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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The new Brit Insurance Designs of the Year show started last week at the Design Museum, taking over from where the old Designer of the Year show left off in 2006. We went along on Saturday to take a look, and we'll tell you all about that in just a moment.
But first, a gentle rant.
The show is, as you can hardly have failed to notice, sponsored by Brit Insurance. They've stuck their name right in front of it. The awards that go with the show are sponsored by them too. They're called the Brit Insurance Design Awards. And frankly, that's just rubbish. Instead of being mutually beneficial, it's mutually detrimental. It makes the Design Museum look cheap, happy to bend over, grab its ankles and get its elegantly shaped butt branded by its corporate master; and it makes Brit Insurance look greedy and egomaniacal. Instead of making the event and awards the most important thing, they've made their sponsorship the important thing. And that doesn't make us like them much.
This is a grim trend that's been happening wherever sponsorship occurs (Carling Academy anyone?). Don't get us wrong, it's a very good thing that corporate sponsorship exists. It makes stuff happen, in bigger and better ways than would otherwise be possible. But, please, let's restore some sense of modesty, elegance and sophistication to the way it's done. Wouldn't the Designs of the Year show, as supported by Brit Insurance, sound far better? Patronage, not prostitution*.
Rant over.
The show itself is a great mix of work arranged by discipline: Architecture, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Interactive, Product and Transport. You might question some of the entries, but it's a really valuable opportunity to see what's being going on across the design spectrum in the past year. It's also great to be able to play with some of the entries, including the Nintendo Wii, Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori's TENORI-ON digital musical instrument, and Ross Phillips' Replenishing Body Kiosk (pictured above, being used by some kids in a much looser way than intended).
In the graphics section, we were particularly pleased to see the Butt Book
Winners in each section, and one overall winner, will be announced in March.
* The fact that Peter Saville's "THIS IS NOT A BROTHEL THERE ARE NO PROSTITUTES AT THIS ADDRESS" sticker is one of the graphics entries feels deeply ironic.
We have a bit of a love/hate thing going on with the D&AD lectures. Sometimes they're utterly brilliant, with compelling speakers who talk with passion and wit about their work. Other times they're boring and banal displays of rampant self-love.
But it looks like the current president Simon Waterfall has done a bang-up job by inviting some really interesting speakers to come along for the 2008 series, and he gets extra points for nicking the Pecha Kucha format for one of the talks.
The line up is:
13 March
Nick Bell, graphic designer, and creative director of Eye magazine
17 April
The Pecha Kucha night, with speakers from Digit, Hi-Res!, Poke and AllofUs amongst others
30 April
Bob Greenberg from R/GA, creative genius behind the motion graphics for Se7en
22 May
Sir Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art
5 June
Amsterdam based graphic design group Experimental Jetset
Apart from Nick Bell, who's speaking in Manchester, the talks all take place at Logan Hall at the Institute of Education in London (near Russell Square).
So, cheerio to 2007, and hey there 2008, how you doing?
With the predictable glut of articles and features about the year ahead currently littering every magazine and newspaper you pick up, kudos to The Guardian for deciding to run with a pre-emptive review of the noughties, and particularly so for designing the article (in the G2 section) so beautifully. We highly recommend you nip out and pick up a copy.
We wanted to link out to the whole feature from here, but interestingly the Guardian Unlimited website has chopped it up into separate segments, and has also somehow forgotten to provide a link to it from their homepage.
Which is odd.
But as such, it rather neatly demonstrates how print media can still do some stuff far better than online media. Don't get us wrong, we love the Guardian site; but it can't (yet) present an article with the same pace and elegance as the newspaper.
For those of you who can't get your hands on a copy, here are links to the elements of the feature:
The way we live now
The event
The face
The meal
The look
The soundtrack
The celebrity
The building
The fertility panic
The art
The book
The internet
The big Melt
The TV
The Superpower
And here's hoping that the parts of the Guardian site still wearing their old clothes (as all the articles above are) soon switch into their shinier threads. (Compare and contrast: the soundtrack article above in old clothes and in new clothes.)
