Just a few things I spotted this week…

A modular typeface system which overlays different weights to build different combinations. Via typetoken

Lego walls! Via ohdeedoh

Milton Glaser on the fear of failure. Via Creative Review, where there are more from similarly wise people.

And finally, delightfully crazy Doctor Who T-shirts. Via GeekAlerts

I’m going to try and do a post like this every Friday. Juicy JPGs and creative clips without the burden of my tiresome opinion…

My ongoing quest to win a D&AD Yellow Pencil is looking up. Well, sort of. They just announced that from this year, projects selected to feature in the Annual, will all win a physical award. It’s not quite a pencil, but rather cute little slices from one. In fact, if your work is actually nominated for a pencil, you get a bigger slice.

So given that the Vodafone Music project I worked on was featured in-book in 2009, I wondered if I might be able to get one of these slices retrospectively. Using the power of Twitter I enquired, and it turns out that anyone featured in-book since 2000 can apply retrospectively for a pencil slice coaster award by emailing the D&AD at celebrate@dandad.org

So if you’ve had a close shave (pencil shaving awards would have been a great idea) with the D&AD this millennium, drop them an email and you could be entitled to a part-pencil.

Nice. Now I just have to work on getting my hands on a whole one…

Tobias Bergdahl went to an Adrian Shaughnessy lecture and made notes. Except his notes weren’t the normal scribbly nonsense most of us manage, he formulated Shaughnessy’s “12 paradoxes of graphic design” into these: (and no, one of them wasn’t about going back in time to shoot your grandfather before he invents Comic Sans)

I’m a bit late posting this, but I went along to the Design Museum a couple of weeks ago, for the private view of Dalton Maag’s type installation entitled Shape My Language.

The centrepiece installation is a cascade of glyphs from typefaces, which gives you a real sense of the generosity of forms in typography, as well as their structural basis (and their Unicode number). Well, whatever it means, it’s lovely. It was there to announce the Ubuntu project, which is a very intriguing attempt to build an open source typeface containing every necessary character in the world, for the Ubuntu flavoured Linux operating system. If you don’t believe me, it said so on the wall:

And if any of that went over your head, you could still just play hunt-the-letter-r instead…

You can read more about it here, or go and see it at the Design Museum London.

If there’s something out there in the world which combines graphic design and Lego, I’m on it. Take a look at this, letterpress done with Lego, beautiful.

It’s the work of Justin LaRosa and Samuel Cox. I’m simultaneously amazed I haven’t seen this done before, and annoyed I didn’t think of it.

If you like what you see, you can buy prints here. Although I think I fancy having a go at it myself…

…brought to you via @espiekermann. Oh, and Happy New Year by the way, sorry I’ve been quiet recently…

Wow, this is lovely. Panasonic Note headphones packaged by Scholz & Friends.

Wish I’d thought of that…

…found via 2modern