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.

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.

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…

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…

This blog has been a bit quiet recently for a number of reasons, but I really had to write about the fate of England’s World Cup bid a couple of weeks ago. I had great fun working on the bid, and was really hoping to become the first lethargic graphic designer to win the World Cup. Instead, I guess I made it to the finals and lost on penalties. My old PE teacher would never have predicted I would enjoy a brief career in international football.

The cover of the latest Private Eye caught my eye at the weekend. Take a good look at the banner above the rapidly balding head of Prince William on the left there. That’s possibly the last look we’ll get of my Supporter typeface at work, with the bid in tatters, the typeface is destined for retirement. It had a short but illustrious career, rubbing shoulders with royalty and being really very visible over the final few days.

The bid team did a fantastic job over the last two years, and on the day itself the English presentation was miles ahead of the others, but every expectant hope back home was about to be dashed. Still, at least they got a free T-shirt…

So alas, it was not to be, and whether the cause was bribery, politics, oligarchs or legacy, at least no-one is blaming the typography…?

Let’s cross our fingers for 2030.