Three Tumblrs Worth Following Right Now
A selection of blogs flying by our dashboards.
Phone Arts
Phones are hard enough to type on, let alone practice graphic design. Phone Arts, a Tumblr started by Guillaume Hugon and Daniel Littlewood, celebrates mobile-first artists who paint on small screens. Heavily saturated art bombs, which look like colored sand bottles after being tossed into volcanos, make up the majority of Phone Arts contributions. It's essentially finger painting, re-imagined and documented on a modern medium with ever-growing aesthetic possibilities. The assumption that a phone is strictly a tool for consuming and not creating is being put to the test. SA
Peak Blackness
Rembert Browne, a friend and writer for ESPN's Grantland, makes Tumblrs for fun. As in, he registers absurd URLs strictly for the sake of a joke and rarely updates them again. Past entries include ihateproquest.tumblr.com, isbeyoncehungarian.tumblr.com and notwatchingscandal.tumblr.com. But Peak Blackness is one of the few that stuck: he assembled an all-star team of writers and editors (full disclosure: myself included) to share rare photos of black icons past and present in all their glamour: Halle Berry and David Justice in vintage Malcolm X gear, Al Sharpton and James Brown doing the stanky-leg, Stevie Wonder fake-punching Muhammed Ali. It's refreshing in its jubilance and variety—candid snaps of black celebrity at leisure, spanning industries and decades. I crack up and tear up at each reblog. MT
National Geographic Found
My grandparents, like many people's, kept more National Geographics around than they knew what to do with. I remember lugging a decades-old cardboard box down to the basement once so they could rip out the pages and use them to start the furnace. It would've taken a century to burn through their massive stash, though, and I was glad. While I was never predisposed to caring about the mating habits of catfish or how so-and-so found such fossil, I could sure hang with the photos. These days, I'm exceedingly happy to be able to revisit the publication's 126-year-old photo archives with National Geographic Found, a hand-picked daily dive into rare and unpublished pics. It's a fresh look at the first magazine I loved, without having to risk throwing out my back in the process. DC