Journal

It might sound self-indulgent, but “me time” may be more critical to your success than you think.

Taking some “me time” may sound like a luxury reserved for self-indulgent celebrities. In today’s hyperbusy world, demands of work and family often supersede spending time doing the things you actually enjoy doing. Perhaps you even feel guilty about taking some time out for yourself, but taking time to rest and recharge are as critical to your success as responding to an urgent email from your boss.

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Get ready: Your emails are about to come with a lot more bells and whistles.

Like many tech-conference organizers, the people behind The Email Design Conference made sure to email attendees well ahead of time with the Twitter hashtag for the event.

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Sometimes envisioning a life without cars is just as simple as doing it.

The narrow street in front of Steven Clays’s house in Ghent, Belgium, is usually lined with parked cars and full of traffic. But for most of this summer, it turned into a makeshift park.

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Every ring holds as much smog as 1,000 cubic meters of city air.

On a trip to Beijing three years ago, artist Daan Roosegaarde looked at a sample of the city’s notorious air pollution and got inspired. The tiny black particles were mostly carbon; carbon, at high pressure, turns into diamonds. Why not suck up the city’s smog, he thought, and turn it into jewelry?

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We talk to Matthias C. Hühne about his new book Airline Visual Identity: 1945-1975 and why airline branding used to be so much better than it is today.

When Continental announced its sudden merger with United Airlines back in 2010, they unveiled the very vanilla visual identity that’s still in use today. The uninspired new logo—which simply stuck the United Airlines name onto Continental’s blue “whiffle ball” logo—replaced the iconic “tulip” logo designed by legend Saul Bass in 1973. It also joined the ranks of countless other airline identities that are playing it safe with competent but bland visual identities—awfully similar as a result.

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How do designers go glamping? With a hand-built sauna and pizza oven, naturally.

Armed with a few supplies, two weeks time, and a wealth of ideas, 18 designers descended on the Swedish island of Gotland and built their dream campsite. Hailing from all across Europe and practicing an array of disciplines—from product design to biology and mathematics—the group riffed on the landscape and crafted tents, hand-dyed sails, a hot tub and more all in the spirit of collaboration. Designers on Holiday is the ultimate—albeit all-too-twee—rustic summer getaway.

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Upgrading it is slow and expensive work, but the new systems will eventually allow more trains to run on the same track.

The New York subway is old. You see the signs every time you ride it. The paint on the cast iron pillars is layered like the rings of a tree trunk, and if you removed the ads from the walls, the stations would fool any time-traveler from the 1950s into thinking they were still in their own time.

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What happened this week? Here’s our quiz for September 4, 2015.

Did you follow the news this week? Research says that one of the best ways to solidify new information is to be tested on it. Here’s a chance to bolster your knowledge of current events—and earn a special emoji badge.

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A Dutch engineering firm has developed a clever way to distribute water in developing countries while collecting revenue for the community.

When Dutch engineering firm Grundfos started researching the best ways to distribute water in Nairobi, Kenya, they found that access to clean water wasn’t the problem. In most communities, people could go to central spigots and pay a fee for access to groundwater that’s both drinkable and readily available.

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An open letter asks Twitter to restore API access to a service that automatically saved politician’s deleted tweets.

Last month, Twitter revoked access to its API from Politwoops, a network of sites that automatically archived the deleted tweets of politicians.

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