Gone are the days of having to fall back on web-safe typefaces. Cutting edge web design is now typographically sophisticated, powered by web-served typefaces. This seminar gives a good overview of what is now possible, and easily accessible to those who are not elite designers. It touches on type selection, readability, editing and other issues.
Our client is an authority on project management software. We needed to convey the practical nature of this particular book and make it extremely clear that it was based on the latest version of Microsoft Project. Fresh, bright colours were combined with images of contemporary architecture.
The pen manufacturer BIC has constructed a website that invites people to submit samples of their own handwriting. An algorithm adds then adds their sample to a massive collective dataset and identifies the 'average' of all those handwritten marks for each letter of the alphabet. Users of the site can drill down to datasets organised by gender, or country or handedness, or profession. The 'average' typeface, as might be expected, is fairly anodyne. It is a clever marketing exercise, but whether it has anything signicant to say about the way we write around the world is rather less certain. The eventual uber-average typeface will no doubt eventually find its way into designer toolkits.
A Chrome plugin that highlights and demystifies jargon in websites you visit. Most of us are already well aware of the evasions and misrepresentations used by marketers, but this plugin perhaps serves as a useful visual reminder of adspeak's ubiquity.
Somewhere, people are reaching blindly for their alarm clock or phone. Somewhere, people are wishing for another hour's sleep. Somewhere, it is always morning. Global Breakfast Radio allows listeners to experience this eternal morning as dawn sweeps tirelessly across the world. Listen to disc jockeys in Moscow, or London or Rio, on Global Breakfast Radio. A strange, yet compelling offering...
The Lytro is not like other cameras -- it is able to capture virtually all of the visual data in a given scene, giving a photographer the godlike ability to post-adjust the image. Focus extends from touching the lens to infinity. Digital light field technology is difficult to grasp, but undeniably interesting. Perhaps it could be adapted for cinematic use, with mind altering results...
Melbourne is home to a surprising number of high quality Art Deco buildings. Robin Grow has written about most of them, and has recently brought out the second edition of Melbourne Art Deco. We worked on a revision of the cover, and strove to allow the strong geometric forms of the featured building to speak without obstruction.
Squarespace have a fun little service for non-design people needing a logo in a hurry. Using a very simple interface, users can select a symbol from a fairly extensive library, add their business names in one of a few quite decent open source typefaces, tweak the colours and positioning and add a tagline. The design can be previewed for the web, t-shirts and as a business card, and also saved as a png file. For design that actually works, please see your graphic designer.
Once a bit of a fringe cause, labelling online images for re-use and sharing (see Creative Commons) has gained some high-level impetus in recent years. Major art galleries and museums around the world have been releasing millions of images and encouraging audience engagement. Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum actually encourages users to re-mix and alter their high resolution artworks. Google's "Art Project" aggregates high resolution images of great art from many of the world's leading institutions. The common creative heritage of humanity, made accessible for anyone with an internet connection...
An experiment in running the title type large enough to allow the image below to be seen almost without obstruction. The result feels open and warm and hopefully conversational.
A neat visual summary of the key colours used by major brands. Colour psychology is an area overrun by dubious pop science and just-so explanations, but you can sure the world's biggest brands take the emotional aspects of colour seriously.
Hilariously bad book covers paraded for the amusement of jaded designers. Shooting fish in a barrel, but nonetheless compelling entertainment. Misguided typeface selections, bizarre image use and juxtapositions, and primitive Photoshop skills abound, often on the same cover.
Ideological fervour was not the only thing that glowed brightly behind the Iron Curtain – the Communist-era Poles had a surprising love of neon signs. Neglected since the breakup of the Eastern Bloc, a museum has been set up to preserve what is left.
If one really squints, this motorbike (ridden by the intrepid Allan Roberts) sports the title type for his book The Hard Way Home (Jo Jo Publishing), courtesy of Chameleon Print Design. So the design at least has braved Andean precipes, forded terrifying rapids and generally defied death for several adrenalin soaked weeks.
Alan's entertaining book, already featured in an earlier Chameleon Print Design post.
Have you ever wondered where some of the more obscure keyboard symbols or UI elements got their start? @ goes back to late antiquity, but others (power on, sleep, firewire, etc are decidedly more contemporary. A modest little site-let here has the low-down. If you have a taste for punctuation rather than icons, try Keith Houston's Shady Characters, the secret life of punctuation.
Three variations on the same cover for a publishing client.
A restrained take on a very difficult, sensitive topic.
We were commissioned to produce an information graphic / poster for railway staff on the topic of fatigue management. With so much text on one poster, the background needed to be very muted and the relationships between different pieces of information as clear as possible.
Watch your favourite types of music duke it out in the ring of public taste. Google has made a brave attempt to quantify the relative popularity of various strands of music since 1950 using objective criteria/data. Witness the massive displacement of previously dominant jazz by pop, rock and others. Watch the slow relative decline of rock as music contines to diversify and fragment. This article has some doubts about the methodology, but even if the results are not 100 percent reliable, imagine how many other axes/areas of human endeavour might fruitfully be subjected to this kind of approach.
What the web is best at: marshalling complex data on interesting topics and making it accessible to everyone. A 'live' map depicting the cost of forgoing vaccination for diseases of childhood. Published by the US based Council on Foreign Relations.
A handy page giving the Pantone > CMYK > Hex values for all standard Pantone swatches. Of course, the match between colours represented in each colour gamut is often rather approximate (for very good and intractable reasons), but it beats rank guesswork.