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Something for the Weekend

You Can’t Keep a Good Creator Down — An interesting piece by Noelene Clark on women in comics for the LA Times ‘Hero Complex’ blog:

a broader look at the world of comics and the women who work there reveals the industry is far more gender-balanced than the superhero fare suggests. Though women still make up a minority of creative talent at Marvel and DC, their influence is growing. And in comics at large, women are on even footing and gaining ground… the frequently spotlighted superhero genre is just a tide pool in an ocean of work — a tide pool that has somehow managed to delay the sea change undergone by the rest of the industry.

See also: Why DC and Marvel Will Never Truly Target Female Readers by Heidi Macdonald, for Comics Beat, and author Belinda Jack on the history of women readers at The Browser.

And finally…

A brief history of Olympic pictograms, at The Smithsonian design blog:

In 1972, a German designer named Otl Aicher refined Olympic pictograms into the concise, clean system that most people think of today as the symbols of the games… Slightly modified versions (and in some cases exact replicas) of the Aicher designs were used at subsequent Olympics as the standard of universal visual language, though in the early 1990s, some designers began moving away from the simplified standard, adding embellishments that referenced the culture of the city where the games were taking place.

You can read about the pictograms for London 2012 (about which, I will say nothing) at The Creative Review, and here’s a great short history of Olympic pictograms by Steven Heller for the New York Times: