I haven't noticed this until this year:

So, two weekends ago the new Harry Potter came out. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Though I'm not an avid reader of the book, I really enjoy the movies. Obviously the special effects are pretty cool, but what I think is even cooler are the small design treatments that you can find within this fictional world.


For example, the packaging of the various candies and chocolates on the train to Hogwarts are always fun to look at, like the chocolate frog!














But, what really caught my attention in the new Harry Potter was the portions of the film that show off the "Daily Prophet," which is the newspaper in Harry Potter land. It is cool that the photos in the newspaper move, however I think what is even more beautiful about it is the typography. Whoever designed the various papers in the movie series must have gone through a hard time trying to stack and track out all of the headers and text. The paper has interesting drop caps and hierarchic shifts. Especially in the new movie I noticed that the designers used "rivers" and "gaps" in the text of the paper to make imagery, like swirlies and things.

I'm impressed with the production of Harry Potter and the detail and creativity that went into making the "Daily Prophet." It was definitely not an after thought in the movie. Here is a link to part of one Harry Potter film. At 34 seconds it shows the actual newspaper [if you want to skip ahead]. Here are some images of the paper too. It may break some type rules, but.. it's Harry Potter after all.

Punk as F**k

via Friends of Type

Paul Rand Video

I am doing my magazine project on Paul Rand and had been doing a lot of research on him for my body copy. I came across this video and found it to be very fun and informative. It uses all of his work and designs and sums up some of his best work in a quick fun video.

cool typographic art

I found a cool graphic design using typography.

The designer is Tariq Yosef Ahmad Shishani Chachnian Jordanian Live in Amman-Jordan (so long!!!).

These are his works.

And this is a stop motion animation for type. Click here

Vintage Movie Covers

I found thins really cool site from an image originating from ffffound.com They have great typographical solutions, each of these are very,very unique and hold it's own individual feel from one to another, although what they do have in common is the extreme differences. Each one has it's own kind of type, color scheme, medium, imagery layout, mood. It's all very different. Some type is made, some recreated by hand from an already existing type face, and others are made out of the images in the cover itself. It's good to keep sharp, and this is a reminder of just how differently applied type and images can be.

Here's some, to see all of them go to the link.

Victoria

Day in the Life of a Graphic Design Student

Rishi Sodha created this senior design thesis/self-promotional piece documenting just how much today's design students have to know and do in order to stand out from the thousands of other design students compete for entry level jobs.

via Behance Network

Ecological Business Cards

I just came across this via here and here. It's a pretty smart way to rethink designing green. We designers love our fancy paper but at some point we'll have to consider other options. The web and mobile devices are great but I think people still like holding and touching things. Using a stamp could be a good way to blend the real and the "fake".

That D Has Got Some Jive Motions.

I bought this music video when I found it on itunes in 2007, simply because I thought the video was the bomb diggity. The song featured is D.A.N.C.E by the french electronic music duo Justice. If Cee Lo's F**k You video and the Kinetic Type videos were to have a baby, this would be it. Check it out.

A Love Letter for You

Check out this mural project in west philly called, A Love Letter for You. click here

Font Conference

I just wanted to share this video with everyone. It's one of my favorites...

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Stationary, book bind, etc

This is for anyone currently working on any stationery collateral or a magazine or brochure, which you probably are if you're reading this blog right now. These are just a couple of things I picked out from some books—I will post more as I come across interesting and inspiring designs.

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Skin Deep Typography

So after viewing most of the posts on this blog i thought other students did a great job of interpresting beautiful treatments of type. I wanted to show an example on how type could be made from something organic yet not reflect the delicacy of most type people see. This man uses clothespins and skin

he has his whole alphabet on http://www.thijsverbeek.nl/index5.html

Onto something a little more permanent and still on the subject of skin. I found a few examples of tattooed alphabets with most of them demonstrating

I am going to continue my search for these skin deep typography treatments but thats all for now.

Walgreens sues Wegmans

Interesting!
http://consumerist.com/2010/11/walgreens-sues-wegmans-over-the-letter-w.html


What are your thoughts?

Emigre

Creating fonts since 1984, are the design duo Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzana Licko, who are also the founders of Emigre Graphics. They are a type foundry that continues to produce typefaces, and are still going strong. There is also Emigre, the magazine, that they ran from 1984-2005. Their top ten most popular typefaces are:

1. Mrs Eaves

2. Mr Eaves Sans

3. Vista

4. Fairplex

5. Filosofia

6. Priori

7. Brothers

8.Matrix

9. Cholla

10. Dalliance

Emigre Fonts

They own over 300 typefaces, now.

Kinetic Typography

While perusing youtube for inspirational typography-related videos, I came across this whole sub genre of typography called "kinetic typography." Kinetic typography means the art of expression through animated text. I found this really cool because I never realized how possible it is to completely recreate the emotions stimulated by a clip from a movie or a song only using type. Here are two very different examples of kinetic typography. The first one is artistically beautiful, while emotionally very intense, and the second one is a little less artistic but extremely fun, using some great colors and animation techniques.

Fight Club: Chemical Burn scene

Blackalicious: "Alphabet Aerobics"

I choose this piece for a number of reasons. First being, I felt it was a good demonstration of hierarchy. I like how each one of the numbers is done in the type face its numbering. It's subtle but effective, also it's not too much of a change leaving the piece still looking very well put together. Also if you take a look at his website (mike giesser) http://mgiesser.com/home/ , in his intro he talks about keeping it simple. this just reminded me of all the times Alice has said that she could design with only 5 type faces for the rest of her life. I;m learning more and more how true this is.





Mostly I choose this because it made me laugh.Normally I hate this faux art nouveau font, but ever font has it's day and I think it works great here. This piece was done by Andrej Krahne. He's a german designer which also makes me a little sad because I can't read alot of his work. However his website is in english www.andrejkrahne.de/#home . He's done some great books that you should check out. His work is very clean. It's simplistic, but not minimalistic. He loves sans-serif.





Helvetica Swiss Army Knife. Couldn't find any more information on it. But it's pretty. The end.




I'm working on a catalog for Bicycles right now so this caught my attention. These were done by a designer French Designer, Juri Zaech. He wants to actually build these bicycles which I think is very cool and he would definitely be featured in my catalog. you can check him out at http://newcreatives.com/?userID=1182189218 . I don't really know his deal right now. His website says that he's an art director. His website has alot of information missing. Who knows.





This piece is done by designer Adam Augustyn. I choose this because his work is nice, but it's trendy and has become generic. However his website looks realy nice.

Who doesn't love typography and posters?

Talking about gig posters last week reminded me of Kevin Mercer's work. I found about him after meeting him and picking up one of his prints at R5's Punk Rock Flea Market (part hipster flea market, park local art/craft show). He's a freelance designer based in Oaklyn New Jersey and goes by Largemammal online. He does all kinds of design work but mostly makes screen printed gig posters that feature some pretty cool typography. He uses all kinds of type, making his own hand lettering, using existing fonts or manipulating them to fit his project. He has a lot of great posters on his site, these are two of my favorites. I really like how much variety he has with his type and how he makes it relate back to his illustrations.

I also found a series of posters by Tom Davie while browsing on Design Work Life. He studied at SAIC and now has his own studio, studio twentysix2, in Cincinnati, Ohio. I couldn't find out much about the actual project, but he has a pretty great series of posters illustrating different typographic concepts and terms. There's really nice looking and bold images of what different parts of type are and what they do or look like. I just really love the way they look, the photographic ones especially, and think it's a pretty good looking way to familiarize yourself with type.

silkscreened designs are so refreshing!

We all have probably created/tried to create a silkscreen effect on type or images. However, no matter how many textures we layer on, nothing beats a good old silkscreened poster. What first drew me to Ed Nacional's work was his poster series for the Terry Shop, a vintage clothing store. What is most attractive about the series is Nacional's use of screenprinting, which is refreshing in a world of primarily vector images. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Nacional blends the universally pleasing multi-typeface poster with classic handmade techniques like letterpress and silkscreening. Nacional's creative use of type paired with old school techniques makes his designs just oh so pleasant to look at.