Chippy, Steve and I have worked out a way to gamify our attempts to do this thing called exercise. It involves an exercise bike from gumtree, a large amount of star trek and this map:
It’s 283 miles to paris according to google so I made this vaguely accurate map to track our progress. When we get there we’ll get some croissants and show off our epic iron legs. 10 miles down so far!
If anyone is interested in a copy of the map there’s a download below:
I took a brilliant jaunt around Kew Gardens at the weekend, and having bought a new charger for my camera was able to use it to get some snaps. I was looking at textures in bark and petal formations, these were the ones I found most inspiring, particularly the fleshy curls of the succulent rain forest plant we saw in the tropical greenhouse. I riffed on some repeating semi-circular patterns in illustrator inspired by these shapes. Also, I had no idea how cork looked as it grew, the deeply ridged texture is really pleasing.
I was inspired to play with some geometric patterns inspired by the plants at Kew.
Last month I took a wander over to the current Design Museum exhibition Wim Crouwel – A Graphic Odyssey to educate myself about one of the masters of graphic design. An impressive catalogue of posters, typefaces and word marks (logos) were exhibited which showed the Dutch designer’s functional aesthetic and rigid use of grid-based design. His influence on many modern graphic designers can be appreciated, his crisp modern lines lend many of his compositions an element of timelessness.
Among his work he embraced the creation of typefaces for technology, creating the font New Alphabet in 1967. This font uses only vertical and horizontal strokes, designed for the CRT displays of the time. This typeface is extreme, almost illegible. Wim described New Alphabet ‘over-the-top and never meant to be really used’. It represents the idea that typefaces for use with technology should be designed with the medium in mind, not merely translated from print.
He was one of the founders of Total Design, the design studio where much of his work was created. The word marks he designed in particular made an impression on me, many of which can be seen in this image from the book 40 Years of Total Design.
This online archive at The Het Geheugen van Nederland has a huge collections of Wim Crouwel posters and flyers. It’s well worth a rummage though for some beautiful retro graphic design.
I was given a rather excellent little book by Enric Jardi with some basic hints on typography, split into 22 tips and 22 things you should never do. The general gist of it is that these are good rules for beginners, which can be broken when you know what you’re doing. As someone who has been dabbling with graphic design since first discovering this thing called the internet, it was a really interesting read.
So, here are the top five hints that I found most interesting:
Do not choose two typefaces that look too much alike
Unless they are very different, you do not need two typefaces. Using typefaces that are too similar is like wearing a sienna sweater and beige pants.
Do not make lines too long or too short
If you want a column that can be read easily, make sure it has about 65 spaces….never less than 35 spaces and never more that 75…when we are talking about spaces, we are talking about characters, punctuation, and spaces between words.
Do not leave words hanging
And avoid widows and orphans. Widows are lines of text that are at the end of a paragraph but the first in a new column. Orphans are lines of text which appear at the end of a column but are the start of a new paragraph that continues in a new column.
If they let you, range left
As a rule, make left-aligned, unjustified columns. If you have to, hyphenate words. To set justified paragraphs, you have to make the spaces between words and letters larger or smaller; there is no other way to go about it.
Avoid imitations
If you can use the original font, why use a copy? On the computers of today, a paradigmatic example is Arial…a substitute for the great classic Helvetica. If you want your pieces to have a distinctly professional aspect, avoid these fonts. (See Mark Simonson’s article “The Scourge of Arial”)
It makes me want to rethink all my web design stuff… and stop using Arial.