A grid of the cover of a 1978 print of something called Home Freezing of Fruits and Vegetables by the USDA - a round fruit is seen in sequence slowly turning into a snowflake

Review: Home Freezing of Fruits and Vegetables by the USDA Science and Education Administration, 1978

One of our unpaid interns found this pamphlet from 1978 underneath the office kitchen fridge while cleaning the drip pan after they spilled one of those paper trays of to-go coffees all over the floor. In exchange for class credit and office redemption we had them sterilize and photograph it for our consumer report and […]

A darkened and gray illustration of the lobby of the Department library with a colorful but scrawny holiday tree illuminated on the desk

Holiday Hours

The Department of Information is closed for winter break. All offices, including the Main Campus, the taco truck in the parking lot, the Xerox Climate Lab, and the library are closed to officers, staff, and visitors until January 1st, 2025. Thank you.

Voting is Beautiful! in red vintage serif font on cream colored paper

A Visual Exploration of Old Voting Advocacy Posters and Paraphernalia from the Smithsonian Archives

We told our unpaid interns that they would not be permitted to take off work on Election Day unless they created a civic-minded, positive, art-oriented post by the end of the week. This is what they came up with. Please take a look at some of the more visually interesting voting advocacy or voting advocacy-adjacent […]

A grid of 7 vintage Smokey Bear posters

Some Beautiful Old Smokey Bear Fire Prevention Propaganda Posters

It’s campfire season here at the Department, and whether you’re burning barrels full of confidential documents or old office furniture full of asbestos, it’s important to practice fire safety. We’ve enlisted our newly minted Information Ambassador, Pokey the Pigeon, to dig through the U.S. Forest Service Smokey Bear Collection at the USDA National Agricultural Library […]

The Psychedelic Nature of 1970s NASA Landsat 1 Florida Satellite Images

Captured by Landsat 1, the first satellite of the US’s Landsat program, in the early 1970s at a scale of 1:500,000 (1 cm equals 5 km), these satellite images of Florida were superimposed with a Mercator grid, printed onto oversized poster panels, and then—likely decades later—scanned and digitized in ultra high-resolution. The resulting images, showing […]

The Best TV Test Cards and Patterns of the 20th Century

Television test cards were elaborate, strange patterns and graphics used for visual calibration or for filling gaps and dead air in the early days of T.V. broadcasting. Often appearing for hours overnight when stations would “sign off”, they would have entered the cultural imagination as hypnotic oddities—likely untrusted and alien—but would come to fill a nostalgic void made up of colorful, wild, and geometric glowing shapes. What weird, luminous, and mesmerizing patterns do we use today to fill up our empty spaces?