We Made This

FontStruct

Dear Internet. We find that we have waaaay too much time on our hands. It would be really splendid if you could find a way to suck away some of that time. Perhaps a few hours each day? Or, you know, more? Excellent, thanks!

Oh. Dear. Lord.

Say goodbye to lunch breaks, coffee breaks, tea breaks, going home early, idle chit chat, or frankly, any semblance of a life. Those clever kids (well, actually, the insanely clever Rob Meek) over at FontShop have created FontStruct, a quite brilliant online type generator.

It's a very Web 2.0 UGC (User Generated Content for the lo-tech among you) kinda thing. You play around with a deceptively simple interface to create your own geometric letter forms. It uses a set of 'bricks' and... well, heck, go take a look. You have to register, which only takes a minute or so, and then you're off. You can browse other people's (frankly astounding) efforts, and even download them (as a .ttf file) for free. Or go the whole hog, and create your own typeface. You can keep it just for yourself (if you're a bit of a grouch), or share it with the world.

Fontastic.

Le Tour de Blanche

We’re not going to be posting for a few days, as we’re heading down to the Isle of Wight. (We’re convinced that it could be the UK’s version of The Hamptons, but no-one’s agreeing with us on that one so far.)

We’re not just heading down for seaside rock and coloured sands though – on Sunday we’re taking part in the first Tour De Blanche, a round-the-island cycle ride in aid of the wonderful Teenage Cancer Trust. If you’re a good cyclist it’s a pleasant day's ride; if you’re not so hot, it’s a gruelling 8 hour marathon up and down an exhaustingly hilly coastal route. We’ll leave it to you to figure out which group we fall into.

If you feel like donating a bit of your hard-earned, just go to our Justgiving page and punch in your details.

Have a great weekend.

The Dog & Wardrobe

You ever have one of those days where aimless meandering leads you to find untold and unexpected riches?

We were out and about in the London Fields area on Saturday, and had exactly that sort of experience when we stumbled across the brilliant and wonderful The Dog & Wardrobe.

It's a little shop that only opens on Saturdays, from 10 to 5 (though you can visit by appointment during the week) and is crammed full with vintage and contemporary furniture and curios, as well as contemporary art and fashion. You could pick up an old canvas backpack, a Decemberists screenprint, a vintage animal skull, a retro tricycle, and... well, the list goes on and on. It's one of those shops you just want to hug.

The stock changes constantly, so there's always something new to check out. And the owners of the store, Vishal Gohel and Jane Money also offer a full spec design service.

Deeply lovely.

Supreme T-shirts

Looks like the design kids over at Supremebeing (watch out, noisy link) have got all printy for their Spring Summer Collection.

There's their CMYK Process T-shirt up top, with registration marks and everything, available in grey and white, from Stand-Out.net.

And then there's their set of individual Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black Ts, available from Urbanindustry.co.uk.

Very tasty. Thrill your friends with your great fashion sense, then bore them for hours with explanations about the intricacies of lpi vs dpi, spot varnishes and stochastic screening.

FOOTNOTE: We're still hankering after a rather lovely CMYK T that the V&A shop was selling for a while, which had a circle for each of the CMYK letters, each of which looked like they were dripping slightly. If anyone knows who did them, or where they're available, do give us a shout. Cheers!

FOOTNOTE UPDATE: Ah, how good is this? Danny Heffer, the designer of the V&A CMYK T-shirt, reads this blog, and got in touch. Find him and his stuff at the We Make It Better blog (we're really hoping that name's not in reference to us...)

Loving the interweb.

Seeking inspiration

Ready for another huge dose of design goodness?

The Seventh annual Friends of St Bride Library Conference is almost upon us, taking place on Thursday 15 and Friday 16 May 2008, and focusing on the subject of Inspiration.

The programme has just been announced, and it's a fantastic line-up of wonderful design folk, including Karl Martens, Jake Tilson, Erik Spiekermann, Rian Hughes and Susanna Edwards.

We went along last year, and had a fantastic time. Read all about it here.

Tickets for this year are £100, or £50 for students.

Looks like this feed is not valid

Humble grovellings to readers who subscribe to our RSS feed – there’s a problem with Feedburner feeds today, which Typepad assure us they’re trying to fix. Hopefully, normal service will be resumed shortly.

Thankyouverymuch.

UPDATE
Fixed now. Cheerss for your patience.

Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press

First off, apologies if you’ve already seen this posted over on AceJet170, but it's just too good to allow even the smallest chance of you missing it.

Last night BBC4 screened a fantastic show with the ever wonderful Mr Stephen Fry going in search of the story behind Johann Gutenberg, the man who created the printing press, and so brought about the existence of mass communication.

We taped the show, part of BBC4’s Medieval Season, and only watched it today – it’s simply brilliant. Fry travels round Europe discovering how Gutenberg put his press together, and gets down and dirty creating type matrices, hand-making paper, and teaming up with Alan May to re-create an original one-pull press, just like the one old Johann would have used.

Fry’s obvious enthusiasm and wonder for his subject are utterly infectious.

Now, if the show had aired just a few months back, none of this information would do you any good. But thanks to the brilliance of the BBC and the power of the interweb, you can still watch the show on the BBC’s iPlayer.* You’ve got until next Monday to catch it. We highly highly recommend you do so.

UPDATE - Philip Crocker from the production company that made the show, Wavelength Films, has been in touch, and the programme’s being repeated on Friday April 25 at 9pm on BBC 2. Hoorah!

And, that’s not all. On Tuesday 6 May at 6.30 the British Library is hosting a demonstration by Alan May of the one-pull press created for the show. Full information and booking here.

Printing history goodness all round.

*Except if you’re living outside the UK. Sorry.

Radiolab

Regular readers of the We Made This blog will by now know that we’re all about visual culture, in its myriad different forms. But we’re also aware that there is some other incredibly good stuff out there; the sort of stuff that doesn’t always enter your head through your peepers.

So we wanted to share a bit of aural pleasure with you, in the form of the fantastically brilliant Radiolab show coming out of WNYC public radio in New York.

They desribe the show like this: ‘Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we'll feed it with possibility.’

The latest season has explored laughter, lying, man-made life, and the various incarnations of War of the Worlds. Each show is around an hour long, and each one is a conceptual and audio delight. They’re available as downloadable MP3s and also as podcasts. Go listen.

Linksplats

After reading this article over on the Creative Review blog, we were reminded that we'd been meaning to do a bit of research into QR codes.

QR (Quick Response) codes are a bit like barcodes, but instead of needing a barcode scanner to read them, you can use a mobile phone camera (either one with the software built in, like the Nokia N95, or by downloading a code reader onto your phone). The QR codes generally contain a machine readable version of a URL, so that your camera decodes the image and opens up the relevant website in your phone's web-browser.

It's essentially a physical hyperlink, or 'hardlink'. (So if you use your phone to take a picture of the code above, it should shoot your phone's web-browser across to the best design blog in town.)

This tech is big in Japan (where mobile technology is generally a few leaps and bounds beyond ours), having been developed in 1994 by Denso Wave. But it's gradually popping up over here, and will probably become more and more popular as phone technology catches up. (Nokia pre-installs code readers on its N93, N93i, N95 and E90 phones, and this page from their site lists places you can download readers for their other phones.)

If you're not rocking a Nokia, Kaywa produce one of the leading code readers, which you can try installing on your phone – though it doesn't work on iPhones yet. (But if you've been naughty and have a jailbroken iPhone, you can download the iMatrix reader.)

You can also create your own QR code over with Kaywa.

(And the Kaywa blogs are pretty informative too: mobile.kaywa.com and www.kaywa.com/vnews.)

People are finding all sorts of interesting ways to play with the codes. Here's just a few of the bits we've discovered so far:

Semapedia is encouraging people to create QR codes as stickers to put up at physical spaces, linking back to the relevant Wikipedia articles. (The Semapedia site has also got a useful drop down list of phone makes and models, linking to the code readers that work with them.)

The Creative Review article mentioned up top is about Emma Cott, who creates clothing with codes that link to your online profiles (Facebook, MySpace etc.)

On a bit of a sidenote, we reckon this area is potentially a gold mine for networking events. We've always wanted to be able to pass a scanner across a crowd of people at a party to see who's who. We can really see a market for a small smart badge versions of QR codes, so that you can advertise yourself to a room. And since you get to choose which webpage the badge links to, you're in control of the information people can access about you - it could be a page you've posted just for that event, your business website, or even something entirely unrelated...

There's another Facebook application "Add to Friends" Gear which does a similar thing, creating some rather dubiously designed stuff that features links to your profile.

For those with a little more fashion sense, you can pick up The Invader, a limited edition scarf, which is a collaboration between Kaywa and Office Lendorff.

2d-code.co.uk is a blog with lots of stuff about QR codes, including a story about how you can screw with your QR codes to make them look more intersting, as they allow for up to 30% deterioration of the code while remaining readable. Which means the BBC could stick their name into their code.

qrcode.es is a Spanish site all about QR codes, inluding a feature about using them as an updated version of laserquest in a battle round a shopping store, and a short story competition, where you have to create short stories (just 100 characters including spaces) that can be embedded in QR codes.

They also do some t-shirts and products, inluding this baby's bib which decodes as "My parents are freaks. Please, adopt me!". Which is, frankly, genius.

And finally, there's a (currently fairly shallow) Flickr pool of people doing interesting stuff (stamps, stickers, artworks) with the codes .

We love these little linksplats.

Admittedly at the moment they tend to be ham-fistedly stuck onto adverts and posters rather than properly integrated, which looks rubbish; but hopefully as people start playing with them more and more, they'll start to appear in more refined and witty ways.

Pirate Supplies Store

Inspiration. It's a good thing. And this TED talk from Dave Eggers has it by the bucket load.

Dave Eggers is the guy behind McSweeney's Quarterly, and the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

McSweeney's is based in San Francisco, and they found themselves needing to rent some office space. They discovered a great place, and decided that they could use part of the space as a tutoring centre to help local kids with their writing skills.

Part of the rental deal was that the building had to be used partly for retail. Since the interior of the space had stripped floorboards and wooden beams, and reminded them of the inside of a boat, they opened up a Pirate Supply Store, kind of as a joke, though they now find that it's making good money. You can pick up eye patches for day and evening wear, peg legs, and supplies to combat scurvy.

The tutoring centre, 826 Valencia, is doing fantastically well, allowing kids to hang out with professional writers, and even to publish books together. And other similar centres have been set up across the US, including a Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store where you can get fitted for a cape and buy a complete secret identity.

The TED Conference gives out grants each year for its TED Prize - created as a way of taking the great ideas from the conferences, and making them bigger and better. The winners of the prize are granted a wish, and this year Eggers was granted one:

"I wish that you - you personally and every creative individual and organization you know - will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have 1,000 examples of innovative public - private partnerships."

Which is pretty damn brilliant.

On the back of that, he's set up the Once Upon A School website to coordinate the project.

Eggers' TED talk lasts twenty-five minutes, but heck, it's Friday - take a bit of time, and get inspired. And if anyone in London fancies doing something on the back of this, or is already doing something, drop us a line. We'd love to be involved.

Print Liberation

A rather lovely thing about running a blog is that people from all over the place get in touch out of the blue to tell you about projects they're working on. And we reckon we've been pretty lucky so far, as nearly all the stuff that's been sent our way has been dead interesting.

One such project is the new book coming up from the Print Liberation studio in Philadelphia. It's a primer on how to start screen printing using really basic elements, and is written by Nick Paparone & Jamie Dillon from the studio, in collaboration with Luren Jenison, with illustrations by Tim Gough. It looks fantastic - we can't wait to get our hands on a copy.

Print Liberation is published on July 25, by F+W Publications, the kids behind How, ID and Print magazines.

Sterling designs

It's all change at the Royal Mint today (sorry, there's just no way to avoid that pun), as it revealed the new designs for for the coinage of the United Kingdom.

Rather brilliantly, the designs are the work of a 26 year old graphic designer, Matthew Dent, chosen from an open competition that attracted over 4,000 entries. We wonder if he'll get a Blue Peter badge for his efforts?

The coins all use a heraldic shield as a linking theme – the £1 coin has the full shield, and the rest of the coins feature segments from it, making up a sort of gappy jigsaw puzzle that'll set you back 88p. It's a kind of post-heritage feel.

The new designs will be hitting your pocket gradually during the coming year.

China Design Now

China Design Now opened recently at the V&A, so we made our way over there this weekend to check it out.

The show is divided into three sections, each representing one of China's major cities: Shenzhen (population: 10 million; average age: 27), Shanghai and Beijing. Each of those sections loosely represents a particular area of design, so that the Shenzhen section mainly features graphic design, Shanghai is all about fashion, and Beijing gets busy with lots of new architecture (much of it by some familiar western names).

Given the staggeringly vast subject the show is covering, it can naturally only offer an itsy-bitsy little taster; but if you view it as just that, it does its job brilliantly.

And there's some great stuff in the gift shop. We picked up a Hi Panda vinyl toy by Shirtflag (that's its box up top).

The show runs until 13 July.

Black is the new white

Google (in the UK only) has slipped into a little black number today.

There was a lot of coverage when the search page Blackle was set up, allegedly saving power by leaving pixels ‘unlit’ in black instead of Google's usual white, but it turned out that most modern computer displays use the same amount of power no matter what colour the background is.

So instead, Google are doing this to raise awareness of Earth Hour, which is taking place this evening at 8pm GMT. You can read more about it on this page from Google.

Early Designs

Our friend Andy over at Now in Colour has set up an interesting project that kicks off today.

He's been asking the great and the good of the creative industry to post up their old college work, as part of what he calls a ‘raindrop idea’, where the individual contribution is small, but where it collectively has a noticeable effect. (A good example of this being done really well is the Blog Action Day that we took part in back in October.)

Alistair’s picked a couple of projects from his time at Central Saint Martins, where he studied on the BA Graphic Design course:

First up is Bob Book, a story about “the brief life and untimely death of an elastic band”. I put this together in my first year at St Martins, and it’s still one of my favourite projects. The typography is rubbish (14pt Arial? I didn't have a clue...), and the mix of photography and hand drawn images is peculiar, but it’s got real heart to it, and that just about carries it through. And I’m still quite proud of the binding, which is just a series of elastic bands stretched across two corrugated plastic boards. You can see the full book on this Flickr slideshow.

Next up is a series of pictures I took of Simon Pegg and Jessica Stephenson when they were writing the second series of the TV show Spaced. It was just a great way to spend a day. As a project it reminded me that there’s a real freedom you have at college to get in touch with people, and it’s hugely important to make the most of that.

You can see more work from other creative folk at the Early Designs Flickr group.

Reference Library

Reference Library is the fantastic blog from Philadelphia based designer Andy Beach (you can see some of his work in the recent book of hand drawn type Hand Job).

The blog is principally a pictorial compendium of the various bits and bobs that Andy failed to win on Ebay.

Which could be a bit depressing.

But instead of getting down about it, he’s created a rich visual feast, ranging from lettering to apparel to storefronts. (And saved a huge amount of cash in the process.)

He’s a damn fine curator. Go take a look.

Jacob Holdt

We made our way over to the Photographers’ Gallery on Saturday to check out the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

Four photographers were nominated for the prize, and it was won by Esko Männikkö from Finland for his retrospective show Cocktails.

But for us, the real winner is Jacob Holdt, nominated for his recent book United States 1970 – 1975, published by the rather brilliant Steidl.

Here's what they have to say about the book:

In the early 1970s, when Jacob Holdt first arrived in the US with 40 dollars in his pocket, he planned to travel quickly across the country to South America. But, totally shocked and fascinated by what he discovered, he ended up staying five years. His family could scarcely believe the letters he sent them detailing the poverty he saw, so his father sent him a cheap amateur camera in order that Holdt could send home proof of his claims. Living as a vagabond, selling his blood twice a week, hitch-hiking over 100,000 miles, he depicted an incredible and unique portrait of America and its underclass. He befriended whomever offered him a lift in their car and a lift frequently became an offer to stay a few days. He never said no and ended up visiting more than 350 homes where he photographed the people he lived with: poor blacks from the ghettos, millionaires, junkies, members of the Ku Klux Klan. Holdt’s images echo the pictures of the F.S.A. and together with the work of another Dane Jacob Riis, his series have widely inspired the film-maker Lars von Trier for the movies Dogville and Manderlay.

The book features a selection of images from his American Pictures series, originally published in a bestselling book in 1977, and toured worldwide as a slideshow ever since. He’s an incredible man – just check out his curriculum vitae.

The show runs at the gallery until 6 April 2008, and is really fantastic. If you get a chance, go.

We Made This is 2

Well, caramba, where does the time go? Seems like only yesterday we were celebrating our first birthday, and now here we are again, getting busy with cake and candles. (We're assuming the presents are in the post...)

In the intervening time, blogging seems to have finally entered the mainstream consciousness. Hopefully we won't have to put up with any more articles debating whether or not blogs are useful - quite simply, as with any other form of creative expression, there's some good stuff, some bad stuff, some incredible stuff, and some complete wank. And being the intelligent, sophisticated creatures that we are, we'll pick and choose which ones to read, and ditch the ones that don't manage to continually tickle our fancy.

(With that in mind, we've recently updated our list of Blogs We Dig (in the right hand column), so why not make a cup of tea, kick off your shoes, and take a browse through all manner of design brilliance?)

And, if you'll forgive us a moment of unbridled schmaltz, thank you all for your feedback and comments - do keep them coming. It really is great to be hooked up to such a lovely bunch of people.

All together now: group hug... mmmm!

Uncredited

A great big thank-you to everyone who has added to our list of rather fine motion graphics - Alistair has been sellotaping all the suggested films into his collection of favourites on YouTube, so do take a look. If you know of any other bits of great typographic film, just sling the links our way.

And if that whets your appetite, you might want to take a look at the decidedly brilliant Uncredited book by Gemma Solana and Antonio Boneu.

A comprehensive collection of graphic design and opening titles in movies, it features a simply staggering amount of work from the greats of title design, and even has a disc with a stack of QuickTime movies of those titles (though it would have been fantastic if it had been a DVD instead).

Lovely stuff.

Harmonie Intérieure

Harmonie Intérieure is the fantastic online shop selling delicious designs by French couple Frédérique and Fabien. They've created a stunning range of interior decorations, including large format vinyl stickers, mounted photo prints and posters.

Our favourite is this typographic sticker from their Temps Retrouvé collection. You can pick and choose from a range of colours and sizes.

(They've also got lots of lovely images over on Flickr.)

Magnifique.