Campsite is a New York based design blog and studio run by visual designer Max Ritt.
I have always admired Andy Cruz and House Industries. Their work incorporates great elements of historical and classic design, often beautifully hand painted lettering, but despite those elements and inspiration it manages to feel contemporary. These images of Cruz’s home and the House Industries studio, from an article on The Scout Magazine really give a good picture of what these guys surround and inspire themselves with.
(via The Scout »)
Anna Craemer has created a wonderful collection of video interviews on design for her personal project entitled Critical Graphic Design.
This particular one is an interview with Karel Martens who is the head of the famed Werkplaats Typografie program. He riffs on curiosity and compares the beauty of imperfect type and design to the great imperfections that make jazz music so great.
(via Frank Chimero »)
I posted about The Lost Type Co-op a few months ago here, and since then Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran have very evidently not been slacking off. When I posted about LTC before they had just launched their site and typeface on offer(Muncie). Now their selection is power packed with ten different typefaces designed by a sparkly list of collaborators and the founders themselves.
(via swissmiss »)
The Useful Towel from Bailey Doesn’t Bark, is a great gift for designers who like to cook and cooks who like design. If I wasn’t so messy in the kitchen I would for sure get one of these. Most days my kitchen towels(more like rags) are doused in sauce, meat jus or are just lightly singed.
(via Quipsologies »)
Hoefler & Frere-Jones have done it again. They have recently released a new typeface by the name of Ideal Sans, which like all H&FJ type families has a battery of widths and available characters.
“Ideal Sans, a handmade typeface for a machine-made age. Setting aside the easy pursuit of digital perfection, Ideal Sans favors handmade forms that help it achieve different goals: warmth, craftsmanship, and humanity.”
(via Jason Santa Maria »)
Based on a typeface found in an old French newspaper clipping, Helmut designed by Superscript² is a nice classic looking typeface. It definitely draws a lot of inspiration from deco type design and Futura. The character palette also includes some unique alternate characters, which give it nice variation and allow for interesting typesetting scenarios.
(via Swiss Legacy »)
Type designer David Jonathan Ross offers up some great insight into contrast and balance in the thicks and thins of letter forms, and there relation to typography over at I LOVE TYPOGRAPHY
“Ever since I started to draw type, one of the challenges that has intrigued me the most is figuring out how letters carry their weight. Arranging thicks and thins and determining the contrast between them is crucial in assembling the systems of shapes that form a type design.
Historically, a letter’s thicks and thins emerged from the writing or drawing implement used to make it. The angle, direction, and pressure of a pen or brush can produce seemingly endless models of thick and thin in calligraphy and lettering. We sometimes carry these ideas over to typography, thinking of typographic letters in terms of imaginary mark-making tools. In type, the conventional definitions of stress and contrast are focused on the idea of stroke, telling us where a line swells to its thickest point, and how thick it actually gets.”
Designer Anders Hernando Balsells created this fun colorful branding, From Barcelona, to promote tourism in his home country of Spain. It was part of his master’s degree program at Universitat Ramon Llull.
(via Design Work Life »)
Jeff Rogers has created a series of five hand drawn fonts for YouWorkForThem that are all beautifully unique and have various widths and characters. Jeff is a Texas native now living in New York City, working as an illustrator and designer, mainly working with custom and hand drawn type.
(via grain edit »)
I am ecstatic to try using this new application called Typeplace. It is definitely something I have been thinking about that would increase my engagement with my iPhone, and as it often is today someone releases an awesome app. that does exactly what I was looking for.
(via Quipsologies »)
Explorations in Typography by Carolina de Bartolo along with Erik Spiekermann is a wonderful new book on typesetting and how type and typesetting coexist. With the amount of time I have been spending on interface design these days the only question I have after looking at this awesome layout and typesetting resource is when does the web version come out?
(via Surfstation »)
Peru has recently launched a new identity that is intended to elevate the image of their country on the international stage. As a beautiful country with amazing internationally exported goods, and an economy largely based on tourism this sound choice. They hired Future Brand who was behind the 2003 rebrand of Australia that has been widely applauded.
(via @Issue »)
I apologize for posting this after the show has come down, but Chris Gentile recently had these and many more amazing photographs exhibited at the Jeff Bailey Gallery. The imagery of his work is simple yet surreal and feels very emotion driven.
(via The Best Part »)
Field Notes has a serious knack for keeping their simple product current and fresh. Every time I look they are releasing some brilliant new books. Right now you can order in their new Spring Colors, which are actually not colored at all. They are actually a set of blanks with a sheet of Futura Bold dry transfer type. Not sure any of us designers need any new sketchbooks, but FN keeps us wanting new ones!
I have wanted to post about Cody Haltom for quite a while now. He is a member of Public School, a collaborative studio in Austin, Texas. Besides being a super talented and diverse group they also publish a blog, which is a key source of inspiration for me on a daily basis. Cody’s work has two major elements that I find really inspiring. He has a very simple clear way of using type that I always find difficult to achieve. The other thing is obviously the interesting graphic scenes he creates and then photographs. This is by no means a hyper original idea, but I find Cody’s style of still life to be really playful and it helps to balance out his cleaner more rigid type work.
(via Grain Edit »)
Typography Deconstructed fills such a necessary void in design education and equips us with general knowledge of something we designers use everyday and on average know very little about. Today there are very few well designed sources of good factual reference when you are truly in need of it. This site and accompanying poster provide the design community with a wealth of knowledge on the subject of typography. So on behalf of myself and designers every where I say thank you TypeDecon!
(via Beast Pieces »)
This poster, Typefaces of the World, designed by Shelby White of the blog WANKEN takes 50 typefaces “based on popularity and usefulness in present design” and integrates them into this awesome infographic. The graphic itself perfectly illustrates the interesting 50/50 split between the US and Europe as the birthplaces of the typefaces. Also notably you can find this poster for sale in the WANKEN SHOP.
Peter Vogel operates a super cool business, of which I am infinitely jealous, in Portland Oregon called Nutmegger Workshop. Basically what they do is create reproduction and historically accurate hand painted signs. Their work is extremely tactile and definitely brings you back to a time when painted signs clothed the landscape of towns and cities alike. The vernacular typography and hand painting techniques of sign painters seem to be in full resurgence right now, and I am really digging it.
(via Quipsologies »)
A tweet just jogged my memory about the Design Love Series on idsgn, which is highly appropriate for today. The quote above is from Massimo Vignelli, and also made an appearance in Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica.
Design firm Frank in Norway created this awesome packaging solution for a new oak barrel aged beer launched by Norwegian supermarket chain Rema1000. You can view more images of the designs on their Behance profile.
