While the great and the good in our neighbourhood are enjoying the refined tennis up the road at Wimbledon and drinking Pimm’s in a relaxed fashion, we’re off to Glastonbury to wade about in mud and eat Pot Noodles. ‘Normal’ service will be resumed next week…

Bruno Maag of independent type foundry Dalton Maag came over to work yesterday to give us a talk about all things typographic. Describing kerning as a zen like experience he took us through an amazing level of typographic detail, typography in the age of the Mac, and his dislike for Helvetica. His enthusiasm for type is infectious and he even managed to hold the room’s attention through the arcane subject of font hinting.

Dalton Maag are one of the remaining companies who still produce lovingly designed type samplers, books and type sheets. Here are some of the beautiful things he brought with him:

This is Co, a typeface I’m extremely familiar with presented in a beautiful book, produced along with North…

…their iconic typeface for Mini…

…and just a few more corporate faces from the Dalton Maag sample book…

The quote of the evening without question was:

For instance, take VAG Rounded, that’s not a nice font, print that out big and look at it if you want to ruin your weekend.

So now the title of this post makes sense…

I saw this and had to post it. Sorry.

From Ironic Sans. You can get it on a T-Shirt too if it will make you happy…

This is genius, a site which looks exactly like Microsoft Windows XP, so you can read other stuff while you’re at work. Choose from short stories, poetry, classics etc, all called up in a faux PowerPoint window. I think this is the only time I have been able to forgive a website for forcing fullscreen mode on me. Found through the very nice Very Short List

No good for Mac workplaces though. If slightly less cultured vintage games are your thing, check out The Macintosh Garden or the Little Green Desktop for similar GUI lookalikes.

Has anyone seen any other sites which look like operating systems?

Oh dear. I’ve been carefully nurturing this old career of mine for a while now, and the first time I get manage to get published in the illustrious Design Week, it’s some nonsense about seat patterns…

Bit strange really. I only idly commented on their blog a while ago, I had no idea they were going to put me into print. It hasn’t done my charisma any good amongst prospective employers or university contemporaries, but at least I got a juicy big link to this site…

We knocked off work a little early yesterday and went over to Regents Park for a ‘picnic’. I say picnic, but it was basically beer and cocktail sausages. Very chilled out and a nice antidote to the studio which is increasingly frantic of late.

Some of the guys had a kick about, which, being a conscientious objector to football, I declined, but it did remind me of this video which I saw the other day…