The Future’s So Bright
Australia is a pretty sunny place so it makes sense that this is where you’ll find the most cutting edge sunglass designs on the planet. Colab [colab.com.au] find established and well loved designers such as Geoff McFetridge [championdontstop.com], eBoy [hello.eboy.com] and Perks & Mini [someday-store.com] and give them an open brief to design a range of limited edition glassies for the label. The results can be a little wacky but never unwearable. You get some crazy stickers and pretty neat packaging by said artists to go with each pair too. Thanks to Benjamin for pointing these out.
Boicozine vs. The Tapeworm 0108
The mixtape refuses to die. Unfortunately the ever popular Tapedeck [tapedeck.org] archive seems to be missing a few pics at the moment but there are loads of pics of them on flickr and a couple of interesting groups such as the Creative Cassettes group for hand-made cassette covers [flickr.com/creativecassettes]. Ah, the memories… anyhoo, there are a few mixtape widgety things popping up online that seem kind of fun and this being Friday and all here’s one I prepared earlier (see below). If you’ve got one you want to share, post a link to it in the comments box. This one was made using Mixwit. It’s you’d like to upload the tracks yourself try Muxtape. You can find a Sportspanda Special ‘The Modern Disease’ Edition Muxtape at [sportspanda.muxtape.com]. Hope you likey.
Modern Relics: Young and Rich
Cover design for The Tubes‘ album ‘Young and Rich’ by band member, Prairie Prince [prairieprince.com]. Listen to some (only loosely recommended) vintage Tubes here [hushie.com]. A favourite of this man [nieves.ch].
The Trouble with Typography
This is a re-post from March last year, but I didn’t want to bury it in the Boicozine archive because, a year on, it’s still just as relevent especially after reading this… [aestheticrew.com]. So the typeface licensing debate goes on, only it looks like foundries will have to to go the way of record companies and film studios soon if they don’t pick up their game. Here’s how it ran last year… Today’s topic for discussion, ‘Typography is in trouble’, and not just any sort of trouble but serious trouble of the most heinous kind… and possibly something to do with extinction as well. This is due to three distinct factors which I shall endeavour to introduce here, one by one: The rise of the Photoshop Monkey, Internet Browsers and the Type Foundries themselves.
Photoshop is easy. That’s why people love it. It can do some crazy stuff for you but if are designing most of your work in Photoshop then you shouldn’t really be designing at all. Does that sound harsh? Have a look around at the visual noise you see everyday. Have a look at any effects laden website disaster [smashingmagazine.com]. Have a look at any recent Movie Poster [impawards.com]. Many of these Photoshop Monkeys will lazily pick through their existing font menu and use whatever is pre-installed on their computer rather than seeking out the most appropriate or well drawn typeface for the job. Either that or lazy marketing hacks (who love manipulating Photoshop Monkeys cause they can’t argue their case as well as fully fledged Graphoes) will specify a typeface simply because they have it on their PC and, therefore know what it’s called and what it looks like. In this case familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, just laziness.
The website you are looking at has the ability to display any typeface you’d like to specify. In fact, any website that employs Cascading Style Sheets [wikipedia] has been able to do this for ages now. Problem is your Browser can’t (well, IE4 could but this doesn’t really help much — Note: it’s back in Safari 3.1, see link above) [msdn.microsoft.com]. Could be developers just decided embedding fonts was unnecessary when you had a least five typefaces to choose from already. For the developer that finds typefaces a frivolous waste of resources you can already specify them as simply ’serif’, ’sans-serif’, ‘monospace’, ‘cursive’ and, ‘fantasy’ (!?). The other possible reason leads us to our third set of culprits in our ‘death of typography’ scenario…
Typefaces are expensive. Well, most good ones are. They can take a long, long, time to put together or require the sort of slight of hand only a handful of type experts can deliver. Typefaces need to be less expensive. Compare them to your average consumer product. Pretend you are shopping on your local high street or shopping mall or whatever and Woolworths now have a typeface aisle. Should I get Children of Men on DVD for £15 pounds or buy Berthold’s new OpenType version of Akzidenz Grotesk for £230 [bertholdtypes.com]? Sure, it’s a loose analogy but none of these type foundries seem to want to admit that many of the decisions regarding typefaces are being taken out of the hands of your traditional design professionals. People being free to create their own types of media (be it a blog, or a blurb book [blurb.com], or a myspace profile etc) means decisions on what typefaces to use are being made by more and more people. Typefaces are mass media. So why do they continue to be marketed to a select few. Surely, there’s some educating to be done on both sides of the fence here.
There are real solutions to this dilemma. Possibly, the best way to solve it is to separate typefaces into two distinct areas. The ‘bite-size’ chunkette [wired.com/snack_attack] and the Deluxe (or Professional) edition. For a typeface to be popular, all it really only needs is four fonts (this is what you should be calling a singular version of a typeface [typophile.com/wiki]), the Regular, the Italic, the Bold and the Bold Italic. That’s your basic package right there. Now all you have to do is market it like the delicious collectable eye-candy that it is and you’re away. The way the web is, this should get people chopping and changing fonts like crazy. The thing to remember is, that like candy, this is only the cheap substitute to the real meal (and you and I know that it’s okay to snack between meals but never substitute your dinner for candy). That’s where the Pro version comes in and the big cash money comes out. Whaddya think? It’s time to stop edging around the consumer and dive straight in. Now which foundry is going to be first to test the water?
Update: And so it begins: [fonts.info]
Further Reading on the Trouble with Typography:
The unfortunate death of Helvetica
[designbyfire.com/31]
Web Design is 95% Typography (Part 1)
[informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period]
Web Design is 95% Typography (Part 2)
[informationarchitects.jp/webdesign-is-95-typography-partii]
Izit Though
Australia now has a boutique publisher all of it own… although I guess P.A.M. [pambook.com] may have got in there first. Still, it’s not a competition now, is it? Joseph Allen runs Izrock [izrock.com] as a multi-function creative house or ‘commercial art making’ and ‘mixed business’ as he refers to it, following on from his work for the Monster Children gallery [monsterchildren.com/gallery]. Recent Izrock output include monographs by Marcus Oakley (a pic from his recent exhibition in Tokyo is shown above) [marcusoakley.com] and Kill Pixie [killpixie.net]
PDF = Pretty Darn Fine
Like it or not PDF magazines are on the rise and here to stay… well, until the next covetable ‘portable document format’ comes along. Candy is a prime example of top quality PDF magazine that instantly springs to mind [candycollective.com]. There loads more of varying quality over at the pdf-mags portal [pdf-mags.com]. Though still a poor relation to the physical object, the big plus with PDF magazines is accessibility. Particularly in the often elusive world of contract titles. So, without even really knowing what it is, anyone anywhere can enjoy Fabio Ongarato Design’s [fodesign.com.au] work on the Space furniture showrooms magazine entitled More Space [spacefurniture.com.au] with it’s quirky hand-cut imagery as shown above. Yours to download for nada, nothing, nought. See PDF magazines are a bit ace. Note: Established & Sons have a very nice PDF magazine you can download too [establishedandsons.com], designed by the talented folks at MadeThought [madethought.com].
Fat Get Fatter
While lamenting the obnoxious, developer-led ‘Dallas in the 80s’ style of architecture that’s sweeping through London it’s comforting to note architectural firm, F.A.T. [fashionarchitecturetaste.com] seem to be gaining recognition for their well crafted, community driven and, well, ‘jolly’ building designs with a raft of new commissions and proposals underway. After their New Islington development in Manchester [newislington.co.uk] they seem to be on the cusp of becoming a household name. Some work on the interior’s of KesselKramer’s new London branch is shown above [kkoutlet.com]. Pay attention City of London, these are the buildings people will still be talking about in 20–50 years time not the city-worker glass and steel ghettos that can only be described as ‘tall’ [heroninternational.co.uk]. We’ll try to showcase a selection of London’s recent wonders and blunders in the coming weeks (weather permitting). Any suggestions, let us know.
Store of Tomorrow, Today
Seems everyone’s getting more and more interested in the future rather than feeding off the past. Wacky funsters Wolff Olins [wolffolins.com], have recently completed their first ‘Store of Tomorrow’ event in London with the next event opening in New York at the end of the month [brandnext.com]. The concept is a little… confusing… a number of quirky, forward thinking brands offer various wares in exchange for written pledges to perform some sort of action. No money is exchanged. I guess it’s a type of swap shop idea [screenonline.org.uk]. It’s interesting that more and more creative agencies (especially those involved in the age old business of advertising) are playing about with retail concepts such as KesselKramer’s KK Outlet [kkoutlet.com], installed in Hoxton Square to launch the U.K. arm of their agency.
Escalator Syrup
Kokoro & Moi [kokoromoi.com] is the new name for Syrup Helsinki. Worth checking out for their work on the ‘We are Escalator Records’ series. They have built up quite a large body of work for Escalator Records [escalator.co.jp] including creative work for their record label and their excellent café/record store [shop.escalator.co.jp/cafe] in Shibuya.
Bizarre Bazaar
Around 1969, British Harper’s Bazaar [paperpursuits.com] had a bit of an identity crisis. It only lasted for a year and a bit, the outcome of which saw it merge with it’s main competitor, Queen magazine [wikipedia], to become Harper’s & Queen [vinmag.com]. But before this weird hybrid mag was born, they did some really interesting ‘messing about’ with the Bazaar identity. Looking very Biba [bibaexperience.com], even the masthead was dramatically redrawn in a sort of 60s/20s homage to Art Deco. Sans serifs were employed throughout in the magazine, which was rare for a fashion magazine at the time, namely Gill Sans.
A few years ago, I worked on the ‘Girl’ issue of a London-based music and lifestyle, and was so inspired by this 1969 edition of British Bazaar that I had a crack at building the typeface myself. It was only ever used for this special edition of the magazine and has been languishing on my hard drive ever since… until now. It’s not for sale because it’s unfinished but here’s a beta version of the ExtraLight weight available for free download for you to muck about with. Let me know what you think.
[ Download Bazaar ExtraLight Beta ]
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