A few links extending the conversation of dimesnsional typography for the folks in Image Making II:

• Dimensional Typography: The Unbearable Flatness of Being. An article by Leslie Atzmon on the subject.
• A Flickr pool from an exhibition curated by myself and Jimmy Luu.
• The Playground. A collection of experimental typefaces presented by Rick Valicenti. Worth a look at is Rick Valicenti’s Incest and Letters to Ed (featured in the exhibition mentioned above). Also worth a look is Blue by Michele Bowers.
• Some type by Karina Peterson. More here.
• Action Types by Marcus Shaefer
• Image above by Alida Sayer

That is all for now. More to come later.

Holy cow…thank you for professor Maniotes for showing me this.
Craft craft craft craft CRAFT!

Pictorial Webster’s: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

a guy i work with passed this on to me and now i to you:

Hi everyone – I haven’t posted to this blog in a while, but here’s some good information about being a creative professional by Nick Campbell from Digital Kitchen. Be sure to check out his blog, portfolio, and the five second projects on video (all linked below):

How to Be A Motion Designer and GET PAID from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.

Blog post for this video :http://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/2009/02/09/presentation-how-to-be-creative-and-get-paid/

His personal portfolio :http://www.creamyorange.com/template.php?page=home

five second projects on vimeo :http://vimeo.com/channels/search:five%20second%20project

Digital Kitchen :http://www.d-kitchen.com/

-Alan

This piece is about dimensional typography, including work in an exhibition Ryan co-curated.

Here’s an article by Leslie on the Eye magazine blog that talks about Ryan’s work.
Check it out.

I figured in light of a plea for typographic help I would actually create a post featuring some books and sites that may help the struggling designer. As for gaining a better understanding of typography a great deal of it comes from looking and trying to understand why things work. Emulate other designers whose work you admire to figure out what they did and then make things on your own. You only get better at it by doing it. So here’s a list of resources that may help you:

On the internets:

Typographic Posters (typographicposters.com). Has a great directory of images of work, from avant-garde experimental type to good old clean grid based typography.

The Behance Network (behance.net). Run a search on Behance without specifying anything other than the category of typography and you will find some great things.

I Love Typography (ilovetypography.com). Nice blog that has lots of type related posts.

TypeNeu (typeneu.com). Another blog site full of good current typography.

Swiss Legacy (swisslegacy.com). A blog dedicated to looking at the history of Swiss design and current work that invokes the days of the international style.

(more…)

I am currently working with Jim Stevens, a colleague who teaches at architecture at Lawrence Tech, to develop a series of 3-dimensional typefaces. The letterforms use a simple set of rules as the basis of creation. Here are the main ones:

1. The character system is arbitrary. Letters can be anything, in this case, simple geometries are combined and subtracted. This system could be entirely abstract (like dots and dashes of morse code and brail). In this case there is some resemblance to traditional latin characters for ease of learning the new system.
2. No character can look the same. Whether through form or use of color, or both, characters must maintain a unique identity. Latin alphabets where similar letters mirror each other (ie. d, p, q, b) can’t exist in 3-d space.
3. Each letter should have rotational symmetry along at least 1-axis. This allows for the character to be easily recognized from multiple vantage points.
4. Color can be used to resemble architectural elements. In this case brick and mortar.

Essentially the type is connected by ball joints which allow for the type to be set in multiple directions. We are currently in the process of rapid prototyping the pieces, following the jump is a look as some of the process and its results. (more…)

I post my drawings on the site Deviant Art. Figured I’d let everyone know that there is a competition right now to design a new logo for them. Prize is $2,500. The thing is, the logo you see above is their new logo. This competition is a challenge to make a better logo than above. I think this logo is better than their old one, but I’m letting you guys know about this, in case you want to take a stab at it.

They have to be submitted by October 14 at 11:59pm. I’m pretty sure you need to have an account in order to enter, since the entries need to be submitted under a specific category of “deviation submissions.” There are free accounts though.

For reference, here is their old logo, with their mascot.

Although I can’t take credit for the drawing above, this flash site is pretty amazing. It lets you draw using font characters in an extremely simple UI that records your drawing process (awesome!) and plays back the drawing process when you look at other people’s work (more awesome!). It’s interesting to me that almost everyone draws people/face. I did:

http://fontpark.morisawa.co.jp/permalink?id=4ption5tppc1a36