Point.B Studio created the images and diagrams for Cornell’s Legal Information Institute’s CFR. The project involved re-engineering 15,000 different types of art in the corpus of documents, including line-art diagrams, schematics, math equations, tables, forms and other types of web objects, many of which are very complex.

Each art object was restored by hand-drawing, hand-coding and annotating the original source low-resolution bitmap graphic to make it machine-readable and accessible to the broadest audience possible. This means that not only is it open to the public at large, but accessible to ALL including the economically disadvantaged due to the fact that it is no longer locked behind a paywall^***. It is available to disabled people as well since the text and captions have been re-engineered to be read by text-to-speech applications. ❤

The posters shown above are our signature diptych for {~beaux libre*}, designed by Rebecca Malamud-Evans, repurposing art that was created during previous art restoration projects by The Rural Design Collective.

More about the current CFR project can be found at https://blog.law.cornell.edu/tech/2019/04/

Below are examples of some of the extremely poor source art that we had to work with that was redesigned by our core team. All scalable vector graphics (SVGs) created during this project were vast improvements over the initial low resolution gifs and jpgs provided as they are accessible, searchable and machine-readable and in many cases we were able to take the improvement a step further and improve the visual design so the schematics were more technically correct and graphically understandable and coherent. The original source .png or .jpg is shown on the left and the final graphic on the right (zoom in for a larger image of each pairing). *** With the optimism that the issue of digital divide will one day be resolved.