It’s no secret I’m a fan of Johnson Banks, so I won’t go on about their recent Science Museum identity apart from stating that obviously, I loved it. If you want to see more of it click here.

No, I’m writing this because I noticed something the other morning as I passed an advert in the tube station.

One of the things designers love to do is line things up. Whenever I get a new identity brief, I often size up the name of the company, looking for symmetries, interesting gaps between letters, double entendres etc etc. All very Smile in the Mind. Anyway, I digress. One thing I often do is work out it the letters will stack nicely, so I liked the fact that the new Science Museum logo does that.

4 letters, 6, or best of all, 9 letters are all a gift. Except that there are 13 letters in S C I E N C E M U S E U M, and my OCD gene means I know that’s a prime number, so it doesn’t work. And then I noticed, they’ve run the I and the E together on the first line. Clever buggers.

Normally that wouldn’t work at all, but it works so well I hadn’t even noticed it.

I’m currently finishing an identity for a law firm, so this website struck a chord.

Typography for Lawyers is a 13 primer by Matthew Butterick, a frustrated lawyer with a design background, in an attempt to show his colleagues the true typographic path. During my current project, I have indeed learned that typography is particularly important for lawyers, and also particularly hard to get right across a large business. Lawyers and designers are kind of the opposite sorts of people.

I found this via The Disciples of Design who reckon it might even be a good student resource…

…I haven’t got the guts to send it to my client though, the 200 pages of guidelines I’ve written will have to do…

As regular readers to this blog might remember, I do like the patterns on public transport seats, specifically those on the tube. I even tried to do some design with them once and had my fascination outed by Design Week.

Anyway, Transport for London have this quirky tube campaign running at the moment, which invites you to guess whether the statements lovingly recreated from vintage patterns are true or false:

If you can’t bear not knowing the answers, check out the TfL site, where a little story sheds light on each one.

Also, feel free to join my neglected Flickr group to collect new patterns. And if you’ve taken a picture of a seat pattern, it probably qualifies for this group too…

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…

Here’s a little typographic treat for the World Cup. Tweet your messages to @thefootwall and we’ll show them on our giant scoreboard on the side of The Brand Union in Farringdon, London.

It’s typeset in Supporter, the typeface I designed for the England 2018 World Cup bid. The letters are inspired by shirt numbers and electronic scoreboards, so they can be stacked and built with like a Lego set.

It’s visible every night and will hopefully be up for the duration of the World Cup… (…or at least England’s participation in it)

Thanks to all of the guys for making it happen – Back of the net!

I can cope with seeing my Supporter typeface disappear from the D&AD judges’ table when lovely things like this survive the cull. Phonetikana by Johnson Banks is a take on the Japanese katakana phonetic alphabet, which actually shows English speakers how to say things. I guess it works in reverse too, helping Japanese people learn the roman alphabet. It’s not new, they did it a while ago, but it did just receive a D&AD nomination last week.

It’s great. I know that because I studied Japanese for two years (an endeavour cruelly crushed by the onset of habitual brand agency overtime) and always loved the phonetic alphabets hiragana and katakana. Japanese has complex symbols, abstract Kanji which are derived from the Chinese language and pretty impenetrable at times, but they also use two phonetic alphabets, mainly for foreign language words or elements of grammar.

It’s funny, because there aren’t all the same sounds in Japanese as there are in English, reading them out forces you to adopt a comedy Japanese accent.

These katakana characters often find their way into technological things, signs and brand names. When you see things like Uniqlo or Wagamama written out in the UK, these are the letters they’re using.

These Kana fascinated me while I was learning Japanese and I still get a kick out of the fact that I can actually read them in things like manga or imported videogames. The Kanji on the other had were an uphill struggle. I’ve always wanted to spend some real time in Japan to get under the skin of it all, but sadly, design is a very hard thing to get into there as a Westerner.

Johnson Banks have quite an interest in Japan, and seem to have made the leap into working over there. The identity they did for the Sendai Observatory was beautiful…

…and the UK-Japan logo feels in hindsight like the genesis of the phonetikana idea…

Lovely. Makes me want to restart my Japanese course again. While I love the idea of alternative alphabets, I did have to pass recently on the frankly terrifying prospect of developing an Arabic version of Supporter.

If you’re looking for a book on the Kana alphabets, I recommend Remembering the Kana which helped me a lot.