Jeremiah, from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. HB pencil.

I rather detest the quality of the iPhone camera.

Courtesy of the Music Animation Machine. Best watched in full screen. A few observations:

1. I can’t even begin to decipher musical notation.

This animation told me a lot more about the structure of the first movement of the Fifth in real time than I think I would have learned in hours poring over the sheet music, or even through listening again and again to the symphony itself.

Not everything – I don’t know how you could graphically represent time signature, for example. But enough.

2. If this animation was converted into an augmented reality iPhone app, for use by concertgoers during performances – if you could understand what was going on in the latest avant-garde work in the moment, or you could overlay the interpretations that had been made of one symphony by different orchestras – well, that would be really cool.

3. It looks a bit like the Arecibo message, and even a bit reminiscent of the Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is pleasing.

And very often also the best graphic design.

Foreign Policy magazine has a stunner of a slideshow up of images from David King’s Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union.

This particular propaganda poster exhorts workers in the Azeri Soviet Socialist Republic to build airships for the Soviet state.

The slideshow includes: war photography from the Russian Civil War; an infographic of the first Five Year Plan; a colour photo of Stalin lying in state – and a haunting prison mugshot of Zinoviev before his show trial during the Great Purge.

Because, after all, only the best graphic design will do if you are aiming to hide the ugliest truth.

PS

Given that the poster was made in 1931, I’m surprised at the iconographic prominence of Lenin over Stalin: Lenin had died in 1924, and by 1931 Stalin had long since outmanoeuvred his main opponents for the Soviet leadership.

Was Stalin’s position still too vulnerable to roll out the infamous personality cult of his later years in power? Were Soviet national minorities like the Azeris still too wary of Stalin’s takeover? Or maybe Azeri graphic designers just hadn’t got the memo from Moscow yet.

The lovely Maira Kalman on discovery, citizenship, and migration in the story of American democracy.

One million people became citizens of the United States last year, compared to 660 000 in 2007; 2.4 million in total between 2006 and 2008.

I think that, buried in the immigration statistics compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, there must be enough individual stories of nightmares escaped and American dreams won (or lost) to keep a thousand Joseph O’Neills busy for the next thousand years.

Which puts this news in world-historical perspective.