Link About It: This Week’s Picks

America's secret society branding, original designs for Super Mario Bros on graph paper and more in this week's look around the web

1. Japan’s Ongoing Nuclear Clean-Up, Five Years Later Five years after a catastrophic earthquake and its resulting tsunami hit Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, workers continue to tirelessly clean up radiation. Ahead of the disaster’s 3.11 anniversary, National Geographic traveled to Fukushima to document remediation efforts. Where fertile farmlands once produced many of the regions crops, mountains of black sacks filled with contaminated soil …

The Original Sketches of Super Mario Bros

In a video shown at last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Super Mario Bros co-creators Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka revealed the way they designed the now legendary video game: using graph paper. Digging through old documents, the two show off hand-drawn designs for various characters, levels and interfaces. After finalizing sketches, the duo handed them off to programmers who translated them into code. Head …

MIN: The New Simplicity in Graphic Design

A survey of beautifully minimal branding, packaging and more in book form

Stuart Tolley’s (creative director and founder of graphic design studio Transmission) last book “Collector’s Edition” was all about unusual, mind-bending and sometimes over-the-top designs—he also created the striking Artist Cover Bomb series for the tome. His new book behaves as a kind of antidote: focusing on quieter and minimalist but equally fascinating creations. “MIN: The New Simplicity in Graphic Design” came to be because Tolley …