Charming
Jewelry designers find inspiration from type.
Glamour Spain, November 2012
type eh?
Graphic design and typography
Archive for the ‘ Design ’ Category
Smelly typography
The title of this editorial says it: O, Beautiful!
If you had nothing but color and one typeface to design new packaging, this would be a great solution. Proof again that you don’t need thousands of typefaces to create good typography.
Person of the year
This page is from the December issue of Time magazine, which is traditionally the issue dedicated to the achievements of an individual.
This year no one person was named, instead the award was given to the “protester.” Read the rationale of that decision by enlarging the image below. The raised fist, the symbol for solidarity, is the perfect graphic form to represent the unity of human spirit, so evident in 2011.
Bank of America: the graphics tell the story
This, bold contrasty design sets the tone of the article, that Bank of America, with $2.3 trillion in assets is big: in the eyes of the government, too big to fail.
Warren Buffet’s recent purchase of $5 billion in preferred stock immediately helped the Bank’s share price that has dropped from $13.34 a share in January to $7.48 in early September.
However the sharp upturn in the share price following Buffet’s investment took an equally sharp downturn the next day—graphically illustrated on the right side of the chart on the second spread.
The article in Bloomberg Business Week concludes:
Barnes ticks off the latest statistics from Lender Processing Services, a major home loan servicer: 4.1 million loans nationwide are 90 days or more days delinquent or in foreclosure; delinquency rates are twice their historical average; more than 40 percent of 90-days-plus delinquent loans have not made a payment in more than a year.
BofA is more exposed to those scary figures than any other bank. Moynihan “has got to know there are more losses ahead, enough to kill a bank,” says Barnes. “No model exists for what happens next.”
Type inspires paper sculpture
This is a pretty remarkable paper sculpture that also happens to have made the cover of the German design magazine Form. The feature article—about information graphics—and the cover artwork, have very little to do with each other visually, but the arresting design of the sculpture is a really beautiful piece of design, not truly typography, but certainly lovely to look at.
Making a splash
This exercise in typographic distortion relies heavily on software manipulation. That said, the results are fascinating.
According to the magazine Digital Arts, the creators of the type, Hussain and Ali Amossawi, brothers based in Bahrein, were curious about how letterforms and liquids could be combined.
The letters were built in Autodesk 3Ds Max by extruding them from two-dimensional type to a depth sufficient for liquids to flow through them in a visually pleasing way.
These shapes were then passed to RealFlow fluid simulation software, which plugs into Autodesk’s 3D suite. A particle emitter was used to fill them with “paint” as if poured from a faucet.
Once each letter was filled, the liquid was released from the constraints of the letter shape, letting it explode.
You can see animations of the complete process at the skyrill website.
Poetic grass
For this piece of typographic art, Stephanie Barber cut stencils out of Kentucky Bluegrass sod. The letters, each two feet long, were laid into the yard at the Poor Farm, an artist residency and exhibition space in Wisconsin. The artist and poet set out to create an environment where her readers could interact physically with her words.
See more of the art.
Type trivia
A page from this month’s Fast Company magazine provides us with a few interesting facts about type:
Futura, the typeface design by Paul Renner in 1927, was used on the plaque that Apollo 11 left behind on the moon. It also is used on a well-known vodka logo, and it’s the type used in the opening sequence of Lost.
The page is designed to show highlights from the July/August calendar. The purpose of the type … well click and enlarge the page and you’ll find out.
New Helvetica: weighing your options
[click to enlarge]
As a follow up to my previous post I thought it would be of interest to see the logic behind the numbering system of new helvetica.
The system is based on Adrian Frutiger’s numbering system for Univers, one of the great contributions to typography, where the base weight of the type, the equivalent of a medium weight, is established at number 55.
New helvetica was published in 1983 by Linotype’s company, D. Stempel AG, with no less than 51 different variants in nine weights and three widths: condensed, normal and extended. This newly designed family of typefaces evolved as a series from the very beginning. Whereas most other versions of Helvetica had weights added over a period of time.
Above are all the weights excluding the italics. In the center you will see the middle weight New Helvetica 55.
This abundance of weights is the reason why the majority of designers prefer Helvetica over Arial.
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type eh? 