THOUGHTS & OBSERVATIONS
Welcome to Shanfan Huang’s Lab
🌱🍁🍀🍄🟫🌵🐞🐛🦋🌻🌿
Welcome to Shanfan Huang’s Lab 🌱🍁🍀🍄🟫🌵🐞🐛🦋🌻🌿
The Wildflower Seed Farm of New York
What do daffodils, wildflower seeds, and a two-hour bus ride to Staten Island have in common? A surprising journey into New York City’s native plant movement. Join me on a visit to PECaN, the city’s native seed farm, and learn why restoring ecological resilience starts right beneath our feet—in the soil, in the sidewalk tree wells, and in the quiet work of local pollinators.
The Soil
The story follows a spontaneous gardening effort that, over 24 hours, intersects with conversations about compost, safety, generosity, and what it means to quietly care for overlooked corners of the city.
Great Finds at East Village Zine Fair
The fourth annual East Village Zine Fair in New York took up the street of St Marks Pl! Let’s see what interesting zines and pamphlets and more importantly, noticeable artists I found!
Botany Books
Who doesn’t like a beautiful rendering of the anatomy of plants?? I collect a lot of botany books just to admire their pictures. Botany books are a good example of reference book design. Today let’s take a closer look at a few of these books to learn what it takes to compose a reference book.
Visual Thinking: A Look into How We Process Information
There is information coming at us in different sensory forms. There is our five senses and their quirks in receiving and processing information. In this article, we’ll focus on visual information, examine different levels of abstraction of visual information, and how different people could sense and process the information differently.
Books and the People Who Make Them
A book that looks like a children’s book with the content that’s completely suitable for adult readers, this book celebrates all the people behind the bookmaking process. From the idea conceived in an author’s mind to the book held in a reader’s hand, this book is visually vibrant and verbally succinct. Informative, lighthearted, and educational.
Artists’ Book as Expanded Literacy: What We Learned from Asemic Writing
If the “normal” books are on a mission to disseminate information as efficiently as possible, then we can say the artists’ books are here to push the boundary of human cognition. What can commercially produced and circulated books learn from artist’ books?
The Anatomical Chart of Clutter
Architectural drawing can not be used directly as illustrations? Making of an informative book? Find out why and how in this book design review! Bonus: what to know about translation and localization!