Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup there are many treats. If you’re a graphic designer,  I think you’ll love watching Print in Motion Winner: Medusa in Fragments.  For those who admire good craftsmanship, don’t miss  The Last Letterpress and Paper Store in Downtown Los Angeles. It’s a poignant video about what is being lost in our digital world.

• An Exceedingly Simple Guide to Keeping a Journal. “I have to confess: I’ve never been good at keeping a journal. Until this year…What has changed? I instituted a few “tricks” to keep the journaling simple, easy, and sustainable.”

• Memoir Writing Tips for Creating Story Structure and the Narrative Arc. “Memoir writers struggle with plot and structure for a very good reason: they think they know the plot. They assume that writing “what happened” is enough to create a memoir, and think that putting journal entries into the computer can be their memoir. A memoir is a story, created and constructed with skill and focus. It can be chronological or it might not be. Writing a memoir asks for you to dig deep into your biography and come up with scenes that bring a reader into your world fully and inspire them to keep reading–something about you and your story is relevant to their lives.Some tips for thinking about story and plot:”

• From Psalters to Downloads. “The MP3 is just the latest in a long line of ways of buying music. Tim de Lisle composes a short history …”

• Print in Motion Winner: Medusa in Fragments. [Video]“With so much stunning work being produced in the world of motion graphics these days, we wanted to invite the field’s artists to show off a bit. And so Print in Motion was born. We approached the competition with no real parameters other than to feature the most interesting and innovative work we could find, and to build a forum for designers eager to see—and be inspired by—what their peers are doing.We received many worthy entries, but eventually we whittled them down to 10 standouts, starting with this great piece titled Medusa in Fragments.”

• A Storytelling Lesson from South Park. [Video] “A while back I gave some tips for tightening stories. One of them was to watch out for “and then” syndrome. That is, if you find yourself saying “and then” a lot, what you have “may not actually be a story, but just a long sequence of events”…Then this weekend I came across this video of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone making the very same point. Only more eloquently. (And profanely, of course.)”

• Nelson Mandela’s life in a digital museum. “For a look at the future of digital museums, check out the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory’s new digital archive composed of thousands of scanned documents from the African leader’s life…But instead of scanning them and dumping them online for scholars to peruse, the center, with Google’s support, created a virtual museum experience — highlighting certain pieces from the archives, putting them in the context of Mandela’s life and then enabling a visitor to the site to go deeper if they’d like.”

• The Last Letterpress and Paper Store in Downtown Los Angeles. [Video] “ink&paper is a portrait of Aardvark Letterpress and McManus & Morgan Paper, neighboring businesses working together to survive in a digital era. The film was directed by Ben Proudfoot, a film student at U.S.C., and he describes the making of the film in a brief interview below.”

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