Good to see that I am not the only one who has to photograph numbers wherever I see them. Wardour Street in Soho ist still home to many colour labs, film-, sound- and design-studios. Someone…
Before we had cheap digital printers and everybody started setting their little shop notices in Arial, there were dedicated systems for displaying messages in shops, bars and cafés. One of these…
Apparently there is a trend to make portraits from letters only. I was very surprised to find my head in a list on typography portraits, right above that of Obama. The designer, Thierry Eamon,…
Metal shutters in front of shop windows are hardly ever pretty. Especially not when the shop seems to be closed forever. I have no idea whether these three letters have any meaning, but they were…
Hotel hallways are long by necessity and not meant to be places to spend time in. Looking out from the lift door all you normally see are the signs with the room numbers on them. Often barely…
The iPhone is not a camera, it just has a cheap plastic lens, a chip and some memory dedicated to capturing and storing image data. There are no adjustments possible, all you do is raise the phone…
Spontaneous slogans here in London have been the subject of my deliberations before. A building site in Clerkenwell yielded this one today, done by an expert, typographically correct:
Even with an ugly ad like this, the Nokia typeface carries the brand. I designed this 8 years ago (Monotype turned my sketches into real fonts) and it’s held up pretty well.
Under download above you can still see the bad copy of the Typomania video that I did for the BBC almost 25 years ago. Two fellow typomaniacs have taken the sound track from that video and…
Students at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the Media and Film department have a project going called “Naming Capitaism”. The whole thing is quite cryptic: the location and…
A Zeppelin NT has been seen above San Francisco Bay, showing tourists the sights from above. The airship is 75m (246ft) long and 17m (64ft) high. The logo Airship Venture is set in ITC Officina…
Magazines and newspapers are suffering, everywhere. Everywhere? Apparently, one of them is doing extremely well: The Economist. Michael Hirschorn argues in this article in The Atlantic that is has…
The latest diagram showing what Information Architects think are the 333 most influential websites is now available.
I just wish they wouldn’t call it a map, because it isn’t. It is a…
This was the first enamel sign for what was to become quite a collection of them. In 1967 we – my then.wife, Joan and myself – saw it somewhere in the South of France, next to the door of…
