When watching international football I’ve always wondered why Italy wears blue, the Netherlands wears orange, and Australia wears green/gold since none of these colors are part of their national flag.

Both Italy and the Netherlands use these non-flag colors because of the ruling houses of their monarchy:

• Savoy blue represents the House of Savoy that unified and ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1946. Blue remains as a national color for Italy—as seen not only in sport applications but also in their presidential standard.

• Orange is the color of the House of the Orange-Nassau, the current reigning house of the Netherlands (which is a parliamentary monarchy).

As for Australia, green and gold were officially declared as their national colors in 1984. According to the Australian government: “Gold conjures images of Australia’s beaches, mineral wealth, grain harvests and the fleece of Australian wool. Green evokes the forests, eucalyptus trees and pastures of the Australian landscape. Green and gold are also the colours of Australia’s national floral emblem – the golden wattle.”

Now that I think about it there are many other examples of non-flag based national team colors like black for New Zealand, white for Germany, blue for Japan…

Here’s a Wikipedia page listing national colors for each country. Also interesting is that there are also semi-standardized colors for international auto racing.

The United States’ international auto racing color is “white with lengthwise blue stripes” as seen in this 1965 Mustang GT350, the first road car to feature racing stripes. Stripes do make your car go faster.

Bull-Doser, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Carmine.shot via Flickr

I remember growing up seeing all these different items with decorative knots: bookmarks, cellphone charms, etc. Just learned today that these were all part of a distinct Korean craft called maedeup (매듭)!

According to the Korean Culture and Information Service, maedeup consists of 30+ traditional shapes and patterns. It also seems that decorative knotting has been prevalent across East Asian culture.

Please, let’s not call it Korean macramé…lol

Knots can actually be incredibly interesting—obviously because of their decorative and functional use…but they also get pretty wild within math and knot theory:

I don’t think this exists, but came across Pinsoft, a speculative design from university students in Spain as a possible solution for people that have a fear of needles.

According to the creators, Pinsoft works because:

[It] stimulates the area near the puncture. It works thanks to rounded-tip spikes, which contract thanks to springs, adapting to the patient's surface. As the needle is inserted, they put pressure on the proximal area and there is a feeling of relief from the prick.

In other words, the prongs distract you from the actual needle.

The design of public transportation fabrics is one of the most ubiquitous and consistent “beauty-in-the-everyday” visual experiences people have in relation to a space. One immediate example that comes to mind is the beloved PDX Airport carpet. This deep connection between design and space is often expressed in the myriad of merchandise available. People even get tattoos of the pattern!

PDX Airport Carpet; via Travis.Thurston, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

PDX Airport Socks via The Athletic Community

PDX Airport Baby Drool Bibdana via Etsy

The Instagram account @idontgiveaseat is a large collection of public transportation fabrics and patterns. There’s definitely a mix of beauty and horror.

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A post shared by I Don’t Give A Seat (@idontgiveaseat)

The type of fabric used on these seats is moquette and according to the London Transport Museum:

Moquette was chosen for public transport for two reasons. First, because it is hard wearing and durable. Second, because its colour and patterns disguise signs of dirt, wear and tear. On top of this moquette had the advantage of being easy and cheap to mass-produce.

My sister-in-law pointed out that the London Underground began creating unique moquette patterns to each line. Some of these designs are available for purchase in a wide variety of products and furnishings:

Gotham is probably the one typeface that defines our millennial aesthetic. I’m sure you’ve seen it, Gotham had taken over the world by 2019.

What you may not know is that in 2014 there was a dispute worth $20 million within the firm that created Gotham: Hoefler & Frere-Jones. The drama was bad enough that Hoefler is accused of “most profound treachery” in Frere-Jones’s lawsuit. Ultimately the pair settled out of court.

Drama between type foundry partners is not new. In this article from Colossal we learn about Doves Press and their founders T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker. They founded the firm in 1900, but by 1909 they had dissolved their partnership. And in 1917, to ensure that no one would have access to Doves Press’ type—including Walker—Cobden-Sanderson dumped it all in the River Thames!

Robert Green, a type enthusiast, began searching for the missing lead type and in 2014 he miraculously found a lone ‘v’. And with the help of scuba divers, the team found 151 sorts (i.e., individual pieces of lead type) out of possible 500,000(!). Here’s a short film about the search:

It’s always fun to be reminded of the physical nature of typefaces…one reason why leading (LED-ing) is called leading, because of the lead in lead type.

I’ve been getting into professional sumo these past few months!

The overall sumo wrestler ranking system and the promotion/demotion process is really interesting. Every two months there is an official tournament, and each wrestler is given a rank. The rankings for each tournament is published in a meticulously hand-brushed listing called the banzuke.

Each banzuke includes each wrestler's full ring name, hometown, and rank is also listed. The highest ranked wrestlers are at the top of the page printed with the largest characters. This is followed by wrestlers in lower divisions, with accompanying smaller characters.

The characters are part of the set of Japanese calligraphy typefaces used towards the end of 18th century of the Edo era. The typeface for the banzuke is Sumomoji (相撲文字) and it was specifically designed for sumo advertisement. According to this video, the bold strokes in sumomoji are meant to represent the physical strength and power of the sumo wrestlers.

Here’s another example of a really striking Edo-era typeface—Kakuji (角字) which was used for making seals: