Archive for the ‘Design’ category

The Making of Vesper | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog

February 8th, 2010
Vesper's two phases (from ilovetypography.com)

Vesper's two phases (from ilovetypography.com)

How are fonts designed? What are the steps and decisions a font designer must make to create a really vibrant and successful font? As someone who recently started enjoying fonts, I’ve never really considered these questions, until now. On the i love typography website (one of my favorite blogs and websites), Rob Keller, of Mota Italic, describes The Making of Vesper, broken down into two phases of his design process as he created a new font, Vesper: The first phase, comprising the Regular, Devanagari, Heavy, and Italic, was completed during his stint at the Masters in Arts, Typographic Design, at the University of Reading. After completing the MA, Rob completed the font’s remaining weights and revised the existing weights.

He provided some interesting details about the process and how he made some design decisions throughout, all of which have a real bearing on the final result.

» Read more: The Making of Vesper | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog

With Copyright Protectors Like These, who Needs Enemies? – Brand New

February 5th, 2010
Hadopi Logo (via underconsideration.com)

Hadopi Logo (via underconsideration.com)

One of my favorite blogs is Brand New. Each post is informative and enjoyable. Recently, they posted an incredible story displaying the dangers of protectors failing to live up to their own standards. Hadopi, the French agency responsible for policing copyright violations and protecting creators from intellectual property theft is guilty of the same. Here’s the short story:

  1. The government hires an agency to design the logo
  2. The agency (Plan Créatif) mocks up a logo
  3. The logo was found to include 2 unlicensed fonts (Bienvenue, which was designed by Jean François Porchez exclusively for France Télécom and only available via websites hosting illegal materials, and Bliss, designed by Jeremy Tankard)
  4. The agency quickly licenses Bliss and replaces Bienvenue with FS Lola (designed for FontSmith by Phil Garnham)
  5. A new, properly licensed logo is released (though the fonts were licensed on the day the logo was released to the public!)

Pretty amazing. For the first post exposing the problem, written by Jean-Baptiste Levée, read his post on graphism.fr. See Le Point’s post (1/11/2010) for a French perspective, or Font Feed’s post. BoingBoing and Torrentfreak also have coverage. It even garnered TV coverage (LCI; in french).

Paleontologist discovers 3-D secrets of Middle Age designs of Kells’ ‘angels’ [Medieval News]

January 27th, 2010

A page from the Book of Kells

I still don’t quite understand it, but, according to John Cisne, a paleontologist who studied the Book of Kells, the medieval scribes who illustrated this amazing manuscript employed “free-fusion stereocomparison” to generate the intricate scrollwork that can be found throughout the pages. With detail to the point of “submillimeter precision”, Cisne, in the journal Perception (Vol. 38, No. 7), argues that the medieval monks uses this method to create the wonderful artwork in the Book of Kells and other beautiful manuscripts.

via Medieval News: Paleontologist discovers 3-D secrets of Middle Age designs of Kells’ ‘angels’.

Bad Survey Design. Please Stop! — All This ChittahChattah

January 26th, 2010

At work, I’m developing a new survey to ask our new hires how the on-boarding process went. Because of all the terribly constructed surveys I’ve taken in the past, I decided to take the process of building it seriously. I searched on the web for any guides to building a good survey. One that I found concise and useful was Steve Portigal’s “Bad Survey Design. Please Stop!” on his blog “All This ChittahChattah“. I’m not sure about the blog’s title (but then again, I’m not sure about my blog’s title, either), but the article was very useful. I found many of his points informative and helpful.

» Read more: Bad Survey Design. Please Stop! — All This ChittahChattah

Book Staircase

January 17th, 2010
Staircase Bookshelves (from fubiz.net)

Staircase Bookshelves (from fubiz.net)

I love books and creative design. Unfortunately for some, space is very tight and finding room for their books can be a challenge. Rather than pitching out the books, Levitate (London), cleverly folded their architectural skills and creativity together to make a Book Staircase. The sides are almost flush with the forward shelf edges. The steps alternate. Overall, a very nice job. I wonder if there are any lights (cable lights, maybe?) underneath the shelving.

The apartment, which apparently belongs to Victoria and Sebastian and has been featured numerous other places, including ApartmentTherapy (where other photos of the apartment are available) and Boing Boing.

New Feature: Typekit support

January 5th, 2010
Snapshot of the Typekit Kit Editor

Snapshot of the Typekit Kit Editor

I just updated the site with 2 new fonts from Typekit: Chunk for the headers and Droid Serif for the body copy. You can also see which faces I’m using. Although it’s an experiment for now, the potential looks tremendous. After I read that the Harvard Business Publishing is using Typekit on their HBR website, hbr.org, I thought it would be worth a trial run. What are the benefits? How much does it cost?

» Read more: New Feature: Typekit support

the preservation of favoured traces | ben fry

December 31st, 2009

I’ve always enjoyed a nice graphical diff, like WinDiff, WinMerge, or KDiff3 — something that shows how a document has changed since some previous incarnation. Ben Fry, father of Processing, has taken this idea to an extreme with Darwin’s Origin of Species by showing how Darwin’s book changed with each revision, graphically depicting the variations in the document by chapter with each revision. » Read more: the preservation of favoured traces | ben fry

The Online Photographer: The Worst Photograph Ever Made

September 7th, 2009

From 12/12/08, Mike Johnston, in his blog The Online Photographer, calls this Annie Leibovitz photograph “the worst photograph ever made“:

From pdnedu.blogs.com (http://pdnedu.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341ce76f53ef010536887d0d970c-pi)

[picture taken from pdnedu.blogs.com (http://pdnedu.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341ce76f53ef010536887d0d970c-pi)]

According to Mr. Johnston, “[the effort put into this photograph] was all done intentionally, front to back, top to bottom, money-no-object, by an army of the most talented professionals, from art director to stylists to make-up artists to baby-wranglers to lighting assistants to photographer to digital retoucher, all working assiduously in concert in pursuit of the utterly pointless.” Ouch!