Live Layer Tennis

Final Final

Friday we concluded our post-season Season 4 Layer Tennis tournament with the Championship Match featuring Kelli Anderson and James White. Check it out and then let us know who you think won, and why. We'll announce the Champ next week. Layer Tennis happens thanks to our pals at Adobe Creative Cloud.

Get It Together With Field Notes

A Ledger, a Weekly Planner, and a Memo Book

Our 25th (!) seasonal limited-editon for Field Notes is The Ambition Edition and it is shipping now. There's lots of new stuff in this one and some cool, really old features too.

How Smart Is Your Family?

Who Owns the Fish?

Since 2004, we have been doing our part to encourage acrimony and hard feelings at family gatherings. Face it, you'll probably fight about something at your holiday get-together, it might as well be something important, like whether or not you're in the two percent of the world's population that Albert Einstein purportedly claimed could solve this puzzle. So... Who Owns The Fish?

Attention Portland

DDC Pop-Up Shop

Our pal and co-conspirator in Field Notes, Aaron James Draplin has orange-ified a space and filled it full with goods. Visit the DDC Pop Up Shop in downtown Portland, and load up on stuff for the holidays.

A Cautionary Tale

Heed This Well, Young Costumed Beggars

To Sweet Hereafter, a warning to trick-or-treaters in the style of Hilaire Belloc.

JC at Creative Mornings

The Problem With Doing a Project in
Your Spare Time is That There isn’t Any

Here's Jim's presentation from the inaugural edition of Chicago Creative Mornings. Thanks to Tina, Mig, Gravity Tank and everyone who showed up.

A Street in Logan Square

All Hallows’

It's often lost in the candy-coated, super-styled proceedings of the holiday, but Halloween is really all about departed souls and dealing with loss.

An occasional series Face Time

Classic Display Faces That Deserve Props

Chauncey H. Griffith's Bodoni Poster Black was developed for Mergenthaler in 1929 and features strong verticals and shallow descenders. It's regularly employed for era-specific "Appearing Nightly at the Copacabana" lobby-card-ish announcements and by and large it's serviceable, if not particularly interesting. But, just in case you find yourself in need of a two skinny chicks whispering near the coke mirror, late 70's, Los Angeles sort of vibe, set it tight in all-caps with almost no line spacing. Suggested pairing: Univers Light Extra Condensed.

This Plus This Equals That

The Lionel, the Richie and the Wardrobe

This is the sort of thing that Twitter is especially good for, but a washroom full of chalkboard walls works too. A while ago we hosted a quick contest called Booking Bands in which we asked people to combine the name of a book with the name of a band. We received thousands of entries, posted a ton of them and then randomly selected three and sent those people the book and a CD from the band that they mashed together. The process of coming up with funny or unexpected associations in this contest became a central part of a presentation that JC gave at SXSW.

Free Vehicle ID System

In Lieu of Depicting Your Family as Ugly Stick-People on Your Rear Windshield

We have word that two readers in New York City, who followed our guidelines for updating their vehicle identification systems, pulled up alongside each other at a traffic light and celebrated their common bond by honking and pointing. Excellent. More recently, John Heslop's vintage Toyota HiAce is looking badass in Wales. Our plot is beginning to take hold. Write for yours free today, but hurry, we only have tens of thousands left. BTW, who has a green Mini Cooper with the Fleet sticker in Chicago?

New on The Deck

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Those people who have assumed that we built The Deck by simply throwing together an ad network from our personal list of favorite bookmarks will find further confirmation of their suspicions in today's announcement. We're happy to say that McSweeney's Internet Tendency has joined us.

If you have a product or service that could benefit by being in front of millions of smart, curious, mostly good-looking people, give us a shout. We're booking Q3 and Q4 schedules now.

December Guest Kate Harding

Kate the Strong

Kate Harding is co-author of The Book of Jezebel and Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere, and author of the forthcoming Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture - and What We Can Do About It. Find her on Twitter at @kateharding. and regularly at Dame Magazine. And for the final month of 2014, she'll be right here, as our Guest Editor.

A list of all the brilliant people who have helped us by guest editing Fresh Signals can be found here.

Other recent features are listed on Page Two.

Fresh Signals

Matt took an old TV and turned it into a Seinfeld fish tank. ms-12.06

Trailer for Little Accidents. ms-12.06

"If you compose a shot for a wider 16:9 screen, then you are, by definition, failing to optimize the composition of the 4:3 image. Choose to serve one construct and at times you must impair the other." David Simon's thoughtful post about transferring The Wire to 16:9 HD from its original source. sd-12.05

Two Lands. dw-12.05

Ad Week's picks for the 10 best spots of 2014. Though they should have just kept it to the two by Dougal Wilson and skipped the other eight. The man can do no wrong. sd-12.05

But can it tell time? The 1925 Henry Graves Supercomplication watch by Patek Philippe, as described in this entirely-too-dramatic video from Sotheby's. sd-12.05

I did this years ago on a laptop while traveling on the Acela Express, but using GPS on a plane is even more fun (and quite a bit faster). sd-12.05

The restaurant of 10,000 bones. dw-12.05

Happy Friday. ms-12.05

Sadly, Kvas hasn't really caught on with American hipsters yet, but I'm predicting 2015 is going to be Kvas' year. bb-12.05

You can watch Orion's splashdown live here. ms-12.05

The Layer Tennis Championship Match is live today at 1pm CST, featuring Kelli Anderson and James White. John Gruber's Match Preview is live now, Smells Like Vectory. LYT happens because of our pals at Adobe Creative Cloud. jc-12.05

And here's the trifecta... "Fortunately, however, tonight is Make Your Own Goddam Dinner Night, a recently instituted family ritual I shared with you in last week's column." Easy Cocktails from the Cursing Mommy, by Ian Frazier. jc-12.05

And another... "I quickly met my second wife, a brilliant graduate student who liked to brag that she had never met a man who could drink her under the table. Then she met me." Liquor and Lit, by Charles Deemer. jc-12.05

A classic FDL and one of our favorite pieces by Roger Ebert, A Bar on North Avenue. "O'Rourke's was the ultimate singles bar, it was said: You went there with a date, and came home alone." jc-12.05

"The idea for this project occurred while putting a used Scotch glass into the dishwasher. I noted a film on the bottom of a glass and when I inspected closer, I noted these fine, lacey lines filling the bottom. What I found through some experimentation is that these patterns and images that you see can be created with the small amount of Single-Malt Scotch left in a glass after most of it has been consumed." ms-12.05

The man who makes me swoon talks to Charlie Rose. *sigh* ms-12.05

An Illustrated History of Mac OS X from Fabricio Rosa Marques. Dig the illustrations. jc-12.05

Orion, liftoff at dawn. Beautiful. jc-12.05

"We are badly in need of a mad computer expert..." jc-12.05

Nice poster for the new 007, Spectre. jc-12.05

"Oh, you got homework to do too? Hey, at the risk of sounding irresponsible, just forget it. Daylight is burning, you can do your homework later." Go Outside, Get Some Fresh Air, and Play With the Monolith, by David Guzman. jc-12.05

Any second now... jc-12.05

Milky Way Over Moon Valley. ms-12.05

If it's good enough for the Kaiser, it's good enough for me! Products branded with Kaiser Franz Josef's face. sd-12.04

Pantone has picked their Color of the Year for 2015. ms-12.04

Matt's email is a monster. jc-12.04

Scot preps his Target team members for Black Friday most valiantly. ms-12.04

A brief history of web design for designers, by Sandijs Ruluks. jc-12.04

Two words. "Cotton Balls." mcj-12.04

So you know, why HFR (high frame rate) films don't seem film-ish. I'm looking at you Bilbo. jc-12.04

Family Flight, a promo film by Airbus featuring five A350-900s. jc-12.04

Plato and the Lunar Alps. ms-12.04

Heads up smarty-pants, The Mystery League is open for business. jc-12.03

Yay! Matthew's 2014 edition of The Good Gift Games is up at TMN today. jc-12.03

Charts for People Obsessed with Serial. ms-12.03

Two words. Space Cards! jc-12.03

Vintage photos from the Chicago Tribune's subterranean vault. jc-12.03

Ben Saunders's talk from March is up at TED, To the South Pole and Back — the Hardest 105 Days of My Life. Our Field Notes Brand helped to sponsor Ben's trek and he was the inspiration for our Expedition Edition, which is pretty tough, but definitely not as tough as Ben and Tarka. jc-12.02

And to bring it all home: Eddie Holland's "Leaving Here" (featuring James Jamerson on bass) was Mötöhead's first single. bb-12.02

Page Two contains the previous 40 Fresh Signals, recent features, a key to the icons and the categorical archives.

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