Norman McLaren - Neighbours

Norman McLaren is one of the film makers I can type into youtube spend five minutes watching a short and love every second. Great way to start the day.

Just my Type

I am currently reading just my type by Simon Garfield. It is an engaging book on the history of type and the specific histories of certain fonts or letters/symbols.

What struck me about this book, was that it was placed at the front of my local book shop in the new books section, not hidden away in the graphic design section in the far corner of the shop; I had to buy it and see why such an honour was given to this book over others on a similar subject.

Books such as the excellent "Type and Typography" have long been used by design students interested in learning about the subject and these books are full of technical detail and rich history. They are however very much like a text book, and do an excellent job in the way they are designed to.

"Just My Type" is not a text book. It has, what the music industry, call cross over appeal, i.e it is written in a way that makes it accessible to a wider audience than just the typographers of this world. Each chapter looks at an area of type, maybe a type face such as comic sans in the first chapter or a symbol such as the ampersand in chapter 6 and details a narrative about these subject areas.

As well as the stories behind a font, the book also details technical aspects of the font talking about what makes caslon structurally different to garamond for instance. But this technical side is not demanding for the non-designer, and this knowledge is imparted through out the book, little by little, so that it never stops being engaging.

This is the really success of the book, in an age when people have got greater opinions about fonts than ever before, when anyone can look at a drop down menu to decide how their birthday invitation will look, having a book that opens up discussion on these typefaces and gets people thinking about type is a great achievement.

Black and White

Check out this beautiful website, which is exhibiting some really nice work at shirotokuro.com

Shirotokuro is a shortened form of ‘Shiroi to kuroi’ which is Japanese for ‘black and white’.

So as the name suggests everything is in black and white and looks rather dashing.

Mr Smiths Letterpress Workshop

Really interesting interview with Kelvyn Smith regarding his Letterpress workshop, done by Creative Review.

Mistakes that make you smile

One of the joys you don't get with digital photography is the excitement of taking the photo and not really knowing what your pictures will look like until they are developed. And inevitably you get the images you thought were amazing coming back out of focus, or sometimes you find images that you didn't think much about and they turn out to be amazing.

This image I was really happy with but, was a total fluke, forgot to wind the film and got this double exposure which was one of those nice surprises you don't get with the new technology.

Snow Phoenix

Check out this page I worked on for Glenfiddich Snow Phoenix.

Just think that they had some nice imagery which makes design a simple page all the more enjoyable.

Confession time

You go away on on Holiday and when you come back you neglect things you shouldn't have.

Such as this blog.

I will be adding things to this blog a bit more over the coming days.