Found while reading Drawn! yesterday, the portfolio site of Fernando Vicente which shows some of his amazing work. I love it.

These two especially - the one on the left is called ‘Type Face’ so I just have to show it here, and the one on the right I like for the expressiveness of the laugh - it makes me smile. Go and have a look.

I’ve been meaning to write something about Oded Ezer for ages, ever since seeing his contribution to the Urban Forest Project (at right). Unfortunately I know only a little about Hebrew typography and calligraphy so I can’t write from any qualified angle on it. Ezer’s work is just amazing though, and so I add another entry to my ever-expanding Things To Learn Or Find Out More About list - Hebrew! Recently I saw a link on Notcot about his recent Ketubah project, which looks great, but I’m having a little difficulty working it out. The closeups show what appear to be cut out letterforms folded over to form new shapes, but the photos don’t say whether they’re printed to look like that or they’ve actually been cut out and stuck down again. I’m hoping the former. Below are some images of his work that I’ve saved for inspiration. Take a look at his site for more, and here for some samples of his poster work.

From Ketubah:

Other inspirational images from Oded Ezer’s site. These really are lovely.

I came across these ambigrams by Tiffany Harvey during the big Christmas/New Year break. There are some great examples in the gallery (on Flickr, of course), but these two caught my eye especially. I’m fascinated by ambigrams, and always thought words suitable for making them were fairly rare, but Harvey seems to promise any word can be made into an ambigram, even two, three or four words. Fascinating.

Wow. Want. ‘Nuff said.

This is an interesting strategy. Jos Buivenga is a type designer producing high quality, fully-featured fonts and releasing them for free through his website. Perhaps realising the seemingly universal attitude that it’s perfectly OK to steal fonts, rather than accepting that they are licensed software products, he allows you to download his fonts with no restriction and just providing an option to donate through Paypal. I don’t know what the solution is to software and digital media piracy, but I’m not sure the honour system is the right way to go about it. I hope Jos Buivenga gets lots of donations, because the quality of his work deserves reward.

I’m particularly liking Fertigo. I think I can make use of that at work (and yes, we will donate):

And I just like this image:

Who says banner ads don’t work? I was looking at this beautiful building (check out the staircase) and there was a banner link to the 2007 winners of the KRob Architectural Delineation, Architectural Drawing & Illustration Competition. The winning pieces are fantastic, well worth a look. Preview samples here:

Now this is what I call a character set. Swissmiss pointed me at this incredible new typeface by Alejandro Paul, on Veer. I have a strong urge to buy it just to play at typing things and seeing the ligatures appear. I mean, some of these ligatures are whole words!

This robot has been programmed to write out the entire Martin Luther bible in a calligraphic style on a long roll of paper. I wonder if they’re going to bind the pages up and publish it? What the robot does is a step up from print in reproducing the manuscripts made by monks, which is great, though it doesn’t say (though my German isn’t good enough to read the product page) whether the robot arm applies differential pressure and angle of stroke depending on the previous letters, or how far across the line it is, or how far down the page, like a human being would. If it did, then that would in my mind give the work a magical, delicate quality of something written. I don’t want to get all tedious and mystical about some missing innate human or animistic quality, but I like the idea of a robot arm having to stretch a bit at the edges of the page, altering its stroke weight after a particularly arduous cadel previously, all that kind of stuff. I can imagine a whole series of publications that could be given this ‘hand done’ treatment. We could have special editions of books made by one-time-only robot arms, ones that get tired after a number of copies and can’t be made to write any more, books made by robots with a signature style, with minds of their own. All eventually of course leading to original works created by machines so advanced we have to refer to them as human (or post-human) too…

If you fancy emailing me about this, do go ahead, but read this first!

• I didn’t make this robot, I’m not involved with the team who made it, and what I know about it is written above
• I am well aware that the original version of the Bible being written was printed, but I’m also aware that the Gutenberg Press had features to attempt to replicate human variation in manuscript writing. My comments are a hope for the future of this machine and not a ‘lament’ or a complaint about it.
• Please don’t be unpleasant. I have no idea what is so upsetting to people about this robot, but please don’t send me insults.

Found via Computerlove, the portfolio site of James Stone, mimeArtist. It’s a nice site, but the thing that got my attention was the great logo, it’s beautifully expressive and simple. Wish I’d thought of it.

Just found this, Robert Stadler Installation in a Parisian Church, which is wonderful. I am, amongst other things, a great fan of French Rococo architecture, and to add a digital typographic mark into it just works so well for me.