Again, some other things that have been doing the rounds but got stuck in my pile of ‘things to look at’. These travel posters by Steve Thomas, Amy Martin and Adam Levermore-Rich promote travel to exotic eras and destinations, such as the Crimson Canyons of Mars, Tranquil Miranda, or the Winter Wonderland of the Ice Age.

I like the ones for destinations in the solar system by Steve Thomas. Aside from their obvious fantasy, I find them a little poignant though. They evoke the ideas of the early 20th Century when we were going to colonise space pretty soon and it was going to be amazing. Except we didn’t, and space is pretty expensive and we’re only just starting to get space tourism, and even that barely above our atmosphere. Still, perhaps looking at these posters we can live in hope! Well, not for Uranus, what with it not having a solid surface and all, oh, and Venus needing some hefty terraforming… but Mars is about right! Oh, except it’s brown, not red. Ho hum:

Then the Amy Martin ones, which are simply beautiful. The colours are lovely, and these are the ones that to me more closely resemble travel posters:

Lastly, the ones that are from the universe of Firefly and Serenity. I have to admit I’ve not watched either so I can’t really comment other than to say they’re rather attractive. You can buy them here though.

Found via Blue Tea, and via the visits to 826LA I made for the Robot Milk post.

Steve sent me a link to the all-new official site for the Prime Minister of the UK, which, incredibly, is in beta. Get that: The official online presence for the leader of (allegedly) the fifth richest country in the world is a crummy beta site with dodgy kerning, inconsistent use of typefaces, colours, rounded corners, spacing, and, well everything apart from general crumminess. Look at the masthead. It’s in Clarendon, Times New Roman Bold and Georgia. The typographic soup continues with the addition of Arial for body text (and oddly, some headlines too), and on a graphic, Copperplate. There are boxes with rounded corners at the top but not the bottom, containing images that also have rounded corners but where the curvature doesn’t match the container (and appears to be damaged by JPEG artifacting on most images). The site is a mess.

The masthead at the time of writing. Click the image to see a broader view of the home page.

The idea of adding features to the site such as YouTube, Twitter and Flickr feeds is a good one, and yes, these things can be a bit messy to integrate at first, but it’s not hard to get those things up and running in any design. The hard bits, especially for a site as prominent as this, is to ensure security, that the background infrastructure can handle the traffic and (importantly) all your content is written and entered into the site. Is this a site that got designed and implemented by several groups who never communicated? It looks like there may have been a design done at pitch stage, but largely ignored throughout development. A good, consistent design is vital for any site, and sticking to it is a must throughout all stages of development.

Still. All these things can be fixed. The design can be clarified, the layout can be rationalised, attention can be paid to consistency and quality, the HTML and CSS can be cleaned up, but it beggars the question, why did they launch an unfinished site and call it a beta? This is not what betas are about. This is arguably one of the most important sites representing the UK and should be implemented to the highest of standards, and yet they launched a crap blog and tried to cover their arses by calling it a beta. Very poor show indeed.

I’ve had a link saved to these pictures for quite a while, and of course they’ve been linked from countless sites over the years, but hey, they’re still worth linking to again.

The thing that I’ve noticed about them is the effect of the small thumbnails all together. You click them and in a way some of the mystery is dispelled, as the smaller size allows you to see the overall pattern. They could be microchip designs or supermarket shelves, so I put them together at a couple of sizes below. To see the details there’s an original size one too.

I love robots, I love invented brands, and I love well-made artifacts, so this set of bottles really got my attention. Trouble is, there’s very little I can find out about it. I know it’s something to do with 826LA, it might be a student project, the bottles themselves might be for sale (though not from their online store) and that I would like one. Or two. Or three.

The typeface for the main brand is Home Run Script, which was identified for me by beejay and Ignacio at Typophile.

Via NOTCOT

Banknote patterns fascinate me. I can get lost for hours in all the details, seeing how the patterns fit together, how the lettering works, the tiny security ‘flaws’ - they’re amazing. Central to banknote designs are Guilloche patterns, which can be created mechanically with a geometric lathe, or more likely these days, mathematically. The mathematical process attracted me immediately as I don’t have a geometric lathe and nor do I have anywhere to put one. I do, however, have a computer, and at the point I first started playing with the designs (mid-2004) Illustrator and Photoshop had gained the ability to be scripted. So off I went, using the hypotrochoid equations on Mathworld to create rather rough and ready patterns - scripting at this point didn’t have a very usable set of functions for creating beziers, so I had to use crummy line segments. The process took ages and served just to prove to me that I could do it, but the results were too poor to go much further.

Then, a couple of years later I discovered Grapher on the Mac. Aha! Now here was a program that could create the patterns I was after and export to EPS. Well, kind of. It could create the patterns, most of the time, and export to EPS, though not always. I got a couple of patterns out of it and had a look round for other options. Again, not much - not much that I could afford, that is.

The basic hypertrochoid equation. This makes a nice rosette.

Then we get to now. I give Grapher another go, and at last, I can create and export patterns:

There are still some extremely frustrating limitations though. First of these is the resolution of drawing the graph. I’m sure for most graphs the default resolution is fine, but when creating these patterns you need tiny increments. Tiny tiny ones. If the line is going from one side of the graph to the other and back again a thousand times in a couple of radians, you don’t want the graph program to start dropping line segments, or corners, or anything really. Grapher does allow you to increase the resolution, but it’s not sticky - change anything in the equation and it pops right back to the default. Every. Single. Time. The same thing seems to happen with the line thickness too - I wanted all the designs to be at 0.1, but it kept changing it back to 1.0. Frustrating! There are a couple of other UI things I’d change, like having an option to keep axes at 1:1 ratio to each other, even when you resize the window.

Another, deeply irritating frustration with the whole process is to do with Illustrator. Try and open an exported EPS in it, and you get “An unknown error occurred”. Photoshop can accept the EPSs as placed objects, and InkScape can (eventually) open them, so Grapher seems to be outputting valid EPS files. I suspect that the number of lines in the graph is causing the premier vector editing app in the industry to fall over. Oh dear.

Still, after all this, I can still get the patterns made, and get them into an image editing program, which is quite something. Now I just need to find the magic numbers to create just the right patterns I want.

This beast creates the pattern above. The m is not strictly necessary for this one, but varying it is good for experimentation.

Note: I know there are programs devoted to creating these patterns - Excentro being apparently one of the most popular, but I’d rather use the software tools I already own first. I played a bit with Excentro and it certainly makes some things a hell of a lot easier - but I’ll hold off buying it for now until I’ve got an actual project I can use it for.

The Boston Globe’s Bigger Picture has a series of images of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. I missed it on TV as I was travelling, so I’ll have to watch it later, but I’ve heard a bit about it. I can’t quite remember all the hyperbole, but apparently it was spectacular, ground-breaking, amazing, mind-boggling and other great superlatives.

This one also reminds me of the Matrix, or Gattaca, or even Minority Report. It’s all very sci-fi. (AFP PHOTO / Joe Klamar)

The only negative thing I read about it was that while it meant to represent the history of China, modern China was barely represented at all and that this omission was down to ‘lack of time’. I disagree. I think the whole thing was about modern China - the glitz, glamour, spectacle, all the money and technology poured into the event, it’s all about how China is today. Also, the very means of presentation are a clear and dramatic demonstration of what the country is about nowadays: mass production. Take a look at Edward Burtynsky’s Manufacturing series of photos and you can see what I’m on about:

You can see his work here, though I warn you, the site is one of those idiot ones that resizes your browser for you without asking.

Coudal Partners linked to this rather nice toy by Morisawa & Company. My Japanese knowledge is rather woeful, so I don’t have very much more information than; it’s pretty, it’s fun, it has a very nice interface, and it appears to be promoting the sheer loveliness of Morisawa’s fonts, so please buy some. I was told by a Korean colleague that there are relatively few fonts available for East Asian languages compared to Western ones because of the sheer number of glyphs that need to be designed, so I would guess a new one would elicit at least a moderate fanfare. Maybe. Anyway, have a play - here are a few screenshots:

I’ve been pondering this article for a while, since coming across Jonathan Hoefler’s posts (and here) about Glagolitic script in my RSS reader. It’s a script I’d never heard of before, and I’m always fascinated by writing systems, so I followed some links, sent a couple of emails and did some research on it.

First off, I have to say thank you to Typonine for sending me the font used for some of the illustrations in this post, and specifically Nikola Djurek who designed and developed it, based on the first Croatian printed book in the script: the ”Misal po zakonu rimskoga dvora”, printed in 1483. A page, and details, from that book are shown below.

One of the things I noticed when looking at examples of Glagolitic is the way some characters appear and disappear; I was trying to set some text in it, and whichever bit of text I tried had some extra characters that weren’t in the font or in any other examples - each one seemed to have characters unique to it. Of course, this isn’t a deficiency of the font (or of the language), but more a sign of the evolution of the written language and of the strong influences on it from Latin, Cyrillic and Church Slavonic over the years. Croatian was written in all three systems in parallel, and as a local system not widely known outside of the Balkans (despite being the oldest of the Slavic alphabets), the form of written Glagolitic has perhaps been more influenced than influencing; In some written examples there are Cyrillic characters, while in others the characters are presumably the original Glagolitic ones, or newer hybrid forms.

Some ligatures in Glagolitic script.

This leads on nicely to arguably the most interesting feature of Glagolitic (for a typographer at least) - the sheer number of ligatures. This interesting PDF states that in one work alone, the Brozić breviary, there are 250 ligatures - a number you’d more expect to find in a hand-written work from a top scriptorium rather than a printed book of over a thousand pages. Also unique to Glagolitic among printed languages are the broken ligatures, where half of one letter is joined to another letter, adding thousands of apparently new glyphs to the language. Of course, for anyone (like me) trying to set some text in Glagolitic, it all appears rather confusing and frustrating - but the reason why I tried (and why I’m always tracing things) is to learn more about something, and in that it’s certainly succeeded. If you’re interested in finding out more, for further reading there are a few articles out there, including (of course) Wikipedia, and this introduction to the history of the script.

So after all that I didn’t get to set some text properly in Glagolitic. I think to do so I’d need to spend some time learning a lot more about the language - so it’s added to ‘the queue’ of Things That I Must Learn More About. In the meantime, for my own pleasure and so you can see how attractive the glyphs are in Nikola Djurek’s font, I’ve created a pattern using it.

Now, if reading across the circles spells anything rude or inappropriate, let me know, OK? The contact form should be working again after the server move.

The site was briefly inaccessible today, and the RSS may show up as having some duplicate entries. Why? The Ministry of Type has moved! Servers that is. I would like to convey the sense of a thrumming nexus of raw computing power; a darkly gleaming enclosure of steel and carbon fibre buried deep underground in an impregnable vault under some faded ancient pile just off Whitehall, but I fear the truth is a little more prosaic.

Instead of a tiny patch of disc space on an overcrowded server among thousands of others in a vast, grey, air-conditioned warehouse in one of London’s more dismal suburbs, the Ministry’s online presence now occupies a spacious new server dedicated to a few carefully selected occupants. It’s most likely still in a vast, grey, air-conditioned warehouse in one of London’s more dismal suburbs though, but I gather that that’s by far the best habitat for servers.

So yes. Welcome to the new server!

I just followed a link to this interesting demo of the latest webkit wonders on Shaun Inman’s site. I’m excited of course by the possibilities that the transitions and effects could provide - from more responsive UIs to having vertical labels on a graph or spreadsheet without graphics or flash, for example - but, and there’s always a but in things like this, that baseline is seriously wonky. Oddly, Photoshop has this problem too - you can’t just rotate a chunk of text and have it maintain a smooth, straight baseline, so you end up converting text to outlines instead and having to start afresh with each content edit. Annoying!

Update: Shaun Inman got in touch directly and pointed me at the Safari Version 4 Developer Preview, which fixes the baseline issue, as you can see here.