Friday Finds 7.23.2010

Jordan: One Minute Portraits

Oh how I adore these One Minute Portraits. Artist Benjamin Hammond was searching for a bit of creative inspiration and turned to the good people of the Word Wide Web to send in their homegrown headshots, which he would turn into 60-second, ink-on-paper likenesses. From Pennsylvania to Paris, people have uploaded their pictures in droves—so much so that his online submission queue is currently closed due to overcrowding. Check out the gallery of finished faces here. If you get through, you can purchase your print for the super-steal price of $19.99, but are under no obligation to buy. I want one! via CoolHunting

Aaron: Does Your House Have the Mad Men Look?

In conjunction with the fourth season of AMC's mid-century hit Mad Men, the Washington Post asked its readers to submit images of their homes that jibe with the Mad Men aesthetic. Though not everything is to my taste, I did like the startling breadth of homes and furniture that show up in the slideshow. Some would feel at home in the pages of Dwell whereas others seem to have gone off the tiki deep end. If nothing else it's a wonderful reminder of how many varied aesthetics were at play in the 50s and 60s, and a nice antidote to our tendency to imagine history--even a narrowly defined era such as this one--as having an all-encompassing look.

Miyoko: A Field Guide to Typestaches

Fast Company's fastcodesign.com has recently become one of my most frequented visited sites and this week it did not disappoint. Sarah Rich, a former Dwell senior editor and now contributor to the blog, unearthed the Field Guide to Typestaches by a San Francisco art director dubbed Tor--no doubt one of the city's designing hipsters. It may not be new but it certainly continues to deliver.

Jaime: Feral Houses

I can't stop looking at these images of 'feral houses' in Detroit, which I spotted on the blog Sweet Juniper. The dilapidated buildings, choked with lush greenery, are  just a handful of the city's thousands of abandoned buildings. As the blog puts it, these feral houses are "reverting to a wild state, as from domestication, a word derived itself from domesticus (the Latin for belonging to the domus, or house). Now these houses are feralis. They belong only to the dead."

Amanda: Color IQ Test

Some people have an acute sense for detecting subtle variations of color, while others have a harder time discerning the difference. This little game has circulated around the Interweb for quite some time, but it's a fun thing to try every once in a while. You drag and drop the varying shades, creating a progression of hues. Once you've arranged it to your liking, click to find out your "score". I got a 31.