Another thing I marked as “to look at later”, merely because of the big beautiful lettering. I was wondering what on earth it was all about and only managed to find a few pictures of it from this year’s Macworld and a reference to an iTunes plugin, which may or may not be this (the site doesn’t feature anything with this lettering on it, sadly). Whatever it’s for, it’s lovely. If you know more, let me know. I found it here.
I’ve been buried in bezier-land for the past few weeks these chairs by Suzy Lelièvre, though they’re not type, illustration or lettering, appeal to my appreciation of curves; a physical world instance of beziers. They look like what you get when you try and drag a point in Illustrator and miss, dragging the line itself into some crazed loopy explosion. So yes, noted here for their appeal to all vector designers, and of course their wit.
The cover of this caught my eye the other day, partly for the design but mainly for the deliberate misspelling. It’s a nice looking thing, and the design follows through the inside of the book too. I like the Wodehouse references for the hangover names, though thankfully I’ve not had anything worse than a Broken Compass for quite some time. Not sure if that’s through moderation or worrying signs of tolerance though.
I nearly missed this. One of the Matts at Bearded Design (I’m guessing Matt Griffin) emailed to tell me about their Kickstarter project, which is to create new digital type from wood types - rare wood types. Digitisation of old types is one of those things that thrills some people and gets others in a froth, but I think this is a project that deserves some support. If anything it’ll help preserve some wood type designs that might otherwise end up as vile, execrable knick-knacks on Etsy. As they say in films and on TV, you’ve got 24 hours (as of writing, to get involved early before the project is funded on Kickstarter). Featured below is a ‘beta’ face they’ve started digitising, currently called ‘Fatboy Husky’. It’s available to download through the Kickstarter page.
Fatboy, featured on the Kickstarter page. Kerned (roughly) by me. Ahem.
Thematically related to the previous post (i.e., being about illustration) is this beautiful piece of work, a linocut by Hubert Tereszkiewicz. He’s got a couple of pieces of linocut work on his site, and the detail and quality of them is incredible. Make sure to have a look at his other work too, I particularly like the Dr Strangelove poster.
As I catch up with things I’ve marked to ‘look at later’, I see a recent post on Graphic Exchange about the new identity for Mad Brew Productions, by Adam Hill. It’s not really a type related thing but I’m very much partial to a nicely executed bit of engraving and linework, so here it is. The premise of the identity is that of ‘wearing many hats’, in that the company does ‘media’ and ‘interiors’ as well as its music production business.
I would link to the page on Graphic Exchange, but to my frequent frustration it’s a site without unique pages, if you can imagine such a bizarre thing.
I’ve seen this video by Naomi Ross linked a few times on various sites and on Twitter, but have only just got around to watching it. It’s a beautifully filmed and edited short video showing the process of creating a letterpress poster. It’s not a technical manual or anything, it’s just nice to watch and enjoy the process of creating something, lots of narrow depth of field shots, with warm, gentle grading and pleasant gently-animated labels for things. If the music were a little gentler it’d be one of those things to watch when you’re sleepy or hungover. Nice. Go and watch it here.
I’ve been sent a book by Thames & Hudson that I think is worth putting on here. The (slightly contentious) title is Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design’s Golden Age*, and shows the collection by the authors, Steven Heller and Louise Fili, of handbills, flyers, posters, photos of signs, type samples, you name it, as long as it’s got script lettering or type on it. I’ve linked to a few big online collections of ephemera before, but never seen one in book form before. The photos are clear and detailed, and while I regret some (all) of the arty cropping, it’s a pretty good resource if you want to research scripts. The collection is broken down by country of origin (rather than by era or style, say) so there are chapters for French, British, German, Italian and American scripts. Thankfully, each chapter has at the end a listing of the origins of each of the pictured pieces, which provides some much needed context; however, I think I’d prefer to have had each image captioned, even if that might have reduced the impact of some of the spreads. A personal preference, I think; your mileage may vary. It’s definitely a book to enjoy browsing through, which is what I’ve been doing, funnily enough.
Interestingly, the book design is by Jessica Hische — I immediately thought of her lettering when I saw the cover, above left.
I just read this well-written and clearly-argued piece by Stephen Few on the work of David McCandless. It expresses many of the thoughts I’ve had on the kind of ‘popular infographic’ going round, though I wouldn’t restrict my criticism to McCandless, nor would I be quite so critical of him personally. The style of work he produces is popular because it presents correlations (and sometimes, coincidences) in data in an accessible, attractive and entertaining way — the error is to assume that this represents the best of graphical analysis or that it’s intended to be viewed as such. As many commenters on this Flowingdata piece have pointed out, there’s a difference between graphical analysis and infographics, and while I disagree with the apparent thrust of their collective argument (that Stephen Few is wrong) it is an important distinction to make.
McCandless’ pieces are often beautiful, and they are indeed based on information, hence the title of his book and site, Information is Beautiful, but they rarely offer deep insight into the data. What I would like to see is the equivalent for graphical charts representing actual analysis. Time for an Analysis is Beautiful perhaps?
Another serendipitous find, this time via Font Bureau on Twitter. The linked image, of a piece by Micah Lexier and Christian Bok, got me looking for some background on it, and more info on the artist himself, and through that I found this wonderful installation: I Am The Coin, a story from the viewpoint (apparently) of a coin, told in 20,000 coins attached in a grid to a wall, with no spacing or punctuation. The bottom half of the grid has the story in a conventional readable form, while the top half has the mirror image of the text. Wonderful stuff — I’m off to have a look for more of his work.
Below is the image that Font Bureau linked to, followed by a few from the I Am The Coin website. Lexier’s site is mostly ‘under construction’ but there are a few links to further information, and of course there’s always Google.
