Care of the BBC comes this fantastic 360 degree panorama of the famous megalithic site Stonehenge. Well worth a quick look!

Today’s pointer to a visual resource comes from the life sciences: it’s the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank from the University of Washington–a collection of some 21,000 public domain pictures of assorted aquatic and semi-aquatic animals and other water oriented subjects. Since these resources are all copyright free, the images can be freely used just in schoolwork alone but in any way deemed appropriate by the user. This collection is greatly enhanced by the stellar indexing work done with its organization, making browsing and locating images here an extremely easy pastime.

One form of visual resource that tends to get short shrift is typography, the art and arrangement of lettering. While previously used almost entirely for paper or sign based work, in the electronic age typography has become a ubiquitous part of our digital environment as well. In large measure typography tends to slip by almost unnoticed–being sort of like an umpire at a baseball game that remains invisible as long as it is performing its job well. That said, there are a number of resources on the web that take a closer look at this overlooked corner of design, and one of our favorites is we love typography, a searchable blog with pictures of assorted interesting typography from across the history of the art.

Just a quick hit today to point out the the International Architecture Awards for the Best New Global Design 2009 have been unveiled by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design. Always an interesting look at what’s current in the world of architecture, this year the winners range from well known folks like Sean Godsell and Zaha Hadid to lesser renowned firms such as Brazil’s Studio MK27, China’s wsp architects or Vietnam’s Vo Trong Nghia Company. Well worth a look if you want to see the sort of thing that’s garnering attention these days in international building design.

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Spezify is a new search tool that mixes and matches results and seeks to get away from the endless list of text links displayed by most search engines. When one does searches with Spezify, all sorts of formats will be interspersed in what comes back after a search–text, images, video and audio may well be all what comes back from a keyword search as is evidenced by the screenshot above that came from entering the term “Kengo Kuma” for the Japanese architect.

The New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery is a huge resource containing over 700,000 images of assorted subjects from various parts of the world. While there are of course large numbers of pictures that are associated with the Big Apple, there are all sorts of other treasures there as well–such as the early Japanese photograph pictured above which comes from a set of 100 early Asian prints and photos. Another interesting angle to this collection is that way that the NYPL’s pictures have also been put into a Flickr set so that the public can help tag and aid in cataloging the institution’s many images.

Inspired by the recent demolition of a modernist house by architect Paul Rudolph as well as the nearby location of Philip Johnson’s seminal Glass House, The National Trust for Historic Preservation has partnered with the New Canaan Historical Society to do a survey of modern homes that grace that particular town. Some of America’s best architects from the modernist period built buildings here, and the hope is that by preserving them digitally and disseminating the information broadly will help to stave off future destruction of these irreplaceable pieces of American architecture. Pictured above is the Bremer house by Eliot Noyes.