a proposal to send them back to school.

“We change our minds by moving our hands,” wrote cognitive psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow in a seminal 2014 study about how gestures and physical tasks deepen and enhance creative thinking. But for most designers, gone are the days of drawing pads, inks, pencils, glues, rulers, thumbnails and sketching. Today’s deadline-driven creative environment has relegated the design process to clicking on a mouse and tapping on a keyboard all day.

And the Lord said, “Let there be free wifi.” 

To address the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, one Dutch design organization issued a global call to the creative community: “What can designers do to help?”

The average museum goer spends less than 30 seconds in front of a work of art. Researchers even found that most of that time is spent skimming the wall text instead of looking at the actual piece.

Here’s a taste of some of the changes coming to politics in the Philippines.

Updated at 10:30 am ET, June 29.

Americans are just now rediscovering the meditative pleasure of organizing life with pen and paper again, but scheduling sans Siri is a long-held tradition in Asia, where legions of discerning journal keepers still take pride in a carefully composed page.

Manila

Good manners never fail—even on automated search engines.

To mark the release of its updated app rules, Apple has transformed a technical guidance document to a zippy comic book (pdf) called App Review Guidelines. Created by digital-storytelling expert Madefire, the 36-page book given out at the WWDC conference this week is a showcase of illustration techniques from DC Comics style to Japanese manga.

June 15, 1991, felt like Armageddon in the Philippines. Twenty-five years ago today, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the country’s north, blowing a cloud into the sky that would cast its shadow over the entire planet.

For the 100th anniversary of the London Underground’s iconic typeface, government agency Transport for London (TfL) will introduce a re-designed tribute font that is as global and quirky as the 1916 original.