We Made This

Deliver us from evil

  

The shot above is of a piece of metal type onto which the Lord's Prayer has been cast. The surface area is about 4mm x 4mm – you could get it onto a 1st Class stamp twenty times over. We were given it as a souvenir of a visit to the fantastic Type Museum in Kennington around eight years ago. But it now looks like the museum is under threat of dismemberment:  

  

"The Type Museum in Kennington is looking like it might finally close, beginning with all its contents being moved from the museum into storage, and then the eventual break-up of the collection. Please help us prevent this from happening.  

  

The Type Museum has successfuly collected a large proportion of all the definitive historical materials relating to the art, design and manufacturing production in Britain of the typefaces in which the world's languages are communicated and recorded. This collection has been closed for two years and needs re-opening to public access, educational and scholarly use – not broken up or put into storage as is curently being proposed. The Type Museum's collections need exhibiting, curatorial and conservation development and educational workshops – not storage. This legacy is vital for the quality of education of future generations of communicators in which Britain has frequently led the world. We appeal for resources to restore and safeguard educational access to these collections."  

Sign the petition.  

  

And hey, if you know of any individual, or company, that might be able to help, drop them the link to this post. The Type Museum is a Very Good Thing – it should be saved.  

  

A font & bookends & tshirts

  

The kids over at House Industries have released their latest font, Studio Lettering, and with it they've produced a stack of tasty merchandise.  

  

If you've got a couple of hundred bucks to hand, you can pick up a pair of their rather fine ampersand bookends in cast iron (bet the shipping cost is gonna cause some damage), or for slightly less cash (and a third of the weight) you can get them in cast aluminum.   

 

  

  

Or, if your wallet's not feeling quite so hefty, you can grab an ampersand t-shirt for just $26. We're getting one sent over, and it's only costing us £20 including shipping.  

  

In your face credit crunch!

Great Ideas, Volume III

  

Well heck, it's that time of year again, and the third volume of Penguin's Great Ideas Series is about to hit the shelves (early August we're reliably informed). Once again, the bulk of the designs are by the marvellously talented David Pearson, including the magnificent The Sickness unto Death cover (above); with additional covers by Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon. Our very own Alistair Hall also got in on the act with a cover for The Evils of Revolution by Edmund Burke (below).  

  

  

You can see the complete volume on this Flickr set, and check out David Pearson's site for Volume I and Volume II. We think they're all looking great, but if we had to choose, our personal favourite is Pearson's cover for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which takes the design from the spine and simply repeats it on the front cover (below).  

  

Genius.  

Degrees of brilliance

We made our way across to a couple of the Central Saint Martins degree shows over the weekend. 

First up we checked out the MA Communication Design show at the Mall Galleries, and then the BA Graphic Design exhibition at the Bargehouse (just behind the OXO Tower on the Southbank). Both shows were really professional, and had some great bits of work, including Yukinori Motoya's Japanese Icons series, pictured above. The BA show extends across three floors of the Bargehouse, which is a simply fantastic space. 

Check out Alistair's pick of his favourites from each show over on this Flickr set. There are some weblinks with each image, though only a few of the students have got their stuff together on them so far. 

Both shows run until Thursday, full details here.

Attack of the Incredible Movie Title Screens!

  
How tasty are these? 

They're from Steven Hill's rather spectacular online collection of movie title screens. He's compiled a catalogue of over five thousand different titles, and they're a brilliant record of typographic stylings through the years. Definitely worth a browse. 

via ffffound

Moments of inspiration

We made our way along to the St Bride Annual Conference at the end of last week, and we were going to post a long, fascinating, detailed and critical analysis of it all, but fortunately Ministry of Type has beaten us to it.

The event was a bit of a hit and miss affair, with moments of brilliance mixed up with moments of not-so-brilliant, and we agree with pretty much everything Aegir at Ministry of Type has to say about it, except that we thought Lizzie Ridout's talk was really interesting, and that she's lovely.

We particularly liked the talks by typographers Jeremy Tankard and Rian Hughes. We'll post later about the gorgeous stuff Rian Hughes showed, but in the meantime, here's some shots of the book TypeBookOne that Jeremy Tankard gave out free to everyone (how great is that?) featuring a variety of his typefaces.

The Shire Types are especially tasty.

Overall, despite a few dud talks, the event was a great success - you get to meet a fascinating mix of really talented people, and are given a whole heap of what Tankard called 'mind-candy'.

Inspiring indeed.

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.

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.

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.

Motion graphics

Mmm, Saul Bass goodness.

We're just doing a bit of research ahead of a bit of work Alistair's doing with some Central Saint Martins students over the next few weeks, and we need your help.

We're looking for the best / most interesting bits of motion graphics we can find, whether they're from television, film, music videos, online, wherever. The only important thing is that they're principally typographic. Alistair's started to put a few bits together on this You Tube page, and it would be fantastic if you could drop us any links or recommendations.

Thank you thank you.