A couple of pieces I threw together for the new Typophile Type Battle — this week, book covers. Your book's title is whichever article Wikipedia's random selector chooses for you, and your imagery is taken from Life magazine's photo archives based on a search on the title. Obviously I was happy as a pig in shit, throwing together my love of random seeds, found imagery, and typography. Hopelessly outclassed, but happy.
Also, my first attempt. Thanks, Wikipedia.
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.
No Friday Typography this week — I'm going to be away for the next couple of weeks, which probably means updates will be pretty sparse. In the meantime, I thought I'd share this quick project I did for a good mate of mine, Bob Cuthbertson. His band, Black Jash, are sending out a limited-release promo at the moment, and he wanted each one to be as unique as possible (anyone who knows Bob's work will know that it features a really strong handmade aesthetic). So he sent an extremely colourful brief to a whole list of folks, asking for some responses — here's a few that I came up with.
Had other stuff to do this week, so only had a few minutes to put this together. Didn't want to leave it til later in the week (again). So you get the omnipresent Helvetica. Also, I made this one into an iPhone wallpaper. Don't say I never get you anything nice.
Update - Okay, dropped the ball with week three. The image I put up on Friday was so bad it had to die — less than ten minutes later, in fact. Anyway, it's Friday again tomorrow, so I thought I'd better put something together quickly.
The typeface is Museo — one of my favourite fonts in the world, by the excellent Jos Buivenga. Jos makes all kinds of really high quality typefaces, and releases most of them absolutely free — and those that he does charge for are more than worth the money. Seriously, go and buy some fonts from him.
Typography Friday! This week I based it on the wonderful Braid (I'm going to put up a full writeup of the game tomorrow). Again, it features a typeface that I've been wanting to use for a little while (the slightly wonderful Estilo Script).
A few days ago, Jack Shedd pointed out the Typography Friday Flickr group — where a whole bunch of illustrators post weekly type-based images on a Friday afternoon.
Recently, I've been feeling a little depressed about how little personal work I manage to do these days, and quick, one-off images are exactly the sort of things I never find time for. In my first couple of years of college, I really enjoyed turning out pointless, purely decorative pieces which just summed up what I was thinking at the time. So I'm going to attempt to set my lunchbreak aside each Friday, and turn out a really quick piece which hopefully will become a little series. Here's part one!
I've always been pretty fascinated by playing cards. Unfortunately, I have the memory capacity of a moderately stupid goldfish, which prevents me from retaining any card games I'm taught for longer than around twenty minutes.
As a format, however, playing cards are pretty enticing to me — combining illustration, sequence, typography and even ancient traditions. When I've come across 'artistic' playing cards before, I've generally been underwhelmed (with a few notable exceptions). I often feel that designers miss a trick by failing to respect the traditions present in playing cards — beautiful, characterful illustration of people, with an almost editorial necessity for layout. All too often, these decks of cards are simply a way of presenting 52 unmatched illustrations in a small format.