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iSTD Awards 2011

I went along last Friday to the International Society of Typographic Designers bi-annual awards event, as I’d heard my Storm Thorgerson poster had been nominated which was lovely, and totally unexpected. Not as unexpected however as winning a much coveted Premier Award, which was something special.

Congratulations too, to the guys from Purpose who were also winners on the night for The Armoury…

…and The Partners who were recognised for their work for the Injured Jockey Fund.

It was a great evening, wonderful work and nice people, so thanks to all the guys at the iSTD and also those who helped make the poster happen (you know who you are)

Oh, it was held at the Museum of Packaging and Brands in Notting Hill which is well worth a visit.




Sans style

I haven’t written much here lately, and there are a number of reasons for that which I won’t go into. One of those reasons though, was that I went on a brief holiday to France, land of fashion, food and style. Imagine my horror then, when I chanced upon Comic Sans jewellery.

Mon Dieu!




Friday Fix: Modular type, Lego, Failure & Doctor Who

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…




Letterpress on the iPad?

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?




The End

It’s Friday, so to mark the end of the week, here’s a treat in the form of Warner Bros “The End” frames from classic films. The real genius of this is that you can hover over any of them to reveal the title frame, so if you can guess the title of the picture, from the style of the ending typography, you’re a true movie geek.

It’s a lovely site, and it’s really interesting to see the development of the type over the decades, as well as marvelling at how differently the start and end of movies are done today. No kooky Ben Stiller out-takes over the end credits here.

If you like this, check out Cinematypography too…




Do typefaces matter?

The BBC are randomly asking today Do typefaces really matter?

It all stems from James Cameron’s controversial use of Papyrus in Avatar, before Bruno Maag dives in and aims a punch at Helvetica.

Still, I guess we should be glad Comic Sans didn’t turn up.

Incidentally, the article is worth checking out if you’re one of those people who is still unclear as to the difference between a font and a typeface…