Edgar Walthert
link Thursday 20th of November, 2008
There's some really nice work in the portfolio of Edgar Walthert. The type section is a particular highlight, with a really nice sketchbook of great type sketches. I'm a bit of a sucker for interesting sketchbooks — I'm pretty sure it's just jealousy, as I'm really bad at keeping sketchbooks coherent, and end up having all my drawings on random bits of paper and spread through about five books at a time.
Corporate Risk Watch
link Friday 14th of November, 2008
Inspiration comes from the strangest places.
I'm not going to rip into the meaningless corporate jargon which passes for content on this site, as others have done, just say that the design is extremely memorable, and right up my street. The heavily locked-down grid, thoughtful typography and bold navigation styles are obviously excellent, and are the first thing you'll notice when you click through. But I'm just as taken with the subtle way that CSS underlines are dropped in favour of big, uneven lines, and that the background is just ever so slightly textured with a barely noticeable 'noise'. It's these little touches that stop the rigidity of the layout from overwhelming the site, giving it a little bit of depth. I'm currently very interested in adding small handmade touches to much more 'artificial' layouts, and you should see this coming up in some of my future work.
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Bloglingua, and relaunching the Log Blog
work Monday 10th of November, 2008
It's been a while since I updated. I always knew this would happen — stuff like this is the first thing to go when life gets busy. To be honest, I thought it would happen about now, although for much worse reasons — mainly the glut of incredibly high quality games that have been/are being released right about now. But I haven't even had time to play any of those recently, with a whole bunch of work on my plate (both during the day and as a freelancer in the evenings) and a mildly traumatic move from my house in Stony.
Anyway, I thought it would be nice to show what I had been doing during this period of enforced absence, and we recently launched a couple of sites at work which I'm pretty happy with. You can find out more about those in the full article.
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Do as I say, not as I do
link Friday 17th of October, 2008
I've been following an interesting thread on Typophile recently, started when Olivier Deneef asked for some suggestions for his Masters project:
“ I want to work for this thesis around the book — Twenty-two things you should never do with typefaces — by Enric Jardi. For every rule he tels not to do, i want to prove that it can be done, because type is more than rules, it's about a feeling, you cant just say how to become good type... ”
The 22 rules in question can be found on Jardi's site, along with a short preface explaining what the list is intended to acheive. Unfortunately, this text is presented in a manner which seems specifically designed to invite criticism — the preface has default linespacing and no paragraph spacing or indentation. Rules such as 'Don't get the medium wrong' and 'Make sure that the typeface does not communicate something you do not want to communicate' are particularly galling in a situation like this. Despite the wisdom of most of the items, criticism is practically assured when the text is presented with such apparent disregard for basic readability.
However, there is all kinds of cool stuff on Jardi's site. You have to work for it (the site's navigation is the ten kinds of horrible usually reserved for Flash-only sites) but it's definitely worth it. My particular favourite is this proposed branding for Montjuic Park in Barcelona. The concept — the leaf shape of the park itself and dividing it into coloured areas according to the type of facility in that area — creates a brand which could easily be scaled into the variety of usable signage required for a public space. I assume that the branding was never taken through to completion, as the logo is only described as 'proposed' — which is a shame, in my view.
My one initial criticism (that the branding would require updating whenever facilities were added or moved) soon gave way to admiration for that same idea. A brand mark which is a direct 'snapshot' of the park at any given time actually seems like a wonderful thing.
Alphabets
link Wednesday 15th of October, 2008
A brilliant collection of alphabets from designers all over the world. The beards one is particularly good, but they're all pretty special.
Via Typophile.