After I wrote about The Dot and the Line animation, Nigel Brachi contacted me to tell me about the book which came out a few years before the film. He kindly sent me some scans of the pages, which show just how faithfully the animators followed the drawing style. The typography of the text is often rather nice too:

This is a fantastic piece of illustration and lettering. Well worth watching. It’s all good, but some of the illustrations that I find noteworthy are the pavement-level view of walking feet (0:27), the yellow and black spread (1:04) and the multiple mouths (1:54).

People are strange from Denis Fongue on Vimeo.

This caught my eye a while back, on NOTCOT, and it turns out there’s a whole range of packaging with it which is all pretty nice. I prefer these ones though, they’re like some cross between newspaper wrap and utilitarian shopkeeping units - it reminds me of how supermarkets sometimes design their own-brand ‘basics’ ranges, which (almost) always end up looking far better than the non-basics stuff. I’m not sure about the treatment of the two Os though, the counters look more like funky bullets somehow. Have a look at the rest of the Asylum site too, there’s plenty of interesting stuff on there.

I was having a look through Behance’s Typography Served website and found this. It looks like it’s in Jihad Lahham’s portfolio (well, I think it does) but on his site there’s a post with pics and nothing else about it. Need info!

Antonio Carusone mailed me to announce his new project, The Grid System, a site (obviously enough) about grid systems. Now, I don’t normally post about things from mailouts or press releases, but since I’m particularly partial to a good grid and I’ve already found a couple of useful things on this site that I’ve found interesting and even bookmarked, I reckon I’d end up writing about this anyway. So, go and have a look.

What did I bookmark though? Well, Syncotype for one. It’s a bookmarklet, i.e. a bit of javascript you can bookmark and then run on any page you’re viewing, that overlays a baseline grid on your page. I have an 18px baseline grid on this site, which often ends up being broken by images I post not having a multiple of that as their height. It’s certainly something I could solve with a bit of extra javascript of my own (or even something server side) to ensure the height of a containing element of an image is indeed a multiple of 18px or a round number of ems, but I’ve not got around to it yet.

The 18px baseline grid. If you have default text settings in your browser, and use Syncotype with an 18px grid, this should all line up. Should.

Also, there’s the problem of whether such automatic measures are even appropriate. For a while I cropped and trimmed all images to a set of heights to match the baseline, but sometimes it just doesn’t fit the image and I found adding extra padding to the container (a paragraph tag in this case) actually spoiled the vertical rhythm of the page. I decided that as this site is a single column that it would be the apparent vertical rhythm that was important, rather than the real one. I wonder how other people solve the problem? Or even if they do…

I’ve been following this series of articles by Johnson Banks about their Art from Barrels project for Glenfiddich. The aim of the project was to get across the length of time it takes to make a barrel of Glenfiddich Single Malt, and the end results are pretty interesting. I haven’t got all that much to say about it, especially as the articles explain it all pretty well, other than to say I’ve discovered I like sandblasted letters in charred wood:

Two of my favourite animations of all time are the advert H5 did for Areva, and their Royksopp video. I can watch them over and over again; they’re so good. So I went to the H5 website recently to see if there was anything else they’d done like that, and found the video for Alex Gopher. I’m sure I’ve seen it before somewhere, but it was a long time ago and I hadn’t made the connection it was done by H5 too. It’s available to view on YouTube, but you can see it on H5‘s (all flash) website by clicking ‘films’, then ‘clips’, then ‘alex gopher’.

Anyway, I like things like this, where the label is the thing itself, and it reminds me of the National Geographic trailers for Seconds from Disaster that I linked to before. I’m thinking it would be amusing to remake Powers of Ten in this style - zooming into the word ‘galaxy’ to see it made up of widely spaced words like ‘star’ and ‘nebula’, and so on, down to the sub-atomic level, with everything its own label.

Screen captures from ‘The Child’

Screens from the Areva advert, the Royksopp video, and this rather good public information film by Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

Talking of labels becoming the object itself, there was a short film, I think on the Sci-Fi channel, about a post-apocalyptic future where the apparently normal, happy, consumerist lifestyle everyone leads is in fact an illusion. There are many layers of unpleasant illusions underneath the ‘nice’ one to stop people trying to break free and see the real world. I particularly remember the ‘real world’ in the film as being made up of cardboard boxes labelled with the name of the object it was supposed to be, and a big barcode (the name set in Helvetica, natch), with one scene showing a load of cardboard boxes labelled as ‘Black Leather Briefcase’ going through some device (gotta love sci-fi) and emerging fully-clad in the illusion of black leather briefcases. I’m sure the film is nowhere near as good or as profound as I remember it, but does anyone know what it was?