It’s wednesday again, time for the weekly type feature. Some people claim this weblog has no base to make typographic posts on, but I disagree; type design, by it’s very nature, is hacking the way we read.
I wanted to start this post with a font that was plaguing me in the streets. The movie ‘Dreamgirls’ has gotten quite large, and although I have no incentive to see it, the poster of the movie is a fine example of appealing design;
It’s avant-gardish, isn’t it? It’s not, but it has been designed by Herb Lubalin, orginally, the designer of the Avant-Garde logotype. Incipit is carrying exclusive rights to the digitized version, and it’s a beauty. I’ve highlighted some of my personal favorite glyphs.
Another eye-catching beauty I stumbled upon is Halvorsen, a very nice Sans-Serif font that has a very friendly atmosphere to it. I appreciate it’s delicate negative space.
In a time of many redesigns, cartoonist insider Cagle flames the recent L.A. Times redesign, counting 22 fonts. As a graphic designer, I have no idea who did this redesign, but they must surely be out of their minds. The other recent redesign, that of the Times, by pentagram, did great;
I really love the horizontal axis; it just works. Very nice redesign, keeping with the magazine’s roots, supposedly (once again, not American) and well, looking good.
In a slightly related note, Google acquired Trendalyzer. Trendalyzer makes pretty graphs, like so;
This is a trend (no pun intended); there is mounting interest in this market. Typographic representation of information and infoviz (visualization) are becoming very interesting markets for designers and coders alike. As technology progresses, both technically using a computer and it’s technology and designing new methods of representing information will become more and more interwoven, and will result in fantastic things.
I hoped to make an update with some glyphs of my own, alas, I’m afraid it will have to wait until the week-end; I am still digging into RADIUS and it’s dozen authentication protocols first. Bon bézier, au revoir.
There has been a whole buzz of news in graphics, GUI, Open Source, and all topics in between in this week, prompting for a new weekly; The Graphic Friday. I’ve mostly decided to add this weekly because there has been an influx of demand for more (regular) posts concerning typography and graphic design (or eye candy, whatever you’d like to call it ;)).
Everyone’s favorite linux distribution, Ubuntu, has gotten a website redesign. A lot of negative feedback was unearthed with the redesign, but I must say, I like it. It’s gotten a sense of information architecture now (most needed information, like a link to the forum, a link to the files, etc), and it’s, well, in line with the general ‘Human’ theme they have had going on in Gnome for a long time now – complete with rounded corners. Ooh, rounded corners, they just seem to be popping up everywhere, don’t they?
Anyway, for even sexier Open Source desktops, a Beryl equivalent of Gnome-Look was also launched today; Beryl-Themes. For those unacquainted with Beryl (you must have been living under a mountain to miss this whole ‘Linux’ thing), it’s a super-dope 3d desktop, complete with theming abilities and productivity enhancements like zoom (as seen in OS X), ‘exposé) (as seen in OS X), and negative (as seen in any OS).
And even more sexy UI news from Open-Source land; Neil J. Patel, a new true innovator in the GNOME project (GNOME is as much as the entire UI in a lot of Linux distributions, and a host of other features that are essential to any desktop operating system) released some screenshots of Affinity, a new GNOME search tool (not quite unlike OS X’s Spotlight).
That’s Affinity set loose on Beagle’s backend (Beagle is a search engine, metadata indexer, much like Tiger’s Spotlight 1.01).
I want to conclude this one Open-Source edition of the Graphic Friday with a film I have just seen, and I rate second best anime next to Akira; Howl’s Moving Castle (grammar nazi cataclysm avoided by Jelmar). It’s immense – what a great movie. I can absolutely recommend it to anyone who enjoys a whole lot of eye candy and weird, speampunk-esque worlds. Impeccable animation and a very strong plot make it a joy to watch.
It’s Typographic Wednesday again, time for some nice insider news from the typography scene.
Helvetica; the movie has started showing! I am very excited and I will be sure to buy the movie as soon as it comes out. It’s already been dubbed ‘the most interesting movie on Graphic Design’, and has received general praise. Keep an eye on this movie, featuring the biggest star in typography to date.
The typographic blog Type for You has a nice interview with Wim Crouwel, a Dutch type designer who did works like the New Alphabet and Gridnik (both now for sale at the Foundry). He’s also, incidentally, from the same city – while I study in Groningen, he spent most of his life there. 
Fabrizio Schiavi is a great type designer. He’s just released a new, beautiful stencil font that redefines the look of stencil. Meet Siruca;
Fabrizio Schiavi’s font portfolio includes the beautiful Sys, and CP Company.
That’s it, for now, some smoky words,
image by fliegender on flickr.
Neat, eh? This is the ‘gravity orb’ script by Flight404. I hope he goes out of his way and publishes the code, that would be cool. I should look more into Processing, it’s API has grown so considerably. Processing is a toolkit that was inteded for musicians, artists, and other people to make artistic coding more accessible. It spits out Java code, or so I am told. Of course, our Flight404 here uses OpenGL as well.
I am a user of Drawbot and Nodebox myself, because I just love Python — even some baby steps in PyOpenGL taken in the last month, but OpenGL is something new to me and I hope to harness a lot more of it’s power in this year. This is a prime example of how cool it can be.
With the sleepwatcher and isightcapture binaries, you can have fun stuff – especially if you use it to double as a thief-proof bread-crumb trail to your laptop, where-ever it is. I made a script to take pictures on failed login attempts, login, and wake-up. When it has taken the images, it stays resident for a while and fingers the computer’s network access for host-name information, does a trace-route (non-priviledged tcptraceroute, no edges cut here) to gather information on it’s geographical location, and sends the most recent image, datestamped, in base64 encoding to a private email address. For now, it’s just like watching a monkey :> 12-02-07 to 01-03-07:
If anyone wants the script, I’d be more than happy to hand over the code.