Welcome to the Monday Memo — your pop culture snapshot from Manifesto.
Hey, friends. Mondays can be tough. Here are 7 things to make November 7, 2022 a bit better.
1. Artist of the Week: Sarah Capon Sarah Capon is an artist, illustrator and animator based in Brisbane, AU. While she works with a number of mediums, her most popular work features intricately layered paper designs (see above). Bright, bold, colorful and delicate, each time you look at one of her creations you discover a new detail that enhances the story within.
2. What we're listening to: Funny Cuz It's True with Elyse Meyers Elyse Meyers first went viral on TikTok after telling the story of how she got stuck buying 100 tacos on a first date. Since then, she gained millions of beloved followers with her unique mixture of humor and heart. Each week on her podcast Funny Cuz It’s True, she sits down with her favorite creators, friends and comedians to find the stories that have stuck with them and changed their lives in big and small ways.
3. What we're watching: Enola Holmes 2 - Netflix Adventure strikes again! Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, and Helena Bonham Carter return in Enola Holmes 2 — where a mystery of historic proportions takes 2 Holmes to handle! If you haven't see the first film on Netflix, it's an absolute delight as well!
4. Trend & Advertising Highlight: Well Designed Government Documents!!??!?! Government documents around the world have long begrudged the design community for their poor layout and dated elements. However, the Swiss government just released a new passport that embodies both form and function. The passport cover maintains the iconic, bold red of the Swiss flag but minimizes the white cross to become a much more balanced element. The cover also featured a textured map rendering of the Swiss Alps, highlighting clean, dynamic design principles. While the inside pages are a little more standard for passport pages, many of them draw inspiration from iconic Swiss geography and architecture. While in the past design has rightfully so been pushed to the bottom of the priority list behind security and authenticity factors, we are so excited to see the Swiss government displaying how clean design and security factors can live together in harmony. We hope other governments take notice and apply the same principles to their passports.
5. Cognitive Bias of the Week: Nostalgia Effect Feelings of nostalgia, or sentimentality for days gone by, lead us to place increased value on social connectedness and less value on saving money. Nostalgia’s influence over our willingness to spend money is referred to as the nostalgia effect. For example, say you are saving up money to buy a new car. You are doing your best to only spend money on essentials as you work towards your goal. Then, when you are watching your favorite show, a commercial for Disney World appears. Dang, you think, I remember when I was younger and my family went to Disney and it was some of the most treasured childhood memories before my parents got divorced. Suddenly, saving for the car is no longer important. Now, you must go to Disney with your siblings. In this case, the nostalgia you experienced while watching the commercial depicting a family vacation made you more willing to spend money in the name of social connectedness, despite the fact that you had been being very mindful of your spending. Well, we aren't here to tell you how to spend money, and we certainly encourage you to create memories with loved ones, but it is important to note how influential this can be as an advertising tactic for impulse buying. You probably need the new car more and it will be a better investment in the longterm, but these intense emotions convince us that we need to instead spend it on a vacation. The best way to avoid this bias is to simply take a step back and make sure you are making the best financial decision for you.
A day of vindication for any of us who drew a smiley face on the sun as a child. A Nasa satellite captured an image of what appeared to be a happy face pattern on the sun last week, prompting the US space agency to say the sun was seen “smiling” .
6. Good News of the Week:
For the first time in history, New Zealand's parliament has an equal number of women and men (RNZ)
Addressing both e-waste and power outages, a Nigerian company is recycling old laptop batteries into solar lanterns (Reuters)
Ray of joy: Nasa captures image of the sun ‘smiling’ (The Guardian)
Decades of protections and restoration projects reverse the collapse of a critical lake and ecosystem in California (Inside Climate News)
7. Bonus: Tweet of the Week We all could use a pep talk from time to time. Lucky for us, the kindergarteners at West Side Elementary in Healdsburg, Calif., are here to help!