The Story of Keep Calm and Carry On

A short video revealing a bit of the history behind the now famous poster

via: swissmiss

Vernacular Typography

Vernacular Typography is a project dedicated to the preservation of vernacular typography around the world. I love the section on hand-painted type in New York. What a great project.

Frank Chimero's New Site

Frank Chimero recently redesigned his website. Rather than a standard portfolio/blog, he created a site that feels like a stream of consciousness of everything he's thinking about creatively. The site is really enjoyable to navigate and experience unfolding. This is saying something. There are very few sites I've experienced that are truly pleasurable to use and not just to look at.

It's in the details #5

Type like this makes me think about Dieter Rams and his principles of design. Specifically, "Good design is as little design as possible." The choice to pull the top of the "k" up to separate "cup" and "rice" is inexplicable. It adds visual clutter and doesn't add to the meaning of the text at all. I understand the temptation one faces as a designer to get in there and tweak something just to leave a mark, but it takes a lot more courage just to set some nicely kerned type and leave it.

Timothy Goodman's Valentine Tweet Marathon

Timothy Goodman spent February 14th drawing a Valentine for each of his 1150 twitter followers. You can view them all on Valentine Tweet Marathon. I love side projects like this.

Kelli Anderson - Disruptive Wonder for a Change

If you've been working as a designer for the last couple of years it's almost certain you've stumbled across one of Kelli Anderson's brilliant projects. She discusses a few of them in this talk. You're missing out if you don't give this a view.

Luca Barcellona

This video of Luca Barcellona doing calligraphy is mesmerizing. If you're not familiar with his lettering work already do yourself a favor and check it out.

How

As an art student one of the things that tempted me most was the pursuit of how. How did you get that effect, what program did you use, is there a tutorial for that? How is easy. There is a process to get to how, and a clearly marked destination to inform me when I've arrived. People been to how before and all I have to do is follow the same well worn path. Even now the ease of how can feel enticing. The trouble is, the same thing that makes how appealing is what makes it uninteresting, it inherently leads to somewhere we've all been before. I'm tired of how—let's do why for a while.

Sign Painting

I've always liked hand-painted signs, but this short video of Dan Madsen performing his craft gave me an even greater appreciation for the true craftsmanship required of a sign painter.

via: Aaron Draplin

Monster Alphabet Poster

If you've been following my twitter stream recently you've probably noticed I've been posting a lettering series called Monster Alphabet over on VERBOSE. I'm really happy with how the project came together so I'm creating a poster to compile the whole set. Below are few shots of the poster tiled together. I'm hoping to send it out to be produced in the next few weeks.