graphic design, art, typography and architecture

I've always liked the Plantagenet typeface, so I was pleased to read that: Plantagenet Novus is a completely revised OpenType edition of Ross Mills’ 1996 Plantagenet typeface. The original face is being redesigned and expanded with an extensive typographic repertoire and multilingual character sets to enable the refined setting of scholarly materials in a wide range of languages. If you'd like a ... [more]

I stumbled across Chris Appelhans today; a very talented artist/illustrator hailing from Los Angeles. He has a surprisingly broad range of styles, from classic water colour architectural illustrations through cartoons, fantasy and what looks like digitally-rendered pieces. A great talent indeed. Images © copyright Chris Appelhans. Prints of some of his work can be purchased from Gallery Nucleus. Thanks to Lauren for the nomenclature, "I on Art". This will be a regular feature: highlighting artists, illustrators and photographers that catch my eye. [more]

Perhaps I should rename this weekly post to "Art of the Week", or something like that. Any suggestions? Well, here is my Illustration of the week, by Bulgarian-born Illustrator Christo Bakalov. Some of his illustrations are even available under the creative commons licence. I'm a big fan of his style and, the often, black/dark humour that inspires his illustration. An interesting chap: born 1969 in Bulgaria, he now works in Marseilles in the South of France (what a wonderful place that is); among other things, he works on the American monthly magazine, Foreign Policy, that has published pieces by the likes of ... [more]

I like this chair--the oddly named Flexible Love; by Taiwanese designer Chishen Chiu; a kind of giant Slinky. Reminds me of the Extendible Bench by Designer and Architect Charles Kaisin. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5sLUsY2FF8[/youtube] FlexibleLove™ experimental furniture incorporates an ‘accordion-like, honeycomb’ structure to create durable furniture pieces produced from widely-available, low-cost recycled materials. FlexibleLove™ furniture pieces, such as FlexibleLove 16, are made wholly from recycled paper and wood products, and are produced using pre-existing manufacturing processes in order to reduce their overall impact on the environment. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkEDDj7TTHE[/youtube] [more]

I've always been a fan of the initial sketches that typographers make when developing new fonts. Even the most ordinary fonts can look that little bit more special when rendered or sketched in pencil. Fontself is an interesting new project--a Bitmap Font and Text Engine--that renders text as images. Now, I can already hear you say that text rendered as an image makes it less accessible, but then if we for a moment think in terms of type as art or for use within Graphic Design, then this project has some potential. It's also an interesting coding challenge. [more]

It has been a long time since I did this. I will make every effort to post a Painting of the Week every week from now on. Here are my favourites by the Japanese, New York resident artist Kenichi Hoshine. "Untitled" - Graphite, Charcoal, Acrylic Emulsion, Tea and Gesso on Paper (28"x23") What do you think? Thanks to Designer Daily for the link. [more]

This is a beautifully designed and entertaining Flash web site. Need a quick break from work - Get The Glass. Meet the Adachi family; a Family trying to overcome a staggering predicament: life without milk! The game is a very simple board-game, but the animation is stunning. [more]

An interesting video from Google on why Gmail is so great(?). I use Gmail for personal mail, and have tried mail through Google Apps, but I wouldn't use it for day-to-business mail. Interestingly, the video extols the virtues of Gmail's "Grouping Mail into Conversations feature"--that's about the only thing I dislike about it. I'd like to have the option to switch it off. Anyone else out there use Google Apps for their mail? [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBbmiQhuAhU[/youtube] [more]

If you're a graphic designer and budding film-maker or either, then you won't want to miss out on this: For the 4th annual Typophile Film Festival to take place at TypeCon, this year in Seattle during August 1-5, 2007. The film festival is wide open to anything relevant to typography, design history, and/or type design. It can be educational, experimental, inspiring or humorous. I'm thinking of entering something myself - any ideas, anyone? For further information see the Typophile Web Site. And while you're over at Typophile, don't forget to take a look at the Typophile Wiki. [more]

FireFox 3 Aplha, codenamed Gran Paradiso, is now available for download - includes some interesting new features, one of which is that bookmarks and browsing history are stored in a SQLite database, which should make for better performance and stability. Gran Paradiso Alpha 5 is an early developer milestone for the next major version of Firefox that is being built on top of the next generation of Mozilla's layout engine, Gecko 1.9. Gran Paradiso Alpha ... [more]