Liquid Treat

Once up on a time, travel involved more than clutching bar-coded documents and wheeling one's black case through identical airport concourses. Return to the golden age in the gilt-edged pages of World Tour, out next month from Abrams. Chilean-born, Paris-based travel writer Francisca Matteoli draws upon the vintage hotel labels collected by trunkmaker and traveler Gaston-Louis Vuitton (whose grandfather founded the leathergoods juggernaut) as fodder for a 21-city global adventure illustrated by hundreds of illustrations, photos, vintage postcards and more than 900 labels that live on as graphic souvenirs of getaways from Athens to Zermatt.

One part spaghetti western, one part blaxploitation, and a smidge of...German mythology class? Those are just a few slices of the Django Unchained pie chart created by Jesse David Fox and Aaron Pedersen for New York magazine's pop-culture blog. The duo, whose twisted infographics ape the approach of artist Andrew Kuo, explore the style and genre components of all nine Best Picture nominees just in time for Oscar night. "How much of Argo is a mid-budget adult thriller versus how much of it is Mrs. Doubtfire?" wondered Fox and Pedersen. "Similarly, how much is Lincoln a Method acting seminar and how much is it that supercut of goats yelling like people?" We suggest printing out and laminating the pie charts to make a set of crowd-pleasing Oscar party coasters.

Finally, a way to swiftly and safely dump all of the stuff you've hoarded away with the best (albeit vague) recycling intentions! Load up everything from spent printer cartridges and mystery cables to dead cell phones and fried laptops into a Technotrash Can, then send the collection box back to GreenDisk. The Sammamish, Washington-based company will responsibly recycle all of your e-waste and take care to securely dispose of any private information. Want proof? Upon making your computer-related junk disappear, they'll send you a certificate of destruction supported by an audit trail report.

What do you get when you combine graphic design, the tarot, numerology and Gestalt psychology? Intùiti, a new approach to creativity that takes the form of a deck of 78 illustrated cards, each matched with its own inspiraional "tale" in an accompanying booklet. "There are no rules," says Milan-based writer, designer, and artist Matteo di Pascale, who is seeking backers for the project via Kickstarter through March 12. "It's a tool for creative thinking based on visual and imaginary associations, so you just have to shuffle the deck, pick a card and 'let it speak.'"

Spread the lettering love to design amateurs with Type Fun01, a quick and pretty online tutorial that introduces typography concepts, jargon, tips and techniques to the font-curious. "Type Fun01 was created to show the bare bone basics of typography in an intuitive and easy-to-digest way," says creator Will Ryan, a graphic design major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From a quick history the site moves on to a rundown of styles (know your slab serif!) and character anatomy before offering examples and a list of resources for further study.

Polaroid was the Apple of its day, promising "instant photography at the push of a button." In the wake of its bankruptcy and the sale of its brand to licensers, Christopher Bonanos brings into focus the company’s storied history -- and recent demise -- in Instant: The Story of Polaroid, recently published by the Princeton Architectural Press. Believe it or not, this is the first book-length history of Polaroid, which grew from garage-startup mode (in 1937) to a billion-dollar business and along the way attracted artist-fans such as Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, and Outkast, whose lyrical enticement to "shake it like a Polaroid picture" lives on as a kind of cultural snapshot.