ABC Oddity is an adorable Alphabet iPhone app for your little one. Begin at the menu where your child can choose a letter and enter a magical hand-drawn world. Your offspring can touch the illustrations to see words in written form and hear them pronounced. Swiping and shaking will allow your child to explore other richly populated letter worlds. (I admit though, iPhone apps that want toddlers to ’shake’ the phone make me nervous. Ella has turned my iPhone into a bonafide missile a few times…)
Over 100,000 thumbtacks were used over 351 hours to create this typographic mural that spells out Fail Harder, a message that underlines the importance of failure during the creative process. Absolutely fantastic. I would love to do something similar in my studio! Hat tip! (Make sure to watch the video below!)
David Friedman took 20 Helvetica logos, redid them in Arial (blasphemy!), and made a quiz out of it to help people hone their ability to differentiate them in a hands-on way.
“The way I relate the difference between typeface and font to my students is by comparing them to songs and MP3s, respectively (or songs and CDs, if you prefer a physical metaphor).”
- Nick Sherman
UPDATE 1: Just got an interesting tweet from my studio-mate @shiflett pointing me to a post by @jontangerine in which he distinguishes typefaces from fonts.
UPDATE 2: Jonathan Hoefler just sent over this link. A growing list of defintions and explanations. Nice!
The Daily Drop Cap is an ongoing project by my lovely studio mate Jessic Hische. Each day (or at least each WORK day), a new hand-crafted decorative initial cap will be posted for your enjoyment and for the beautification of blog posts everywhere. To use a Daily Drop Cap on your site or blog, follow the instructions in each post and read about the usage limitations. Enjoy!
In 10 Common Typography Mistakes Brian Hoff lists 10 common mistakes used in type design/layout that can make a large impact in the effectiveness and appearance of your designs, in addition to saving you time and money when dealing with printers.
After spending a little too much time in front of the computer my friend Arianna thought she’d get back to basics and get her hands dirty. She makes these posters because cutting giant stacks of paper, setting wood type and scrubbing ink off her hands feels good.
Typedia is a brand-new community website to classify typefaces and educate people about them. Think of it like a mix between IMDb and Wikipedia, but just for type. Anyone can join, add, and edit pages for typefaces or for the people behind the type.
Congrats to the fabulous crew behind Typedia! Well done!
Does your t-shirt lower your carbon footprint and improve air quality and reduce your utility bill? This t-shirt does. This shirt is part of the Holiday Matinee Artist Series, which means they donate 100% of proceeds from every t-shirt sold to Plant-It 2020. That means every time you buy a shirt you plant, maintain, and protect twenty trees. It’s that simple, plus all shirts are tag-free and 100% organic. How’s that for a designy do-good-feel-good gift?
About the artist: Nikki Farquharson is a left-handed designer living in London, England. She’s obsessed with letters, lines, patterns, shapes and colors. For this project, Nikki wrote a poem where every word ends in the same sound of Holiday Matinee.
Swissmiss is a design blog and studio run by Tina Roth Eisenberg, a 'swiss designer gone NYC'. Contact me if you have a design project, a link suggestion or just want to say hello.
