ISOLA, Suhyang Jung’s final project, has won a student merit award in the HOW Promotion Design competition. Her work can be seen in the October 2008 issue of HOW, a prominent graphic design magazine. ISOLA is the branding and packaging design for three lines of bath and beauty products targeted at urban working women.
Hey guys, For the few of you who might not know what Threadless is, it’s a t-shirt company that prints limited versions of designs created by different designers & artists. There’s an initial period when you send it and they can either take it or reject it, and then it goes public for people to vote and comment on it.
Well, I had an illustration that sat on the back of my drive for months and then I decided to send it out of curiosity, I just got an email saying that it got selected for public voting, so, check it out and tell me what you think.
Hey Guys,
Just so you know, I just found out that there’s gonna be door tickets for the Salazar Awards, Sagmeister being the guest speaker. The tickets sold out in like three days but they kept some, my guess, to see how designers will fight for the last ticket.
So if you want to attend the event, grab a blanket and go to the Roundhouse earlier than everybody else who has a ticket!
When a young Wim Crouwel went to a German type setting expo in 1965, he saw one of the first digital typesetters. He saw Garamond 6pt and noticed that as you scaled the letters, lets say by two times, there would be twice as many pixels available to generate the curves, thereby changing the font as you scaled it. This spawned an idea in him that would eventually lead to this grid-based type concept that would be later used in rock album covers and pop art magazines. His ideas were later published in the “New Alphabet” (1967), a book showcasing his approach to print and type design, and the whole book consisted of not one curve or non-45 degree diagonal! Crouwel’s idea was clarity in the digital age, to create a defined typesetting that would not change when scaled, because of its strictly 45 or 90 degree angles, and because if its inherent grid-based structure. The type was to be very square, so that if text lined up on top of each other, the letters would be lined up as well. What started out as an experiment for Crouwel became a sleeper success. Peter Saville, a designer that was contracted to design Joy Division’s Substance album redesigned Crouwel’s “New Alphabet” to be more legible, and then released it as “atmosphere ’88”. For years to come, the new wave of digital type must nod their hats to Wim Crouwel’s foundation laid by “New Alphabet”. It presented a clean, rational scope in which to view type design with this new digital medium. With the new wave of pixel fonts (type designed with screen usage in mind, making efficient use of blank spaces to create readable text even at small sizes) emerging, echos of Wim Crouwel’s methodologies still ring strong today. His foresight in the future of type design can be seen with hundreds of different modern fonts out there, and their functional ideals can all be linked back to Wim Crouwel’s “New Alphabet”. I created a type specimen showcasing Wim Crouwel’s “New Alphabet”. For the piece, I brought in another functional digital type “OCR Std”, to contrast “New Alphabet”, and to also highlight the similarities between the two eras of functional digital type. I then created a site map of The Foundry’s website and all of its internal file assets within that domain using Processing. The Foundry is the only foundry I have found that digitized Wim Crouwel’s type. All of the files on this site are linked to each other ultimately by the single root node, “/”. I am trying to communicate the parallel with Wim Crouwel and this root node. Virtually all of digital type that followed are connected to “New Alphabet” by some avenue or other. Just like the root directory, Wim Crouwel is the node that links all other functional digital type to each other, and all of them share the same concepts and approach in their design and function. I used Processing to extrapolate the filenames and linkage properties to map out the connection between all of the files, I had to play with the layout a bit, but it was mostly done in Processing and Illustrator. Let me know what you think! 
British Columbia design students are being invited to compete to create a new logo for the government’s LiveSmart BC climate action programs… Click here
Sebastien just gave me the heads up that Vista Print does free business cards without their logo on them. You have to use there designs, 42 in all, but you can edit all the text. Go and check it out.
I really love this company’s stuff… from the simplest unit (the tea bag) right up to their gift boxes and accessories, all their packaging is simple, beautiful and fun, without being too girly. The photos are nice too- and the colour pallet.
Paul Rand left a huge mark on American graphic design thanks to his corporate logo designs you’ve all probably seen. It was only recently that the UPS logo was redesigned from his original look.
Here is a 4 minute Quicktime film tributing Paul’s work, a delicious animated journey through very familiar shapes and colors as Paul explains graphic design. In short, it looks really great.
Paul Rand was inducted to the One Show Creative Hall of Fame this week.
There are some leftover red & black posters for Helvetica. They will be in resources for the next few days. Help yourself!
