Elemental | Wired Science. Braille comes unbound from the book: how technology can stop a literary crisis | Society. On a lazy Sunday afternoon, Chancey Fleet reads the menu of Bombay Garden to four friends gathered at the back of the Chelsea-based Indian restaurant in New York City. Although she is reading aloud, there are no menus on the table. They aren't necessary, because Fleet is blind. Instead, she reads using a Braille display that sits unobtrusively on her lap and connects to her iPhone via Bluetooth, electronically converting the onscreen text into different combinations of pins. She reads by gently but firmly running her fingers over the pins with her left hand while navigating the phone with her right.
"The iPhone is the official phone of blindness," she told the Guardian. Until recently, technology, especially that which converts text to audio, has been hastening the demise of Braille, which educators say is a bad thing. Fleet's iPhone has a built-in screen reader called VoiceOver that works with all native applications. "Apple has set the bar very high," she said. Nihal Erkan. The genius behind dozens of typefaces - Imprint. This article originally appeared on Imprint. The Priester Match poster designed in 1906 by Lucian Bernhard is a watershed document of modern graphic design. Its composition is so stark and its colors so startling that it captures the viewer’s eye in an instant. Before Preister, persuasive simplicity was a rare thing in most advertising: posters especially tended to be wordy and ornate. No one had yet heard of its young creator, who, thanks to this poster, was to influence the genre of advertising know as the Sachplakat, or object poster.
Over the course of his career, which progressed from the turn of the century to the 1950s, Lucian Bernhard became a prolific designer not only of innovative posters but of trademarks, packaging, type, textiles, furniture and interior design. Bernhard’s formative years (born in 1883) coincided with the explosion of Art Nouveau and Jugendstil.
Bernhard capitalized on the Priester success. Bernhard also made inroads into German typography. Slate Magazine. The Christian Science Monitor. GeekDad. Boing Boing. Salon.com. Wonders of the medieval world | Slide Show. Medieval Europe is often portrayed as a dark time of pestilence, filth, violence, intolerance and ignorance — a disconnect between the splendor of the Roman empire and the cultural explosion of humanism during the Renaissance. The truth is far more complicated.
Geniuses like Fibonacci, Averroes, Aquinas and Dante didn’t exist in a vacuum. Universities that are still in existence today were founded during this time, Aristotle was revived, books came into their own, and the mathematical and scientific advances of the Muslim world filtered into art, design and architecture from the periphery of the continent. These 11 spots reveal a glimpse of the cultural and artistic splendor of the Middle Ages. You can find more medieval travel spots on Trazzler.
View the slide show. CNN.com International - Breaking, World, Business, Sports, Entertainment and Video News.