What started as a project to create a few letters for an album cover morphed into an entire alphabet derived from the collective contributions of this Swedish punk band.

Bassist Anton Bolin was working on the new record’s graphic design and “wanted to do something that suits the dirty hardcore punk we play. So I started to pee a logo and when it was done, I realized that it would be a refreshing typeface for the world to see.”

The half-year process involved urinating on bed sheets, photographing them and then turning them into vector formats using digital software. Rapid dehydration was a challenge — in each attempt, a letter had to be made in a matter of seconds if at all.

A lot of testing was involved in the selection and stretching of sheet material as well to achieve the desired effect. To save anyone interested in replicating the process some time and trouble, the band’s album also includes a quick-and-dirty DIY tutorial on making urine-based type.

“It was so limiting to have to adapt to your bladder,” said Bolin. “On a good day you had three maybe four attempts to create a letter.” The results, though, were worth the wait. The resulting typeface looks dynamic and organic, much like the streams of urine that went into its creation. Pissjar Sans (“a typeface made of piss”) is also available for free from the band’s website.

Some great institutions are becoming even greater in the digital age — places like museums continue to scan high-quality paintings and photographs for distribution and agencies like NASA put vintage pictures and video footage online for everyone to access.

Joining the cool kids’ club, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) has taken its Art of the Poster collection from the Golden Age of graphic design (late 1800s through the early 1900s) and put it up on the web for anyone to share.

“Featuring over 200 printed works, Art of the Poster 1880-1918 presents a look at lithography’s rise in popularity during La Belle Époque,” reports MyModernMet. “It was during this time that artists like Alphonse Mucha, Jules Chéret, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec popularized the art form, which gained public prominence thanks to new methods of production.”

In the late nineteenth century, lithographers began to use mass-produced zinc plates rather than stones in their printing process. This innovation allowed them to prepare multiple plates, each with a different color ink, and to print these with close registration on the same sheet of paper. Posters in a range of colors and variety of sizes could now be produced quickly, at modest cost.

At the time, many of these masterpieces were essentially commercial in nature, designed to promote products, stores and restaurants. Today, they have made their way into the archives of art history, helping to bridge the gap between popular culture and the closed-door art world of museum exhibits.

Anyone who has dreamed of retiring from the rat race to run a grand estate hotel, rural farmhouse bed and breakfast, quaint inn or remote monastery spa could see their wish come true in this unprecedented giveaway from the Italian government.

As part of its Strategic Tourist Plan, Italy is offering up 103 historic sites to those with the will and means to renovate them back into use for tourism purposes. And this is just the initial offering: 200 more are slated to be given away over the coming years.

The State Property Agency and Ministry of Cultural Heritage are leading the project, aiming to draw visitors to beautiful areas with currently disused architecture. In some cases, a lot of work is needed, but that’s the nature of centuries-old structures.

State employee Roberto Reggi says “The project will promote and support the development of the slow tourism sector. The goal is for private and public buildings which are no longer used to be transformed into facilities for pilgrims, hikers, tourists, and cyclists.”

The country has previously auctioned off historic properties, including dozens of lighthouses, with similar goals in mind, but this time they are making it all free, banking on the long-term prospects of the renovations to raise funds for local businesses and the national economy (via Inhabitat).

The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative (MUFI) has developed a multi-acre urban agricultural campus in Detroit with gardens and an orchard designed to feed thousands of local residents.

This so-called “agrihood” reflects a different approach to neighborhood planning and growth centered around urban agriculture — it provides fresh and locally-grown produce to local households. In the case of Detroit, disused land has been repurposed to realize this farm project.

“Over the last four years,” explains MUFI cofounder Tyson Gersh, “we’ve grown from an urban garden that provides fresh produce for our residents to a diverse, agricultural campus that has helped sustain the neighborhood, attracted new residents and area investment.”

The program is about more than just feeding people — it addresses food deserts but also nutritional illiteracy, teaching residents about healthy eating as well as sustainable and local agriculture.

MUFI is currently working to convert an old deserted building into a new Community Resource Center as part of its non-profit educational initiatives. From there, they aim to build a local healthy food cafe and other amenities for serving and connecting with the community. They are also working on a basetern project (turning basements into cisterns) to provide water for the food they grow.

“We’ve seen an overwhelming demand from people who want to live in view of our farm, says Gersh. “This is part of a larger trend occurring across the country in which people are redefining what life in the urban environment looks like. We provide a unique offering and attraction to people who want to live in interesting spaces with a mix of residential, commercial, transit, and agriculture.”

A few years back, one man in Saudi Arabia was hailed as a hero for putting leftover food from his restaurant in a refrigerator along the street for anyone to take; since then, an ongoing effort in Europe has been scaling up the same approach to serve whole communities of people in need.

In Germany, urban refrigerators have spread thanks to help from online food-sharing apps and thousands of volunteers. A digital platform that connects those in need with stores and restaurants that have excess food boasts 10,000,000 pounds of shared edibles to date.

Still, they have a long way to go: the European Commission estimates that close to 90,000,000 tons of usable food is discarded annually across the EU. Globally, a whopping 40% of edible leftovers are thrown away.

Currently, over 100 shared food spots have been developed across Germany, 20 of which are located in Berlin. Large chain supermarkets are playing a significant part, making a coordinated effort to donate food they cannot sell but that is still safe and edible. Passers by also fuel the efforts, however, depositing whatever they can spare at these sites.

Germany is leading the charge on multiple food-related fronts these days, home to the world’s first packaging-free grocery store and first in-store vertical micro-farms. As a densely-populated European country without much space to grow (in terms of population or produce), Germany is bent on innovation and looks likely to remain a leader in this department for years to come.