Friday, November 30, 2007
I have a love/hate relationship with cereal.
In grocery stores (if you haven’t noticed) the healthier cereals are on top, and the sugary, unhealthy cereals are on the bottom. Generally, health-conscious adults are tall, and children who don’t know any better are short. Marketers take advantage of this human growth cycle to sell stuff to us. I think it’s kind of sick, but heck, that’s just smart business, right? You might also detect a gradual shift of healthy-sugary mix on the middle shelf.
And then there’s the design of the cereal boxes themselves. Corresponding the nutrition of the food entombed you’ll typically find fun, energetic designs for cereal that’ll give you a sugar overdose, and old-fashioned or classic, stable designs for cereal with a more respectable nourishment level.
Matthew McNerney wrote about an encounter with cereal box design in I Vant To Eat Your…Face? He shows us cereal boxes slowly pushing actual food off the cover in favor of enviable characters, noting “…it seems that demographics studies and marketing agencies have gone the Nike route and have stopped selling a product, and started selling an idea.”
None of …
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
The Art of Founding Type from John Downer at Emigre’s site, an essay “first published in 1995 on the back of a poster introducing the Not Caslon typeface.” A great historical overview of how type was made, and the particular development of the Caslon typeface.
The Typophile Film Fest 4 opening title sequence is an awesome short film made with typographical elements. (via Type For You)
Monday, November 19, 2007
When you’re invited to a costume party, make sure you show up on the right day. Strut your stuff any earlier and your grand entrance may acquire less admiration and more awkward glances than desired. This advice would apply especially when the party is being thrown more or less in honor of a special guest, present.
Monday, November 26, 2007, is Blue Beanie Day. Facebook invitations were sent inviting celebrants (“standardistas”) to show support for Web Standards and Accessibility. Instructions as follows:
Don a Blue Beanie and snap a photo. Then on November 26, switch your profile picture in Facebook and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group at Flickr.
Pretty straightforward. The blue beanie comes from a man named Jeffrey Zeldman who wrote the first widely read book about the subject. The cover of his book, Designing with Web Standards, shows a pixelized photo of him wearing a blue beanie. Clever and skilled as I am, I magically rendered my own head into the beanie on the book cover, seen here (on right — wow!):…
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Potus Typographicus (podcast). Steven Heller presents the typography of the Bush administration as part of the Paul Rand Lecture Series.
Why Comic Sans? Vincent Connare, designer of what is probably the world’s most misused font — Comic Sans — offers insight into its origin:
Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program’s interface, the typeface used to communicate the message.
There was no intention to include the font in other applications other than those designed for children when I designed Comic Sans. The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
My website had been bothering me the past several weeks. It wasn’t rushed together, but it lacked refinement. I noticed more and more parts to improve. I began putting together entirely new interface compositions. I would be happy with one, sit on it a few days, show it to my wife, and realize it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I did that a time or two.
The other day I recalled reading an article on A List Apart by Cameron Moll: “Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign.” So, wondering if there was a way to redeem my current design — to realign it — I set out to do just that. You are now seeing the result of my curiosity and effort. Below are screenshots of before and after:
Notable additions include larger typeset for titles, and a self-portrait in the sidebar, which adds a really nice color balance to the screen. I’ve also spent a considerable amount of time editing and writing new copy on my about page, and I’ve added links to some work examples.
Comments and criticism welcome.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
As my wife would attest to, I am online a lot — which may not be the best idea in the world — but I count most of my time on the Interweb productive, rather than not. In that time I find a lot of interesting (fascinating, well-written, well-designed, inpspiring, etc.) websites, and, in the spirit of Elsewhere by Khoi Vinh and Shaun Inman, Derek Powazek’s links, 37signals Sunspots, John Gruber’s Linked List and others, I’ve decided to begin sharing articles I find. I’ve often fought deciding to do this, because, what can I add that’s not already covered? My Google Page Rank and Technorati Authority are zero, but I’m throwing all that to the wind and stepping out into this new territory. If one person finds one clip interesting or helpful, then it will have been well worth it.
So, to identify such a post, I will call it Hotlinks, along with a snapshot of what’s inside. I’m not sure how frequent this will be — perhaps once or twice a week — but, here to start it off are a couple video’s I came upon yesterday:
Erik Spiekermann presents a case for Typomania …
