Month: January 2016

Humor

Would You Vote for This Typeface?

By Delphine Hirasuna |

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A few days ago Meta Design/Font Shop founder Erik Spiekermann expressed his displeasure in a tweet: “Cannot stand that Trump uses my #FFMeta @ FontShop: (only in the background, but still) he only deserves Arial.”
That led Roger Black to tweet: “Trump does not deserve Arial.” Others chimed in that wingdings and dingbats were more appropriate for The Donald. From the incensed outcry of type lovers, one would think that Spiekermann had been violated or defamed by Trump. Type-loving tweeters had very specific views on what kind of personality deserved to use a humanistic sans-serif font that conveyed a calm, reasonable presence, and it wasn’t the bombastic candidate. For the sake of truth-in-typography, we suggest a more suitable option for Trump – Comic Sans.
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Books We Like

Louise Fili’s Typographic Love Letter to Paris

By Delphine Hirasuna |

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Over the past four decades, New York-based designer Louise Fili has returned often to Paris, camera in hand, to document the signage of the Parisian streetscape. Graphique de La Rue is what Fili calls her “typographic love letter to Paris.” From the classic neon that illuminates bistros and cafes to the dramatic facades of the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergere to Hector Guimard’s legendary art nouveau metro entrances, Fili shows us the sensuous elegance and dazzling beauty of Paris street signs. This book is a sequel to her Graficadella Strada: The Signs of Italy, which is equally sumptuous.
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Advertising

Volvo’s Invisible Visible Paint

By Delphine Hirasuna |

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Anyone driving on a dark winter’s night knows that pedestrians and cyclists are difficult to see, especially if they are wearing dark colors. That is why Swedish car maker Volvo has introduced an innovative new safety feature that isn’t part of their vehicles, but is on the cyclists and pedestrians who may cross their path. Developed by creative agency Grey London and Swedish startup Albedo100, LifePaint is a water-based spray-on reflective paint that is invisible in daylight but lights up at night when encountering the glare of automobile headlights. LifePaint can be sprayed on any surface – bikes, helmets, clothes, baby strollers, pet leashes, shoes, wheelchairs, backpacks – without affecting the material or color. Completely transparent by day, it only glows when a headlight shines on it. It wears off in about a week, and washes out completely. To promote its new Volvo cx90, the car maker is giving away free LifePaint samples in bike shops in the UK before rolling the product out to a broader market.
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Pop Culture

Tonight Show’s Star Wars Jam Session

By Delphine Hirasuna |


This 90-second plug for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show is as ingenious as it is entertaining. Featuring Fallon, house-band The Roots, and the Star Wars cast, the video shows the performers singing as an a cappella choir. Arranged in a grid a la Hollywood Squares or the Brady Bunch, each performer is shot against a plain background while giving their own solo rendition of the film’s most familiar tunes. By shooting at different times and places to accommodate the performers’ schedules, the producers were able to make Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Lupita Nyong’o, Gwendoline Christie, BB8, storm troopers, 3CPO, and R2D2, part of the all-star chorus. The juxtaposition of colored squares and overlapping of a capella voices turned the video into a spontaneous jam session, with performers playing off each other even though they were in different parts of the galaxy.

Packaging

Natural Branding by Nishikigoi Sake

By Delphine Hirasuna |

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The rice-growing region in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture is renowned for its excellent sake (made from fermented rice) and its colorful ornamental carp fish, called Nishikigoi, or koi for short. Tokyo-based design agency, Bullet, was inspired by this regional icon when developing the packaging for a recently released sake product produced by Imayotsukasa Sake Brewery, based in Niigata. The sake brand named Nishikigoi features the distinctive bright red and white mottled patterns of the carp on its bottle and a white box cut-out in the simple silhouette of a carp. Stunning and stylish, the packaging displayed together in a retail setting look like a school of swimming Nishikigoi fish.

The ornamental carp originated in Niigata around AD 1500 when rice farmers began using the common carp as fish food, raising them in the reservoirs above the rice paddies. Around 1800, farmers began seeing colorful mutations of the fish and cross-bred them to create and stabilize new strains in vibrant colors and patterns. The ornamental carp were largely unknown outside of Niigata until they were sent to the 1914 Tokyo Taisho Exhibition as a unique product of the prefecture. By 1938, they were being exported as decorative objects to other parts of the world. Today they are prized as their own unique living art form gracing the ponds of many home gardens — and on the bottles of premium sake.
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