Public Domain Image Archive

Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.

The Unraveling of Space-Time | Quanta Magazine

This special in-depth edition of Quanta is fascinating and very nicely put together.

Coming home | A Working Library

While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.

Mandy’s writing positively soars and sings in this beautiful piece!

First Impressions of the Pixel 9 Pro | Whatever

At this point, it really does seem like “AI” is “bullshit you don’t need or is done better in other ways, but we’ve just spent literally billions on this so we really need you to use it, even though it’s nowhere as good as what we were already doing,” and everything else is just unsexy functionality that makes what you do marginally easier or better. I’m sorry we live in a world where enshittification is being marketed as The Hot And Sexy Thing, but just because we’re in that world, doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

Frostapalooza in photos and videos | Brad Frost

These are great!!!

Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More | Openverse

A library of CC-licensed photos.

Next time you’re tempted to use a generative “AI” tool to make an image for a slide deck, use this instead.

Write Alt Text Like You’re Talking To A Friend – Cloud Four

This is good advice:

Write alternative text as if you’re describing the image to a friend.

Standing still - a performance tinker | Trys Mudford

What Trys describes here mirrors my experience too—it really is worth occasionally taking a little time to catch the low-hanging fruit of your site’s web performance (and accessibility):

I’ve shaved nearly half a megabyte off the page size and improved the accessibility along the way. Not bad for an evening of tinkering.

Muscular imagination

Robin Sloan on The Culture:

The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently artic­u­late and defend their values. (Their enthu­siasm for their own politics is consid­ered annoying by most other civilizations.)

Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.

I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.

Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.

AI Art is The New Stock Image

While some executives in Davos may get excited about its infinite possibilities this week, to a younger consumer AI Art is already ‘a bit cringe’.

An Image Dialog Web Component

Here’s an HTML web component that uses progressive enhancement for a very common use case: clicking a thumbnail image to view the full size image in an overlay. Just be sure to update the code to include an alt attribute before using this in production!

Sizes=”auto” pretty much requires width and height attributes — ericportis.com

Huh! I did not know this. Good to know!

Intent to Ship: Auto Sizes for Lazy Loaded Images with Srcset

Remember when I wrote about sizes="auto"? Well, it’s coming to Chrome! Hallelujah!

CSS { In Real Life } | Stop Using AI-Generated Images

I have yet to meet anyone who wants to hang AI art on their walls (although I fully expect to see it in hotel chains).

border:none 2023 – florian.photo

I love these black and white photos from the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg!

Whole Earth Index

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.

river

This is quite mesmerising—click on an image that takes your fancy; see it surrounded by related images; repeat.

35mm scans — writer/editor/reporter

Clicking through these cold war slides gives an uncomfortable mixture of nostalgic appreciation for the retro aesthetic combined with serious heebie-jeebies for the content.

The slides appear to be 1970s/1980s informational or training images from the United States Air Force, NORAD, Navy, and beyond.

UX London 2023 | Flickr

These pictures really capture the vibe of this year’s lovely UX London event.

When I lost my job, I learned to code. Now AI doom mongers are trying to scare me all over again | Tristan Cross | The Guardian

Ingesting every piece of art ever into a machine which lovelessly boils them down to some approximated median result isn’t artistic expression. It may be a neat parlour trick, a fun novelty, but an AI is only able to produce semi-convincing knock-offs of our creations precisely because real, actual people once had the thought, skill and will to create them.