I just downloaded the 5-page Design Police kit. I can’t wait to run this through a colour laser printer with sticker-paper. These are awesome for any Creative Director. Or use them on your next piece of junk mail. Or better yet, use them when you’re on public transit reading a crappy free paper and leave your typographical wisdom for the next commuter. I can’t tell you HOW many times I wish I’d had a USE A LIGATURE sticker.
Popularity: 82% [?]
This is an awesome article collecting type samples that have characterised 2007 and may lead 2008. As a creative guy who often falls out of touch with pure typographic expression this was a great crash course.
Link to Speak Up (via cpluv)
Popularity: 20% [?]
This article, plain and simple, blew me away. Presented at the ATypI Conference (Brighton, U.K., September 2007) by Joe Clark, a Toronto-based Accessibility Consultant, designer, and writer, this well-researched and comprehensive dissertation on the triumphs and foibles (but mostly foibles) of the inconsistent use of signage throughout Toronto’s city-wide transit system opened my eyes to so much happening around me (and I don’t just mean in regards to the TTC).
Everything from information design, accessibility, clarity, font usage, and branding comes into question throughout the article, taking into account history, opportunity, hegemony, possibility, and bureaucratic politics. It’s a bit of a long read, but I promise you’ll learn something.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Adam Tickle, Alistair Webb, and Matt Michaluk share a very special cake to celebrate Helvetica’s silver anniversary as one of the planet’s most ubiquitous sans serif faces.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Yes, I’m probably being unfair. I bumped into Sketchcast’s offering and was intrigued. It is a really good idea. It’s also so remarkably basic that it’s doomed to failure I fear (Doomed! Doomed!). sigh. Anything that says I can draw a blog and post it sounds great. A simple tool to spice up our picture + words offering. Unfortunately it’s so slow. There is no option to double, triple or quadruple speed your drawing. It plays back at the speed that you made it. Which is slow. We write slowly if it’s going to legible with their chunky pen. It’s slow if you have make sure the line is processed smoothly and not like a heroine addict withdrawing while drawing. I couldn’t even be bothered sitting through the whole playback of my quick blog test video (see incomplete above).
And another thing, Wordpress don’t support the embedding of their video! C’mon Wordpress. Lighten up a bit. It’s not java. Or anything malicious. It’s just slow.
Play with it, discard it and then maybe the developers will make it better.
ps. Don’t get me started on Virb’s slow poke development cycle!
Popularity: 13% [?]
I’m always on the looking for talented people who make ad guys appear to know what they’re doing (I need all the help I can get). Bite Animation are one of those crews. They’re a small motion graphics & design studio in Johannesburg who’ve done some impressive work for some very picky creatives. They’ve just relaunched their website so go visit them. If you’re a fan of heavily layered illustration you’ll enjoy the experience.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Now this is a cup I could wake up to every morning. Beautiful typography. Simple, clever, and functional design. A great gift for any graphics freak, whether they drink coffee or tea. (via information aesthetics)
Popularity: 7% [?]
Similar Diversity is an information graphic which opens up a new perspective at the topics religion and faith by visualizing the Holy Books of five world religions. Communalities and differences of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism are shown up in this datavisualization.
The visual’s basis is an objective text analysis of the Holy Scriptures, and works without any interpretations from the creators’ side. Despite - or even because of this abstraction, the artworks are not only working on an informal but also on an emotional level. The viewers should be inspired to think about own prejudices and current religious conflicts.
Those five graphics are showing the positions and the frequency of the word “you” in the different Holy Scriptures. “You” acts in most cases as a request to abide codes of behaviour or moralities, and so aims most directly at the reader.
Read more about the details here.
Popularity: 5% [?]
This sounds like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, but there used to be 27 letters taught to students in the early 19th century. X, Y, Z, and, per se, &. The mumbly students eventually morphed this into Ampersand, of course. Neatorama details this and origins of other everyday punctuation marks like the Exclamation Point, Question Mark, Equal Sign, Dollar Sign, even TAFKAP Symbol (The Artist Formerly Known As Prince). Great typographical trivia.
Popularity: 4% [?]
| BuzzFeed |
| Add To Your Site |
