I’ve had this page of manhole covers open in the browser for the past few days, one of those things in the should-look-at-more-closely category. I’ve had a better look now, and I was reminded of seeing Japanese manhole covers, and they come in a much greater variety of designs (and colours!), so I was wondering why manhole covers are often so dull. I watched a How it’s Made on manhole covers the other day, and there’s no real reason why a city, region or département (say) shouldn’t have its own design.

This site has a good collection of images of Japanese manhole covers, four of which I’ve cut out below.

I saw this great little image over on James Squire (via 1+1=3). Unfortunately I can’t find a higher resolution version for closer type-ogling. There are some larger versions overlaid on images of the beer itself, but I like these type-only ones better.

Found while reading Drawn! yesterday, the portfolio site of Fernando Vicente which shows some of his amazing work. I love it.

These two especially - the one on the left is called ‘Type Face’ so I just have to show it here, and the one on the right I like for the expressiveness of the laugh - it makes me smile. Go and have a look.

As mentioned elsewhere, it appears that Xerox have rebranded, courtesy of Interbrand. There’s a pretty good critique of the new logo over on Brand New which I mostly agree with, apart from one thing. While the pixellated effect was (and is) rather cliché, Landor’s implementation of it was sophisticated and spoke well of what Xeros did, and still does. Sub-pixel anti-aliasing and high resolution screens notwithstanding, we still produce work in a pixellated environment, and it’s only when we print something that those pixels go away, so the big ‘X’ seemed perfectly appropriate for a company making printers, photocopiers and scanners and the like.

Clearly I’m not party to some vital information here, perhaps Xerox are planning to move into the manufacture of cricket, or petanque balls. Nice wordmark though.

Over on Telstar Logistics there’s a great post on the book “Flight thru Instruments” which has some of the best information graphics I’ve ever seen. There is, as ever, a Flickr gallery of images from the book, which are a great source of inspiration, especially the seemingly simple ones like this and this. Go and take a look. There’s a nice bit of background on the production of the book:

It turns out, “Flight thru Instruments” is so beautiful because it was created by the General Motors “Graphic Engineering” Staff under the leadership of Harley Earl. And who was Harley Earl?  Earl worked as a designer at General Motors from 1929 until 1959, where he rose to become the postwar chief of GM’s styling section. He drew styling inspiration from airplanes throughout his career, and Earl’s most famous design innovation was a little trick he cribbed from the swooping rear fins of the P-38 Lighting fighter flown during World War II.

The illustration below caught my eye especially. I’ve read definitions of pitch, bank and yaw in the past, and yes, they’re fairly straightforward concepts, but they never really seemed to stick in my mind. I always had to draw a little diagram to make it clear, and while the diagram below is much more complex (and I think it’s the least successful of the set for being hard to interpret) it contains a fantastic visual description of pitch, bank and yaw. I’ve redrawn them at right, a bit larger, mainly because I like redrawing things and I wanted to make a wallpaper of it (which you can get here: widescreen, square/4:3, and even iPhone). Yes, I know the text is a bit wonky, but I was trying to match the original, honest.

And, because I like the cover too:

No, it’s not a logo, it’s today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. It really looks like a logo though don’t you think? It reminds me of all the swooshes and planetary logos we’ve seen over the years, except this time it’s the real thing. That’s what it looks like.

I used to read the Nonist ages ago, and then it went ‘on sabbatical’ for ages. I’ve only just noticed that it’s back (despite posting a link to it recently - I thought it was an old post).

Anyway, this post brought me to a great selection of interesting bindings from the British Library. Worth a look through the site as there are lots of inspirational links and posts.

I’ve been meaning to write something about Oded Ezer for ages, ever since seeing his contribution to the Urban Forest Project (at right). Unfortunately I know only a little about Hebrew typography and calligraphy so I can’t write from any qualified angle on it. Ezer’s work is just amazing though, and so I add another entry to my ever-expanding Things To Learn Or Find Out More About list - Hebrew! Recently I saw a link on Notcot about his recent Ketubah project, which looks great, but I’m having a little difficulty working it out. The closeups show what appear to be cut out letterforms folded over to form new shapes, but the photos don’t say whether they’re printed to look like that or they’ve actually been cut out and stuck down again. I’m hoping the former. Below are some images of his work that I’ve saved for inspiration. Take a look at his site for more, and here for some samples of his poster work.

From Ketubah:

Other inspirational images from Oded Ezer’s site. These really are lovely.

I came across these ambigrams by Tiffany Harvey during the big Christmas/New Year break. There are some great examples in the gallery (on Flickr, of course), but these two caught my eye especially. I’m fascinated by ambigrams, and always thought words suitable for making them were fairly rare, but Harvey seems to promise any word can be made into an ambigram, even two, three or four words. Fascinating.

I came across this today, Taiwan’s recycling logo. Note the effective use of white space - a reminder of the excellent FedEx logo.