Remarkable satirical maps from the First World War; the Raemaekers is especially brilliant.

"However I am just as impressed but the extent in which Scarry’s work has in fact not dated very much at all. While the book covers an almost bafflingly broad range of occupations and includes sections on the extraction and transformation of raw materials, there is one notable omission: large-scale manufacturing. And without industry, from a Western perspective the book seems in fact almost presciently current. Some of the jobs the author describes have evolved, very few of them have all but disappeared (you can’t easily bump into a blacksmith, much less one who sells tractors); the texture of our cities has changed and those little shops have given way to larger chain stores; but by and large we still do the things that occupy Scarry’s anthropomorphic menagerie: we fix the sewers and serve the meals and cut down the trees and drive the trucks and cultivate the land and so forth. It’s almost as if Scarry made a conscious effort to draw only the jobs that could not be outsourced overseas, and had thus future-proofed the book for his domestic audience." I read this when I was very small, and loved it; fond memories, and sharp analysis

"The closer has confounded hitters with mostly one pitch: his signature cutter." Lovely motion infographics - informative, and powerfully confirming the narration.

"Smells like Dwarf Fortress". An illustrated account of a the nightmares of one particular fortress of dwarfs. Pretty, funny, and I still can't quite get my head around that game.

"Philip K. Dick fans from around the world have contributed to this scanned collection of over 650 PKD book covers." Some of these are awesome, from the crazy french covers for VALIS to the German editions of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - retitled as "LSD-Astronauten".

"I started with Valentina Tereshkova in January 2009 thinking if I drew one every week I'd finish the series around the end of the year. See how well that worked out." I like Phil Bond's art already, but this set of portraits of female astronauts is just lovely.

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Eggleston. So much care and attention in the work and the way he describes it; so many lovely illustrations. The "color scripts" alone are great, but really, it's all worth your time.

"In the game you are rewarded for keeping your tracks together while navigating through the surreal world of an "architectural" diagram. The camera moves in continuous motion and the object is to finish the course with as many points as possible." Watch the trailer; it's astoundingly pretty. Can't wait for this one!

Someone will come.

Map of Shanghai, as Sim-City style rendered projection; is this useful? Or is this just a style of imagery computer users are used to?

David Hellman releases hi-res assets of all the Braid artwork. It is beautiful, and am thinking about how best to use some of it on my desktop.

Ocean Quigley has a blog, and whilst all the stuff on Spore and Sim City 4 is super-nice, what I really like are his paintings and sketches, which are just lovely.

"We are a loose collection of mostly London-based comic-artists, illustrators and writers, who have grown up listening to the Magnetic Fields and got together over a mutual love of the songs. One day, on Twitter, a couple of us decided that illustrating - or writing a comic - or a short story - inspired by all 69 songs was a worthwhile and exciting pursuit, so here we are!" Let's see how this will turn out.

A page full of prettiness, and it fills itself up as you go. Art, graphic design, sci-fi book covers; it's all here.

Olly Moss has now moved from movies to videogames, pastiching classic Penguin covers; the Goldeneye one is superb.

"We’ve generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It’s a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that we’re delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008. To give you an example, we thought we’d show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who’s had a very busy 2008 - President Elect Barack Obama." This is super-awesome. Can't wait for mine, no matter how small it is.

"A modern tale about caring, mending and letting-go, drawn with letters and punctuation marks." Oh! This is just beautiful - a short story about a girl, and a snail, composed entirely out of type.

"My Favorite Book Covers of 2008" Some I'd seen before; some I'd not. Some very beautiful things here.

Beautiful.

Just like magic. Lovely.

"Pretty sure I'm not the first person in the universe to come up with this idea, but I've yet to see another connect-the-dots tattoo." Beautiful.

What a wonderful piece of a UI; two projections of a tunnel-boring machine, synchronized with one another, to help you visualise it in 3D. Lovely - not what you'd expect from a fairly niche company's site at all.

That they are. Got to love the type on these.

4chan /b/ thread on the American economic deficit, which explains things quite well, and has stick-man-anon illustrations to boot.

"[the film] presents the simple joy of photography and, without hyperbolizing or talking down to its audience, gives a comprehensive explanation of how the camera works." Lovely film explaining the way the SX-70 works, from the Eames brothers; the explanation of how the film itself works is beautiful.

In 2000, a group of seventh-graders were asked to draw what they thought scientists looked like and describe their pictures. Then, after visting Fermilab, they were asked to repeat the exercise. Some of the quotations are genuinely excellent, cf "Some people think that (scientists) are just some genius nerds in white coats, but they are actually people who are trying to live up to their dreams and learn more." Aren't we all?

"...the compass... measures a whopping 1.21km in diameter. according to wikipedia, ‘it is inclined to magnetic north (around 13 degrees east of true north) and is used by pilots for calibrating heading indicators’." Blimey. That's big.

Remarkable, oscar-winning short; real interviews, and some incredible CGI character design. At the heart of it: a very sad story. Beautiful soundtrack, too.

Pokemon illustrated next to humanised representations of themselves. Cute, silly.

Users' artwork from Colors! for the DS. Really quite impressive, some of this.

"Mommy, why is there a Server in the House?" A lovely book to explain the "stay-at-home server" to kids, snapped by the gang at Gizmodo. Well, it made me laugh

People draw maps and more from memory. The results are interesting to say the least, and, at times, beautiful.

An even better explanation of SQL joins via Venn Diagrams. Already saved some bacon today, I can tell you.

An animation painted on a many walls, and interacting with the space around it. Hypnotic, grotesque, beautiful.

"In 1947 Life Magazine asked some famous comic strip artists to to draw their famous characters while wearing a blindfold." The results are, in equal parts, strange and wonderful.

Timo Arnall catalogues the various uses of the dashed line as visual metaphor.