If you’re curious about how websites work, you’ve ever selected ‘view source’ to see the guts of the HTML, or you have wondered about the ominous ‘back-end’, then wonder no longer. Back of a webpage reveals the inner workings of your favourite websites and gives new meaning to pressing the browser’s ‘back’ button.

The photographic paper detail on the Flickr one is genius. Send you own submissions to backofawebpage@gmail.com Found via davidthedesigner – Made me smile too…

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)

Well they say the iPad is the future of publishing, so it was only a matter of time before it colonised the past too. John Bonadies’s new project on Kickstarter aims to purchase a shedload of lovely old letterpress type to be digitised, and allow iPad users to make their own virtual letterpress compositions.

These can be used to generate images on the iPad itself for emailing and such, but the really interesting part is that it sounds like the system might eventually let you order an actual letterpress print of your design, and it is planned to hit other platforms such as the Mac soon afterwards.

They’ve got 25% of their $15,000 funding as I write this, and you can join in for as little as $1. Buying a guy on the internet a lovely letterpress collection is a bit like giving somebody else a load of money to go to Disneyland and send you the pictures, but they seem to have some nice open plans for sharing the type as a resource in the future, which hopefully means everyone will see some benefit.

Still, if I could persuade the internet to buy me a DeLorean that would be fantastic.

Letterpress is so specialist now that it has moved beyond the reach of most people who might be casually interested, or only modestly financed, so this is a nice way to open it up a bit. It could also be a great educational tool to teach classes about the history of type and let them get their virtual hands inky.

Head over to Kickstarter and donate some capital. Capital, geddit?

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…

No, not the rubbish film, the video which shows the Batman logo changing over all its various incarnations.

This isn’t just a geeky indulgence, it seriously shows how much variation can still be found in something simple and essentially already ‘designed’, as well as the impact small changes can have on the character of a recognisable symbol:

Video found via Logo Design Love