They’ve been redeveloping Blackfriars station forever now. Hopefully the kerning is on their to-do list.

I saw this outside a pub at the weekend. I don’t think it was intended to be taken literally.

I’ve finally got round to going through some of my pictures from honeymoon in Tanzania. We had a great time and as well as photos of my beautiful new wife, I took lots of the sort of pictures graphic designers take when they’re on holiday:

I loved the hand painted signage in the places we visited. Obviously print reproduction is beyond the means of many people, so they’ve become adept at rendering typefaces and brand trademarks with a paintbrush. The imperfections and analogue nature of the graphics can be laughable, but they do the job, and in some cases are very accurate indeed.

Typography is a constant need, but when photos of things are called for things get interesting.

It’s something we miss now that cheap digital printing rules the roost, those chalkboard writers pushing pie and pint night in the local Wetherspoon’s pub are all that’s left.

It reminded me of these movie posters from Ghana I saw a while ago which are just wonderful.

And then there’s an album I’ve been listening to recently, from The Very Best, friends of Vampire Weekend…

With some global companies taking a real interest in emerging economies, and African nations growing in commercial confidence, could we be looking at a new source of visual inspiration? Cadbury’s seem to think so at the moment…

Seeing as I posted last week about my work on the England 2018 World Cup bid, I thought I’d dig out this glimpse of the American bid identity, which has been designed by Pentagram in New York.

I really like it, and it’s strikingly similar to some of the identity work I did for the England bid which didn’t see the light of day (and which I’m not allowed to show you, sorry). As it stands, it still shares some common DNA, the custom typeface playing a central role in the identity, a campaign tagline about community based on a play of words. Even the two-tone colours are close to the England United colour palette which our host cities have been provided with.

There’s a similar tension between the bid logo and the campaign identity, although I think the balance between the two is better on the England offering so far. Interestingly, Pentagram are also designing all the bid materials themselves, whereas the England identity is being rolled out by various agencies across the country as and where needed, so is already unavoidably looking less coherent.

But hang on a minute, even I, as a football agnostic know that the USA hosted the World Cup in 1994, which is fairly recently. Surely England deserve it, having waited over 40 years…?

Check out the US bid website here…

…but obviously don’t vote for them.

Football’s never really been my thing, but I watched the England game this week with particular interest. Before the game, the Wembley crowd spelled out ‘England 2018′ in a typeface I designed. It’s called Supporter, and it was created especially for the FA’s World Cup bid.

It’s a monospaced display typeface, inspired by shirt lettering and scoreboard type. It’s carefully built to stack vertically and horizontally in a grid formation to create tight type lockups on banners and other promotional materials.

It was first used at the press launch along with the campaign slogan back in May…

Read the rest of this entry…

Have you ever wondered what a bird’s favourite font is? Well, that’s the sort of issue my mind turns to on a Friday afternoon. Check out Type Nesting, a collection of homely nests inside various letters of the signage alphabet.

Apparently they prefer the letter R…