Well, today is the last day of voting, and I haven’t managed to cover all the pieces that feature great design. Work got in the way, and the original post didn’t attract that much attention. I mean, it is my most visited post to date, but still no comments :P. Anyway, here’s the second round-up, with more choices to vote for (and a slightly different layout). If you missed part one, you’ll probably miss part three, which will come after the winners have been announced, on the 23rd. So make sure you subscribe to the feed to stay tuned.

WorldchangingStefan Sagmeister

Project MJohn Bielenberg

Brian W. Jones - This is not grass

Title: Project M
Designer: John Bielenberg and participants
Vote
Project M is an intensive summer program designed to inspire young graphic designers, writers, photographers and other creative people that their work can have a positive and significant impact on the world.

“Oprah has one. But Herbert Banks doesn’t have one. …”

Twitter logoTwitter

Title: Twitter Logo
Vote

GTA4 LogoRockstar Games

Title: GTA4 Logo
Vote
One of the best action/adventure games out there. I like the logo, nice type in there.

FacebookFacebook

Title: Facebook
Vote
You all know it.. would you vote for it?

Clear Magazine

Title: Clear Magazine
Publisher/Creative Director: Emin Kadi
Vote
Clear is the first international fashion design magazine located in the Midwestern United States.

TDC.comType Directors Club

Title: Type Directors Club
Designer: Brian Miller
Vote

Circle of family necklaceSima Gilady

Title: Circle of family necklace
Designer: Sima Gilady
Vote
This beautiful necklace is a unique way to bring your family together and the beauty and simplicity of the symbol of eternity!

Dwell Magazine RedesignKyle Blue

Title: Dwell Magazine Redesign
Client: Dwell Magazine
Designer/Art Director: Kyle Blue
Vote
There is a great interview about the redesign over at Walker Art Center website, recommended reading!

As most of us know already, the National Design Week in USA is about to start: between October 19th and October 25th, the Cooper-Hewitt will be freely open to the public wanting to attend the exhibitions and panels surrounding the National Design Awards. With this occasion, the museum has launched a special competition called Public’s Design Awards, a place for everybody to nominate and vote for the best in 2008’s design landscape. For the typography-minded people, I thought I’d present a list with all the nominees that feature great use of type. If you want to vote type, here are your best choices.

I miss youColleen Baran

Stepping out to celebrate lifeStephanie Orma

GOOD Magazine designScott Stowell

DesignObserver designMichael Beirut

we Campaign designBrian Collins

4th Street BikewayJoseph Prichard

optimismReed Seifer

Helvetica, The FilmGary Hustwit

Braille Alphabet BraceletLeslie Ligon

I found this rather weird looking website when browsing notforpaper.com, a new site dedicated to “work best realized away from a printed surface”. It is the homepage of a new interactive agency called BigMan, established in 2007 in Sao Paolo, Brasil. If you give this BigMan of letters a spin, you’ll find some interesting links and strange bits of thoughts, arranged with anarchy in mind. I like the way everything is presented: fully typographical.

Matthew Anderson is a typography-oriented designer and you can tell that from his domain name: ampersanderson.com I really want to congratulate you, that’s a nice one! I wonder if anyone has called him that yet… I know I haven’t posted in a while, but let’s cut to the chase, regardless. I found out about Ampersanderson.com latest type work from ilovetypography.com, the greatest typesite of all. Mr Anderson is from Brooklyn, NY and graduated in Seattle. He has a great resume

Hammer of Justice

Bell of Freedom

Saw of Truth

Drums of Unity

Welcome to September’s typeface round-up. The month that just ended gave me a lot of headache, and its closure leaves me with many things to ponder. Last night, I figured one of them should be new type, so I came up with the idea of making a monthly special post with newly launched typefaces. I hope, as more visitors come by, to get comments on this sort of decisions.
September brought some interesting typefaces; while surfing away amongst the many, I could distinguish two trends, one of which is headline/body text type and the subject of this first round-up post here on t.a.t (the other trend being scripts/handwritten). I found some rather nice fonts which may become your next selection if you have a magazine or newspaper to work on.

HirukoThinkDust

Hiruko original poster

Hiruko is a complete family of rounded characters fit for both headlines and body text. It has four weights, a rather nifty Oblique Light, an Alternates version and a very nice looking Outline, with Alternates. It took 6 weeks to design and it’s available through MyFonts, T26 and YWFT. The designer, London-based Alex Haigh, worked for several of the top international brands, mostly through his one-man show (as far as I can tell) Thinkdust type foundry.

The uniform peace of all caps.

I find the typeface to be quite pleasing, it’s monotonous forms helping the eye to read. I like how everything looks in all caps, especially when set in Light weight: everything looks so compact and uniform, there is nothing to disturb the peace. Via.

Platten Neu P22

Early this September, P22 announced the arrival of Colin Kahn’s Platten Neu: a revisited, extended version of the foundry’s ink-pen rounded Platten typeface. Inspired by 1920s fountain pen practice books and very similar to early-age alphabet books, Platten is now Neu and ready to kick: it includes 6 Pro weights, amongst which lies a wonderful Demibold, plenty of characters, alternates and ligatures, making it a delicious treat for any headline or logo.

Love the cap G.

Again, I like the Light version, I might have a knack for these things. The Demi is skilfully made, with a playful attitude, but the Light seems more serious. And that uppercase G is fantastic. In fact, you gotta love all the small caps, they look so real and the strokes are kept in perfect harmony. Another thing to note, at least in my book, is how the Italic loses the rounded aspect at the tip of the strokes (Light weight especially), but how it compensates by adding more arcs to the forms. Notice the amazing impact this trait has in the case of the letters Mm and Nn.

Caput FontFarm

Just now I found the FontFarm, a german design shop focusing on type, amongst others. Their newest release, a typeface that’s been in the works since 2006, is named Caput and got out the workshop late last month. Caput is a contemporary sans serif and is made out of a very interesting blend. The uppers seem set in their place, although they do have a few interesting twists, while the lowers are a little more special, with slight variations in stroke width, just enough to make heads turn. This combination between stiff uppercase and smoother lowercase is tied though an interesting x-height, that gives a slight square aspect to most of the characters. The typeface comes in four weights with accompanying stand-alone small caps, plus a lot of alternates and form variations, and its designer, Natasha Kai Oetzbach, is very proud of it at the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach am Main, near Frankfurt.

Taz 3 LucasFonts

LucasFonts, the home of prestigious type designer and teacher Luc de Groot, who authored fonts such as Thesis, TheSans and TheSerif, offers a new and (greatly) improved version of the Taz font. Reaching a staggering 15 weights - all with extended European set, nice ligatures and two sets of figures -, the family makes the perfect arsenal for newspaper publishing. And one more thing - which might be an emerging trend for today’s round-up: the Light weights were carefully readjusted for better readability, making a big family happier, even at smaller sizes.

Benton Modern Display Font Bureau

Last month seemed to be a good time for revisits. Font Bureau recently announced theirs. Calligrapher Richard Lipton revisited his Century Schoolbook Italic revival, Benton Modern Text, which he did together with Christian Schwartz (who added Bold weights later) during 1997-2001, a typeface made for Boston Globe and the Detroit Free Press (Tobias Frere-Jones having drawn the regular). Now, Dyana Weissman joined Lipton in making the result, Benton Modern Display, a true classic. The family features six weights, ranging from Light to Ultra, plus Italics, Condensed and Compressed versions, making for a total of 36 styles and a family worth considering.

Klavika Process

Eric Olson from Process designed Klavika during 2003-04 as a strong, editorial sans with four weights, accompanying italics, small caps, and a total of six figure sets (including small caps figures). It features ligatures, alternates and pre-built fractions.

Type designer Eric Olson taught typography at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and later established Process Type Foundry as a contemporary typeface design studio. His colleague, fellow designer Nicole Dotin holds a MA from the University of Reading in typeface design and was also a teacher of typography and web design at the MACD. She’s just about to finish a very intriguing typeface named Elena, due to release in late 2008. Will definitely keep you updated.

Bulldog Club Type

Note the heightened ear on that g, looks great!

My cat is going wild right now, so I’m going to cover one last typeface and then call it quits. This is Bulldog, from the now well-established foundry Club Type, of UK designer Adrian Williams. Bulldog is a nice little family of six, numbering three weights and featured on Faces.co.uk. It’s a great tall grotesque fit for both running text and headlines. The stems are a little curved at the end, which works remarkably well for such a tall x-height. Williams founded Club Type back in 1985 offering type for pre-PostScript systems. Adrian started digitizing original designs from as early as 1990, succeeding in being one of the popular foundries of today’s world. Bulldog was designed in 1989 to celebrate 100 years of sans-serif modern type, and is now out in the spotlight and offered through Faces, amongst others.

The building of the West London Academy received a new voice in 2006, with the great way finding signage beautifully designed by the Graphic Thought Facility. Featuring beautiful icons, powerful and visible colours and the marvels of the Calvert typeface, the designs seem to fit perfectly with the building and it’s modernist interiors.

The pictograms blend nicely with the type

The GTF was founded in 1990 at the beginning of the London graphic design recession. The founders, Paul Neale, Andy Stevens and Nigel Robinson were MA colleagues at the Royal College of Art and founded the business throughout the first years with part-time jobs, government schemes and a game-show prize. Since then, they became one of the most prestigious graphic design agency in the London scene, doing design work for clients such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Carnegie Museum of Art, the Tate Museum, Nokia or British Council. Their latest show is a one-agency exhibition showcasing their work, held at The Art Institute of Chicago, which closed this August.

The big numbers on the staircases drew my attention. It’s the first time I see a floor number this beautiful and, well, big. I think it’s extremely useful and, if not, at least beautiful to look at. The typeface used throughout the pieces is designed by Margaret Calvert back in 1980 1. She is responsible for most of the road signage in the UK, and invented some widely used road pictograms, such as the famous “men at work” (man and shovel) or “children crossing the road” 2. Her typefaces are used by the British Railway System (Rail Alphabet typeface) and the Tyne and Wear Metro (Calvert typeface) in North East England. Via

Typographunnies is a great website dedicated to type jokes. And it’s not all about the jokes, it’s also about the type. I love the way different sizes, weights and ultimately typefaces combine to create a very diverse reading experience. The page looks light-hearted, though not light, and savvy, though not serious. Something to remember, I think. The creator, Kosal Sen, is a Printeractive Designer from Philadelphia, having graduated at Drexel University. He is a graphic designer at TMX, and a freelancer with a nice portfolio on the side. Via swisslegacy

Some are really good.

But anyway, here’s a really funny one, that’s also informative and a bit weird (well, they all are, at least for someone that doesn’t know his slab from his adnate): “I got this neat idea for a movie. You know Paul Renner, right? Duh, he designed Futura. Classic, but clunky, not as nice as Avenir. Right on! Imagine what Paul would do if he laid eyes on Avenir. Impossible. He died 32 years before it was designed. Not in my movie. Letâ??s say heâ??s found this time machineâ?¦and he uses it to to spy on Frutigerâ??s drafts for Avenir, and he comes back in time, uses the knowledge gained, and revises his own Futura! Thatâ??s crazy, yo. What would the movie be called? Back to the Futura. Fucking brilliant.”

Gary Hustwit’s feature-length documentary celebrating one of the greatest typefaces of all times, Helvetica, was highly acclaimed by everyone. It’s worth seeing (and believing). The centre point of the film was its intrigue, plot twist and conclusion - asking great designers a simple question: Helvetica, love or hate?

For the haters

Sean Rees, the designer of this lovely poster, is a welsh graphic designer/illustrator relocated to London who describes himself as “passionate about type, ideas, and bacon”. His work, showcased on his fresh new website features unique type treatments and some great looking illustrations. Be sure to check it out. Via typetweets

Wim Crouwel: I love Helvetica

Herman Zapf: I hate Helvetica

Helvetica was born in 1957 from the hands of Max Miedinger in Switzerland and became the most widely used sans-serif typeface of the new century. In the film, Wim Crouwel states that “we were impressed by that because it was more neutral, and neutralism was a word that we loved”, outlining one of the key qualities of the Helvetica family.

Neubau is a type foundry and design studio from Berlin focusing on classic modernist approaches to design, where typography plays an important role. Hence, the present type-heavy piece of (web) design.

Their design portfolio features the same heavy usage of type, brought forth by a weird flash interface with very unclear interactions. It’s nice to look at, though, giving a feel of a gratifying cityscape with imposing architecture.

Layers of type in a modern design

NB Grotesk typeface, featuring 9 weights

Their typefaces are reminiscent of the grand classics such as Futura or Akzidenz Grotesk. Newest additions include a very powerful typeface entitled NB Grotesk, that comes in 9 weights. Via DesignObserver.