Have a look at these great typographic maps of city neighbourhoods from ORK. There’s only Chicago and Brooklyn at the time of writing, but coming soon are Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston. I can’t wait for the Manhattan one.

They remind me a little of this typographic map of London, though I’d be interested to see London represented in the same style as the ORK ones. Well, that and other cities of the world too.

(via swissmiss)

[UPDATE: The Manhattan one is now available]

Discovered over on Fubiz, this beautiful animation from zero to ten using imagery from the arts of bonsai and ikebana. This really is a beautiful short film, and it reminded me of something I’d seen before, so a little bit of checking through my saved files and links I realise I saw some of the preparatory work on artless. In fact, I wrote about it here. The artwork is by Shun Kawakami, Illustration, Suibokuga, Drawing by Tadashi Ura and the photography (?) by Taisuke Koyama

The first picture here is from artless, the remainder are stills from the animation.

Another great article on pingmag: VEB Typoart: The East German Type Betriebsstätte. Go and read it, it’s got a good history of the organisation and on Karl-Heinz Lange, designer of Minima (both pictured at the end of this article). I’m thinking of ordering the limited edition Freundschaftpacket.

I’m particularly fascinated by these two bits from the article. The second being from the interview with four members of Typoart Freunde:

At Typoart, the principle “frugality and effectiveness” lead us to work with representatives from the printing enterprises to develop a type program that met all the important requirements: a Renaissance roman for literature, like Garamond, a classical, like Bodoni or Didot, then a slab-serif, for example Clarendon. There had to be something from each major style. Naturally also sans-serif, in different styles, like Helvetica and Futura. The “Zentrag” would even request imitations of specific western-made typefaces they couldn’t afford to license.

It’s the history of VEB Typoart, as an example of the fate that many GDR businesses met after the German reunification. Also, to the very end, their working methods were so modern and advanced. Unlike in West Germany, type design in the GDR wasn’t subject to the pressure of business competition. So, typefaces could be created with more care and craftmanship. You could truly call it Schriftkunst [typographic art]: No effort was spared in order to stay on the cutting edge.

So this is fascinating. They had to copy western designs (the article makes mention of Times New Roman) and yet the work they were producing themselves was of a higher quality than those western ones. They were working at the cutting edge, producing the best work, and yet when the business was taken over after reunification, it was run by someone not interested in type, and the place went under and the typefaces were all nearly lost. It reminds me of other businesses producing excellent products, most notably Adobe, which are now run by accountants and managers rather than by the engineers and designers who develop and use the products. Of course a business must have managers and accountants, but why must they be placed at the very pinnacle of the organisation? Their motivations can only be to profit and organisational efficiency, rather than to creativity and excellence. VEB Typoart avoided this for much of its life by operating under a soviet system where profit was not a motivation (and organisational efficiency came about through a scarcity of resources, rather than SMART objectives and the like) and collapsed under a new system with a rush for profits as an advertising agency. I guess it proves to me once again that placing managers, accountants and administrators in control of creative professionals always seems like a good idea to managers, accountants and administrators, and almost never works to improve productivity and creativity.

Browsing Design Observer, I came across a link to this short documentary on YouTube about Julius Popp and his work. He’s created a machine to take text from various online sources and display key words from it using water. The screenshots below give a hint of it, but are no match for the video. Go watch it, it really is incredible.

This Flickr set has some great images of the 1923 ATF Specimen Book. Later in the set are some wonderful images from other sources, including the one at right which is great - can’t beat blackletter and, er, pinkletter. I’m liking the monograms too, which you can see on the original set here.

The car everyone would love to own!

Well, based on this fabulous brochure, who could blame them? Found on the Old Car Manual Project, another of those collections-of-things sites that you bookmark because you know you’re going to find them useful someday. This site is a great resource for 20th Century typography, illustration and layout, not to mention car design.

I recently came across the excellent site, Liam’s Pictures from Old Books, and while browsing came across scans from Letters & Lettering: A Treatise With 200 Examples.

When I had first decided I wanted to design typefaces I looked around for books on the subject, and yet could never find any book that worked as a primer, a beginner’s how-to manual*. If I’d have come across Letters & Lettering back then I’d have found a very good book from which to learn about constructing letterforms. The examples you can see here (and lots more on the page on Liam’s site) are lovely and clear and show the construction of, say, Trajan-esque forms. There are other examples in the book, blackletter and modern type forms, but it’s the large outlines that interest me here. This site will definitely go in the bookmarks.

* I did eventually find Leslie Cabarga’s Logo, Font and Lettering Bible

Something I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. This site is a veritable treasure trove of calligraphic inspiration. Three examples of my favourites below. Visit the site for much more.

I just read this pingmag article on manga translator Simona Pini. I’m enjoying the idea of sound effects and actions being represented as graffiti-style japanese text.

Not really related to type or illustration, but it comes under the definitions of sculpture and architecture, which is close enough for me.

I found this a while back on pingmag, on an article on chocolate. Unfortunately, like many sites for exhibition spaces, they seem to want to hide all the information from you and expect you to turn up to the thing on a mere hint of a title and a brief synopsis, so no link to more images, background info or what the piece at right is about. Whatever, I like it. I love maps, especially 3D ones and antique ones, like this one of London.

Related to this, I came across a load of great panoramas of Coruscant, the city-wide world from the Star Wars series. I am particularly fond of this one.