Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
Nicole Meyer has embarked on a fun project : Lake logos have a tendency to be, well, fairly ugly. This project was created to rethink what they could be. One Minnesota Lake. One Logo. Every day. Should only take a little over 27 years to hit ‘em all. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
Stephen Doyle, that super smart guy that everyone loves, created some lovely tape illustration/lettering/installations for a New York Times Magazine story this weekend. Lots of people do these type illusions, but few do it this well. Check out the tape on the skeleton’s ribs! I want to be Stephen Doyle when I grow up. Also, don’t miss the behind the scenes video. … Read the rest here
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Wood Type Revival is the brainchild, and subsequently successful Kickstarter project , of Matt Griffin and Matt Braun from Bearded . Their aim is: …to acquire ten fonts of rare historic wood type representing faces that are not available in the world of digital typography. The faces will be printed on an old Vandercook proof press, scanned, and digitized as opentype fonts. Those fonts will then be for sale as digital downloads on this site. … Read the rest here
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From Christian Annyas , who also heads up the wonderful Movie Title Stills Collection , comes a survey of fire insurance maps from 1885 to 1921 by the Sanborn Map Company. While fire insurance maps may sound like a big snoozefest, don’t be fooled! Christian has great posts of New York maps and images of the different permutations of Sanborn’s own logo on the maps. The lettering on these covers is just beautiful. Sanborn Map Company began creating fire insurance maps in 1867. They were created to assist insurance agencies in assessing the fire risk of properties. Detailed maps, showing building use, sidewalk and street widths, layout and names, property boundaries, distance between buildings, house and block numbers, location of water mains, hydrants, piping, wells, cisterns, and fuel storage tanks… Read the rest here
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Golden Grid System , a folding grid for responsive design. I’m not big on frameworks, especially when we’re talking about baseline grids, but this one is really well done. And I can get behind this sentiment from its creator: “Take it apart, steal the parts that you like, and adapt them to your own way of working.” Plus it’s a beautiful design to boot. Be sure to resize your browser a lot and play with the little grid reveal button on the top right of the page. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria: Five & Ten : Jason Santa Maria, describing his site’s redesign (which launched on Friday): I decided to not let the design of my site become a barrier to writing here. The most important thing this site does for me is give me a creative outlet to play and write. Anything that gets in the way of that needs to get the boot. The result is a responsive, Tumblr-esque digest of things interesting to and written by Jason, with much more design sense than most Tumblr sites — including mine. … Read the rest here
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This year marks my site’s tenth birthday online, so I’m celebrating with a new design edition. This is number five! I noticed something with my last site a little while ago. The custom designed articles I was posting (and that I loved to post) were keeping me from writing more regularly. It had nothing to do with the time involved to design those article, I usually kept things simple and got to be pretty fast at it, but more the presentation that bugged me. In order to post something, I felt it couldn’t be short or just a quip on a topic, it had to be substantial. I fell into a design trap I unknowingly set for myself. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
Images © Jacqui Oakley Check out some of this gorgeous work from Toronto illustrator, Jacqui Oakley . I absolutely love her technique and use of color. … Read the rest here
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Lovely new Vintage series covers for Oliver Sacks designed in-house by Cardon Webb. via John Gall … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
About Face , a new article series I’m writing over at the Typekit Blog where we’ll look at the details behind a typeface and try to crack what makes it special. First up, some of my favorites, Joshua Darden’s rounded wonder Omnes , and Carol Twombly’s gorgeous slab hybrid Chaparral (the same serif in use here on my site). I have a serious crush on Chaparral. … Read the rest here
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Waste Landscape is a monumental art work that takes up the “Halle d’Aubervilliers” 1000square meters in the CENTQUATRE, from the 21st of July to the 10th of september in Paris. “WasteLandscape” is a 500 square meters artificial undulating landscape covered by an armor of 65,000 unsold or collected CDs, which have been sorted and hand-sewn. via Fast Co. Design … Read the rest here
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Tattly , designy temporary tattoos from Swissmiss and friends. Featuring designs from talented folks like: Jessi Arrington, Frank Chimero, Chris Glass, Jessica Hische, Julia Rothman, James Victore, and more! I made the one called Aperture . … Read the rest here
Tattly: Designy Temporary Tattoos : Now available for purchase, $5 each. Concept by swissmiss , and designs by Jessi Arrington, Frank Chimero, Jason Santa Maria, and others. … Read the rest here
It’s all too often the case that as soon as a project is finished, I’m on to the next one in the queue, without any time to stop. I’m sure others know this feeling – there’s no time to reflect and blog about the work you’re doing. So here starts the catch up… Back in April, a project I was involved in was finally launched, the new Identity and website for Five Details , previously known as ExtendMac, whose “Flow”: FTP client won a Runner up prize in the prestigous Apple Design Awards in 2008. Brian Amerige, who created Flow was getting ready to release a new iOS app called Seamless to coincide with the relaunch, and Hicksdesign were bought on board to create a new identity and website. After a few different explorations, we settled on the simple logo of the 2 ‘D’ shapes that together form a ‘5’ in the negative space: The logo has white and orange variants, working on either a white or dark background, as well as ‘layered’ version, for use in backgrounds: Brian and I discussed suitable type treatments, and I felt that LFT Etica was the right fit for this project… Read the rest here
There’s an interesting debate happening in the world of mobile design at the moment. In one camp we have the “nativists” who believe that the best mobile experiences are tailored to a particular device. These are the people focused on creating platform specific mobile apps and mobile websites. Then we have the “universalists” who believe in the “one web”, a place where all content and services can be delivered to multiple devices through the same URL. This division is causing me a bit of a quandary. … Read the rest here
Can CSS create art? That’s a question I set out to explore recently, and I like to think that the answer is yes. You can judge for yourself: Spinning the Web , a photo set on Flickr. To be clear, when I say “Can CSS create art?” I don’t mean that in the sense of wondering if art, or artful designs, can be accomplished with CSS. … Read the rest here
PhotoSwipe, an Image Gallery for Mobiles Devices : HTML/CSS/JS-based image gallery specifically targeting mobile phones and tablets. I’ve just tested this on iPad 1, iPhone 4, BlackBerry PlayBook, Samsung Galaxy Tab, and HTC Aria. It works fine on all of them except the Aria (slow loading for some reason). … Read the rest here
Polygraph is a lively new typeface from PintassilgoPrints that’s just bursting with character. It’s inspired by polish artist Leszek Zebrowski’s poster work, but I see echoes of Rennie Mackintosh’s hand lettering style in here too. Whereas official Mackintosh typefaces (and my own amateur contribution Hill House ) are very clean and rigid, Polygraph carries the expression of artists hand really, really well. Packed with eccentric alternates, it is an all-caps font with four exchangeable variations for each letter. These alternates are programmed to cycle when the font is used in OpenType-savvy programs, creating a random effect on glyphs distribution. … Read the rest here
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If you think your site’s content doesn’t matter, then you are sorely mistaken. Granted, the argument for content strategy has always mystified me. Not because I think we can do without content strategy, we can’t, but I’m amazed that we still have to make the argument. Folks care very much about appearances; what their websites look like means the world to them. But why don’t they care just as much about what their sites are saying? … Read the rest here