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.

Font Constructor claims to be “a standalone mac only application to build fonts in an intuitive way”. It certainly looks interesting, but I was mostly taken by the look of the lowercase ‘g’ on the example it shows. Very nice indeed:

I’m a bit loath to post another article on something to do with the Bible, after the flood of mostly offensive, illiterate and incomprehensible emails I got the last time I posted on the subject. However, needs must, and I think this is remarkable enough to post on. Researchers at Israel’s Institute of Technology, Technion, have enscribed the entire Hebrew Bible onto a silicon surface smaller than the head of a pin.

I could quip that, of course, the kerning’s all wrong but I suspect these letters were created by a process akin to dot-matrix printing. I think it’s amazing. Beat that, microfilm!

This is an interesting strategy. Jos Buivenga is a type designer producing high quality, fully-featured fonts and releasing them for free through his website. Perhaps realising the seemingly universal attitude that it’s perfectly OK to steal fonts, rather than accepting that they are licensed software products, he allows you to download his fonts with no restriction and just providing an option to donate through Paypal. I don’t know what the solution is to software and digital media piracy, but I’m not sure the honour system is the right way to go about it. I hope Jos Buivenga gets lots of donations, because the quality of his work deserves reward.

I’m particularly liking Fertigo. I think I can make use of that at work (and yes, we will donate):

And I just like this image:

Been meaning to post this for a little while, I think I found it via Design Observer, these simple t-shirts each bearing a sample of a great typeface. I think they’re a nice idea, but I’m a little disappointed that they don’t have designs that reflect the character of each face more, instead opting for name-of-face-in-a-box. Printing restrictions, I assume.

Still, they’re nice, if too small for me. Go and look.

Wow. Want. ‘Nuff said.

(bantjes.com)