Linkroll
I've discovered quite a few websites during my many years of browsing the web. These are some of my favourites, from the interesting to the helpful to the strange.
Articles
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Longform
A site dedicated to good long form journalism, though they can miss. The collections are great to start with. Maybe also check out the slightly worse rival Longreads.
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Damn Interesting
Articles on all sorts of topics that are, as the label says, damn interesting.
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Atlas Obscura
An atlas of strange and unknown places, including articles on relevant topics.
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Codex 99
Personal stories regarding maps, design, machines, and more.
Cartography
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Alkebu-lan
What if the continent of Africa had never been colonised?
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Ian Mladjov
Intensely high-quality historical maps of a variety of states and places.
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Strange Maps
A variety of interesting historical and statistical maps. Unfortunately, it is hosted on the execrable "Big Think".
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David Rumsey Map Collection
Scans of antique and rare maps, hosted by Stanford University.
Design
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Logo Design Love
A site commenting on wide-ranging topics of identity design.
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Coverjunkie
Magazine covers both new and old, from the controversial to the well-known.
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Living Room Candidate
Not really design, but definitely marketing, which is close enough. Presidential ads from the US from 1952 to 2020.
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UserOnboard
Detailed analyses of onboarding flows of various apps, including reasoning behind GUI decisions.
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Art of the Title
Hundreds of movie title sequences, from classics to blockbusters; some have interviews with their designers.
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GUIdebook
Although it hasn't been updated since 2006, this GUI design collection is still worth a look.
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Web Design Museum
A chronicle of old trends in web design, as represented by websites from 1991 to 2006.
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Sci-Fi Corridor Archive
Kilometres of sci-fi corridors, from old to recent. Also see Science Fiction Interfaces, which chronicles UI design.
Fiction
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SCP Foundation Wiki
A huge writing project about an organisation that collects "anomalies" that contradict natural law. Many of the stories are written in a faux-scientific format.
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The Left/Right Game
The /r/NoSleep subreddit is usually quite bad, but this story's... actually pretty great. It's apparently been adapted to a podcast, but I haven't checked that out yet.
Heraldry
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Hubert Herald
Detailed knowledge of both historical and modern arms and emblems, in Dutch and English.
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A Guide to Software for Heraldry
My guide to software for heraldry - spanning vector, raster, and specially designed programs.
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A Glossary of Terms Used in Heraldry
One of the main heraldic dictionaries of note; has examples for many terms used, and a "synoptical table" of categories.
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Links to Online Rolls of Arms
A list of rolls of arms available online, hosted by the Viking Answer Lady.
- See more heraldic resources
Miscellaneous
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Legends of Localization
Fascinating stuff about the localisation of videogames (primarily from and to Japanese), including in-depth profiles on certain titles.
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Letters of Note
A collection of letters from authors, scientists, politicians, and celebrities, ranging from the jovial to the angry.
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Message to 12K
What message can we leave behind that will deter post-apocalyptic society from entering abandoned nuclear waste facilities?
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Wealth, shown to scale
Jeff Bezos owns a lot of money. To be fair, most is in assets, but it's all ultimately a way of holding value.
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DHMO.org
The profusion of dihydrogen monoxide is one of the most dangerous modern health crises, yet it remains shockingly underreported.
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Plane Crash Series
150+ profiles of airplane disasters (and near misses), with detailed original analyses of what went wrong and why.
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DreamBank
Over 20,000 accounts of people's dreams, in both English and German. Unfortunately, the interface is more of a nightmare.
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The Analog Antiquarian
The history of the (western) ancient wonders of the world. If you've into retro gaming, check out the sister site as well.
Personal
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appelsaus.neocities.org
Pixel drawings of coats of arms and a bunch of neat art.
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gatosalchicha.neocities.org
Takes advantage of the naturally tiling properties of hexagons to produce a really neat layout.
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marijn.uk
One of the primary inspirations behind my site - its prominent placement here is my way of credit. Like mine, it's filled with a mix of interesting stuff.
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novov.me
Oh wait. You've already on this site. Crap. I think it's pretty neat, but you might be inclined to disagree.
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rvklein.me
Nice-looking graphics and fonts in a unique style.
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Also check out...
Reference
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Wikipedia
One of the best sites on the internet - the famous yet infamous free encyclopedia. If you've good at following arcane rules and parsing wiki syntax, you should join - it always needs more editors.
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Wiktionary
A surprisingly accurate and comprehensive dictionary for any conceivable language. The Wikimedia Foundation also hosts a bunch of other great projects: Wikisource, Wikivoyage, Wikiquote, Wikimedia Commons...
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Internet Archive
See how thousands of sites looked at any point in history, and browse hundreds of public domain games, videos and books.
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Project Gutenberg
Another great site for public-domain books.
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The Cutting Room Floor
Collates all the unused, cut, and otherwise unplayable content in videogaming.
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TV Tropes
The classic time waster, amassing trivia and tropes aboout every show imaginable. I personally like to browse by category, like Dream Tropes or Character Flaw Index.
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Digital Transgender Archive
Trans people have been around a lot longer than most people think.
Technology
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Ars Technica
The one tech site that I still read on a regular basis. Well, that and CSS-Tricks, but that has a lot of crap.
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Folklore
Some amusing stories from then-employees of Apple during its early years, before Jobs left the company for the first time (not that I endorse the man's abusive behaviour).
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The Useless Web
A button that takes you to a random site with no reason for existing. Not everything needs to have a purpose.
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The History of the Web
A gargantuan work-in-progress telling of the whole story of the World Wide Web, including some fascinating side tales.
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Against a User Hostile Web
Like most things, the web is slowly being blanched into a corporatised imitation of its former self. Also see the article's follow-up, The Small Web.
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Motherf**king Website
Web design does not need to be some baroque experiment to see how much JavaScript you can use to display five lines of text.
- If you've of a more technical bent, I also have programming stuff
Typography
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Fonts In Use
Shows fonts applied to packaging, posters, and other graphic material - from the 1800s to the present day.
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Typewolf
Displays trending fonts as they are used in websites; also has font pairing guides, recommendations, type trends, and lookbooks. Has a great list of typographical resources as well.
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Typeset in the Future
Analyses the typographical choices behind popular films such as Alien and Blade Runner.
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Son of Typecasting
A fascinating blog series by type designer Mark Simonson which discusses usage of type in historical films.
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OHNO Type School
A series showing how each letter in the alphabet is crafted from a font designer's perspective.
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On snot and fonts
Computer scientist Luc Devroye's guide to the typographic world. I don't agree with everything, but it's very useful.
Visual Arts
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Moebius Gives 18 Tips to Artists
18 illustration tips by one of the comic industry greats, Jean Giraud (alias Moebius). There's also an annotated version by artist William Stout.
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Public Domain Review
Stories about art which, as the title suggests, is largely in the public domain.
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100 Photographs
TIME magazine's collection of the "100 most influential photographs ever taken".
Wikipedia
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Project A119
"The aim of the project was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon." As you might guess, conspiracy theorists have had a field day with it.
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Barnum effect
Why astrology seems so effective despite being not scientifically proven. Also known as the Forer effect.
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Black swan theory
Oh yeah, there were clues that it was going to happen all along. Totally.
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List of common misconceptions
You most likely believe one of these.
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Computer humour
Some of the stuff is funny, others not so much.
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Cognitive dissonance
When a person is able to hold conflicting beliefs simultaneously.
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Defence mechanism
No, my website isn't bad! It's really good actually! You've just paid off by Big Website! Also see List of cognitive biases.
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List of eponymous laws
Novov's law isn't a thing yet, but quite a few others are - there's literally one for every letter of the alphabet excepting Q.
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Lamest edit wars
Is it the Liancourt Rocks or Dokdo? Derry or Londonderry? A lot of editors had opinions, and some went to ridiculous lengths due to them.
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List of really stupid article ideas
Wow, yes, it is totally time to create an article about my pet cat. What? I think it's a great idea. Why not my left toenail as well?
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Malana, Himachal Pradesh
The oldest democracy in the world.
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Map–territory relation
The differences between a thing and its representation. Related to the concept of reification.
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Merism
High and low. Heaven and earth. Greater and lesser.
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Operation Vegetarian
A military plan to kill millions of Germans during WW2 by... feeding cows anthrax. Testing lead to contamination of a Scottish island.
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Unusual articles
Breast. Shaped. Hill.
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List of unusual deaths
Death comes for all of us. But not necessarily like it does for these people.