I dislike ‘meta’ posts, posts about posting, or posts about not posting, for that matter, and I’d rather keep my day-to-day work separate from what I write here. However, just this once I’m going to break that rule.

I’ve been busy this week getting my online portfolio up to date with a shiny new design; rather different from the clean spaces of the Ministry I’ll admit, and in a very different tone of voice, but it’s all about being appropriate I guess. Still, I finally got to use some of those guilloches I made!

If anyone needs a rather good (and oh so modest) art director, creative director-designer type hanging about their offices drinking litres of coffee, then do get in touch. The portfolio is here, and the usual LinkedIn profile is here.

I found this massive collection  of movie title screens a couple of weeks ago in a Google image search (for something else, naturally) and, well, the nature of life at the moment meant I didn’t have time to have a proper look. I had a look through it today and found this beautiful piece of script lettering. Of course, I had to trace it, and it’s really quite special; the lowercase reminds me of Savoir Faire a bit, but the capitals are just so… movie! Take a look:

I found many other examples of great lettering, but here are four special ones I might trace at some point:

When I saw this chocolate type I had a thought that it would be fun to try and print using it. Just use warmed rice paper and off you go. OK, the type wouldn’t last very long, but each piece would be unique, and edible. Oddly, and just out of interest, it claims the letters are set in “FF FagoMo Bold”, but unless there’s another foundry out there prefixing their font names with FF, I can’t find it on FontFont’s site.

Update: Thanks to Jason and Marc for finding the correct font, seems there’s a typo on the Typolade site. The font is FF Fago Normal Bold.

I recently came across this review of the book Arabesque by Gestalten; while I’m probably going to buy it for myself as a present at some point, I couldn’t help but notice the visual similarity between this piece of brushwork and a Torii gate. Purely an irrelevant coincidence I’m sure, but a rather pleasing one nonetheless.

These lettering samples by Daniël Maarleveld look like they would be at home on a banknote or certificate. Such a simple, straightforward idea; easier than the usual banknote bas-relief, yet still highly effective.

This print by Steed Griffin caught my eye on NOTCOT. I could quite full my flat with prints like this, and yes, you can buy them from his Etsy store. Mmm. Black and red:

Phillip Niemeyer of Double Triple kindly wrote to explain who that VA logo was for:

I checked my own photo archive of the archive and found the VA business card. VA stands for “Ike Vern & Associates, Photography”. Much of Lubalin’s great graphic work seems to have been simple jobs for small clients. I love that.

I posted the VA image, a tissue in Lubalin’s handwriting specing a logo, and a unique logo for the World Trade Center.

http://www.doubletriple.net/lubalin

Phillip Niemeyer

Technically this is an update to this earlier post, but I wanted to create a new one because I rather like the Double Triple logo, at right - a mirrored ‘3’ in ITC Baskerville.

I came across this site the other day - Ridiculous Design Rules. I’m not quite sure what the basic premise of the site is - whether it’s to collect ridiculous rules together and collectively point and laugh at them by giving them stars, or to collect rules together and rate them as ridiculously good or relevant. It’s very odd. I thought of the ridiculous design rules I’ve encountered before but they tend to be about the audience, or users, for example the truly ridiculous and unproven (and unprovable) “99.9% of people set their browser to the correct language” to the too-many-caveats-to-say-one-way-or-another, “text on screen is unreadable compared to print”.

Whatever you think of the rules or how they’re presented, the site does have some beautiful illustrations by Niels Shoe Meulman - only four for now, but hopefully a lot more soon. I’m particularly taken with the cat picture, it’s a nice Latin script variety of the kind of illustrative Arabic writing I’ve posted about before. Very nice indeed. You can see them larger on the site, or on this Flickr set.

Excellent news; Erik Spiekermann’s brainchild The Fontfeed has relaunched as a new, independent site. Combining the insights of Erik Spiekermann himself, Stephen Coles and Yves Peters, this is definitely a site to add to your RSS reading list, or should you be so inclined, your bookmarks. It sounds like it’ll be very much worth it:

Along with delivering advice and inspiration, our goal is to add a perceptive voice to the type community, bridging the gap between font users and font suppliers. We hope to stimulate interaction and kick start a valuable and lasting discourse between all parties, so don’t hesitate to let us know your thoughts.

So yes, congratulations on the new site!

Peter Gabor’s gallery of Herb Lubalin’s work has been linked to from lots of places as the Tribute to Herbert Lubalin, and if you’ve not seen it yet, it’s worth a look.  However, that’s just the gallery for a whole category of articles by Gabor about Lubalin, so that’s worth a look too (it’s all in French, mind). While the gallery does have plenty of great examples, the pages don’t have any background information or titles for any of the pieces of Lubalin’s work; it’s not so much of a tribute as a teaser, or a portfolio that really needs the artist there to explain each piece - at least to say what it was for.

Victoria and Albert logo, by Alan Fletcher, 1989.

The case in point for me is the “VA” logo below. Who or what was it for? Searching for it online gives a list of everything Lubalin did in Virginia, but nothing that appears to explain this. It’s a mystery. And yes, it does remind me of the Victoria and Albert Museum logo by Alan Fletcher, at right.

Mysteries aside, I just like this one: