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So You Need a Typeface

So You Need a Typeface
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Good design Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design? As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.) Typography in 7 Minutes: A PBS Micro-Documentary by Maria Popova Visibility, invisibility, and what the spirit of letters has to do with the meaning of text. On Monday, we featured 10 essential books on typography. Today, we turn to this fantastic short documentary on, you guessed it, typography from the excellent Off Book series by PBS Arts. In just 7 minutes, the film explores type — ubiquitous yet often unnoticed and misunderstood — through the work of some of today’s most iconic type designers and freshest voices, from Brain Pickings favorite Paula Scher to our friends at Hyperakt, masters of the infographic form, as well as legendary duo Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, and Pentagram prodigy Eddie Opara.

20 Stunning Photoshop Tutorials Every Designer Needs Photoshop tutorials are everywhere, but good Photoshop tutorials can be hard to find. Designers often have trouble finding enough time to design the many projects that come across their desks, which means they are usually short on the time needed to search for excellent tutorials to improve their skills. The goal of the following collection is to provide a shortcut to twenty tutorials that are worth your time. Keep exploring, though, and let me know about others that you have enjoyed! This roundup starts with the beautiful interesting stuff.

Cultural Connectives: Understanding Arab Culture Through Typography by Maria Popova What typography has to do with cross-cultural understanding and linguistic minimalism. I’m obsessed with language, such a crucial key to both how we understand the world and how the world understands us. In today’s political and media climate, we frequently encounter the Middle East in the course of our daily media diets, but these portrayals tend to be limited, one-note and reductionist. 15 Famous And Successful Logo Redesigns - What Has Been Improved? As we realize that we are now living in the Brand Era, where everything is branded and labelled we are more concern to companies we believe can help us, shops where we can get our supplies, or websites we trust to keep our data or information securely. This is how a company’s logo appeal as the first thing costumer will consider to trust or not. Among thousands of logos out there, some of them may look cheesy and cheap, and some visually give us confident. In order to grab our attention and get our trust, many companies even consider to re-brand/redesign their logo.

10 Essential Books on Typography by Maria Popova What Arab culture has to do with industrial ideals, midcentury design and Victorian hand-lettering. Whether you’re a professional designer, recreational type-nerd, or casual lover of the fine letterform, typography is one of design’s most delightful frontiers, an odd medley of timeless traditions and timely evolution in the face of technological progress. Today, we turn to 10 essential books on typography, ranging from the practical to the philosophical to the plain pretty. In 1967, iconic typography pioneer Emil Ruder penned Typographie: A Manual of Design — a bold deviation from the conventions of his discipline and a visionary guide to the rules of his new typography. From texture to weight to color to legibility spacing and leading, the 19 chapters gloriously illustrated in black-and-white with some in red, yellow and blue explore insights from the author’s studies and experiments.

47 (More) Brilliant Advertisements [High Quality Photos Last week we gave you 35 Brilliant Advertisements and the story blew up on the web. Hundreds of Repins on Pinterest, 78K shares on StumbleUpon, great action on Facebook & Twitter. All in all it was an awesome story so we decided to pull together 47 more brilliant advertisements for you to enjoy. From The Web Leave a comment comments

What if famous brands had regular fonts? RegulaBrands - Pixelonomics Jan62012 EmailEmail What if famous brands had regular fonts? - RegulaBrands Last week, I was having a skype call with a friend in Italy, who also happens to be a communication designer. And like every other time, we took a detour to one of our favorite topics of discussion – ‘clients’.

Options for @font-face implementation Webfont embedding is so widely supported by modern browsers at this point that there’s really no excuse not to incorporate them when appropriate in your designs. There are hundreds of free fonts available for embedding, as well as plenty of paid services that allow you to include commercial fonts in your designs. A lot of designers, it seems, are intimidated by the idea of @font-face embedding though. Even though it’s been gaining popularity and support for the past couple of years, a lot of designers still stick to their usual collection of web safe fonts for the vast majority of their designs. More Brilliant and Clever Advertisements Published on: Nov 06 2012 by Inspiration Here is a series of brilliant and clever advertisements … Clever Ads Billboard Powerful and Creative Ads

Stunning Subjectivity: Paula Scher's Obsessive Hand-Painted Maps by Maria Popova An irreverent, artful antidote to GPS appification, or what the NYC subway has to do with tsunamis. Iconic designer Paula Scher is one of my big creative heroes, her thoughts on combinatorial creativity a perfect articulation of my own beliefs about how we create. Since the early 1990s, Scher has been creating remarkable, obsessive, giant hand-painted typographic maps of the world as she sees it, covering everything from specific countries and continents to cultural phenomena. This month, Princeton Architectural Press is releasing Paula Scher: MAPS — a lavish, formidable large-format volume collecting 39 of her swirling, colorful cartographic points of view, a beeline addition to my favorite books on maps. 20 creative Logo inspirations #2 Recently I did a lecture at the University about logo design and branding trends, so I post the second appointment of “20 inspirational logos collection” that you can use as inspiration for your own logo designs. 20 inspirational collection#1

How Cloud Computing Made Web Typography Better For Everyone What’s makes sites like A Working Library and Pictory stand out from the pack in terms of readability? Clear, humane typography, of course. But what makes that possible? Web fonts: legally-licensed real typefaces dynamically served via "the cloud" using Javascript and CSS.

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