So yes, as mentioned elsewhere, Typographica released their favourite fonts of 2006. The face that immediately caught my eye and made me go “Ooo!” was Darka, a new interpretation of Blackletter type by Gabriel Martínez Meave. Some of the capitals could be used as cadels in themselves, they’re so beautiful, and a lot of the letterforms have a real calligraphic flamboyance. I have a love of blackletter types and of calligraphy in general, so Darka seems right up my street. The thing is, even though the site says the font can be bought from FontShop, it’s not on the site at all. As soon as it is, you can be sure I’ll be buying it. Until then, I’m stuck with the sampler PDF and a bit of copy’n’paste to play with the letterforms.

From the site:

The second page of the PDF sampler:

And, I couldn’t resist. Not sure about the “Ty” kerning though, but I think to make that work nicely I’d have to redraw part of the T:

Yet another great discovery, the portfolio site of Jonas Bergstrand. I love the style of these examples, though look at his site, as it shows his full range of skills, including some fantastic sculpture and typography.

An old one, but recently discovered by me on my travels. The Lorem Ipsum Cuff, on Veer.

Of course, I have to include a chunk of Lorem Ipsum on a post such as this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Curabitur pretium. Vivamus nisi. Maecenas eget mauris eu mi lacinia molestie. Sed a dui. Nulla sem ante, iaculis at, volutpat eu, facilisis in, metus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Aliquam erat volutpat.

After writing the big piece on mobile phone typography, I came across this odd little concept phone from BenQ. I can’t find out much more than that it has a touch screen, and it looks rather lovely. No typography required when you’ve got beautiful, expressive icons! OK, OK, you need it for messages and stuff… but hey.

I love the koi! It looks like this icon you use to be able to download here.

I came across this nice little maze generator the other day. I’ve had a little play with it, and it’s incredibly relaxing to watch it solving the maze for you. I used to spend hours and hours drawing mazes as a youngster (detail at right), pages and pages of them. Whole notebooks full. I think mine has a certain organic charm, though I do love the cartesian regularity of the generated ones.

Tufte discusses this a fair bit in his book Visual Explanations, but I thought I’d raise it for a site I’ve just come across; style.com. I’d seen a thumbnail of one of the images from this ‘feature’ on pearls, and clicked to have a closer look. Unfortunately, it turns out that the ‘thumbnail’ was the actual posted size. Look at the area of the screen devoted to stuff that isn’t the article you’re interested in. I’ve coloured the areas below. The grey area is the useless area, the black area supporting text for the useful area, and the white area is the focus of the article, the most useful area. Look how small it is. Style.com is clearly a site utterly devoted to selling ads. They’re perfectly entitled to, mind, but I won’t be visiting them again.

Berling Antiqua, Arno Pro and Georgia numerals

Another thing I came across. These watches labelled as “The SEIKO Electronic Ink watch for women”. Why specifically for women though? Apart from what the display can show, these don’t look particularly feminine. I think the e-ink watch idea is a good one though, and somewhat related to my post about mobile typography and manufacturers’ seeming obsession with 7-segment-style characters for showing the time, I think there’s a real opportunity to use non-lining numerals to display the time. At right, some examples.

...but I know I like it. I’ve been spending more time than is healthy browsing hundreds of photography and design sites lately, and I’ve come across so many inspirational things. Usually though, they’re just some tiny detail I spotted that felt was worth keeping track of. Like this one, from the showreel of Chico Jofilsan. It’s beautifully animated here, and you can see some variants on the logos section here, which doesn’t say what it’s a logo for. I’m guessing it’s a Brazilian TV channel ident.

I’m always intrigued by fonts that aim to have a fixed radius of curvature in the glyphs. They’re always display fonts, and sometimes they’re quite attractive. I came across this one today on Yo Lo. The site is stupid and doesn’t have individual urls for pages, so you’ll have to browse to find it.

I already wrote about typography on mobile devices, with a focus on the S60 platform and obligatory mentions of the iPhone and non-obligatory mention of the LG Prada phone. What I failed to mention was the current state of play over in the world of Windows Mobile. I don’t intend to write an exhaustive review of the OS, or of every screen; this is more of a first impressions piece.

Microsoft have recently released the latest incarnation of the platform with Windows Mobile 6. I’ve seen adverts for version 5 (I think) around the place, and the shots that they’ve been using to advertise it (what’s this, using the UI in ads? Encroyable!) are fairly attractive and well laid-out. At right is a screenshot from a landscape-format device, and it looks quite similar to the S60 layout, though perhaps making a better use of space.

What’s the rest of the OS like though? Looking at some screenshots from mobile-review.com I have to say it’s not too bad at all. The type looks like Tahoma and is of course rendered using ClearType, which raises an important question; Why don’t more mobile devices use some form of smoothing? It’s not down to processing power surely? S60 devices used SVGs for their OS elements (all vector) and are smoothed rather nicely, so why not the type? Very odd indeed. So, apart from the type rendering being good, as I said, the layout and typography of WM6 is generally OK, but has a few odd inconsistencies. The main home screen (bottom left, below) has that rather odd search bar cutting across it, and then, apparently for the sake of cramming in the Windows Live icon, the left margin is broken, ruining the layout and making it difficult to ‘scan’ the screen - something that should be a paramount concern for any mobile device. The odd placement of the search bar might be down to user preference, but the Windows Live block should have been better to start with. It makes it look like someone designed it nicely, then extra stuff was just thrown at it til it stuck. Mind, the left margin itself is defined by the unnecessary divider line between the Windows logo and the ‘Start’ label, rather than the left edge of the label itself, which is typical of a design process that fails to operate on a strict principle of less is more. The type defines the margin! You don’t need an extra line! Grr.

The email screen (top left, below) is interesting just for the different sizes of the type used. The ‘from’ field looks fine (though any UI designer might ask why the field is needed at all) but for some reason the ‘to’ field is set in a larger type, and doesn’t share the same left margin. The mobile review people seem to be of that accursed group that sends emails with no subject (or maybe they got confused and ‘news’ is meant to be the subject) so we can’t really tell what that would look like. The keyboard stands out from the whole set of screens. It looks like it was grabbed wholesale from a different device entirely - it doesn’t match the green glassy theme at all, and I can’t really see why. I could get all Tufte about it, but do the buttons need to be all embossed with rounded corners and gaps between them? It all conspires to reduce the apparent click area. In fact, do the buttons Fitt’s Law right up to each other, or if you were to hit the three pixel gap (2 for borders, 1 for background) between them, would nothing happen?