I’ve had this great gallery of technical illustrations open in a tab for a little while now, and if you’re at all into super-detailed diagrams it’s well worth a look. The one of the fan (below) is my favourite. Via Chris Glass.

There’s a great collection of 3D type designs on You The Designer. I was looking through them and was reminded of the long-neglected Atlas Magazine, which is sort-of still going (well, it’s there but not being updated from what I can tell). I remember Atlas having a new design with each issue, which was what kept me going back, and looking through previous issues you can see how fast the technology was developing in those years. One of them even offers a link to the Netscape Plugin Finder, using a pop-up window. Still, it’s stuck on the last design now, though you can look at previous issues by clicking the roman numerals floating about on the left, if you can. It’d be interesting to see how it would have developed, had it avoided the big-time of IPOs and say, a merger with Slate or similar. I wonder if it would still have navigation that tries to run away from you?

Another great link via Ace Jet 170, this article on the Font Feed about lining, tabular and old-style figures. I’m a fan of old-style figures anyway, and prefer to use them in most of my work as I find them much more readable, even for numerical data. Still, I suspect I’m somewhat disnumerate, so having the extra ‘word shape’ provided by old style numerals is going to be helpful for readability. I was also raised at a time when maths books were also set with old-style, and somewhat contrary to the example in the Font Feed example, so were most recipes I saw.

Pilcrow symbols from Helvetica and Palatino

Favourite to draw that is… Two interesting articles I’ve followed links to on the H&FJ site recently are the ones about the Sulzbacher Eszett and the Pilcrow (and Capitulum) (via Kottke and Ace Jet 170). It seems both come up in people’s favourite characters to draw. I like drawing the ‘3’ myself, both in ink and with beziers, but drawing the eszett is like a super big extra special bonus ‘3’ with soft curves, sharp edges, stressed strokes… lovely. Some people I work with have eszetts in their surnames, and it disappoints me that after a few months of blank incomprehension from some of the less linguistically capable* they replace it with a double-s. A real shame.

Office doodles testify to the popularity of the letter R, perhaps because it synopsizes the rest of the alphabet in one convenient package (it’s got a stem, a bowl, serifs both internal and external, and of course that marvelous signature gesture, the tail.)

I think I’ll chime in with Kottke and ask to see some of these office doodles!

* I’m ashamed to say this can be summed up as, “mostly British people”.

Farm animal, curiosity or pet? Check out the big cat in this one.


Multiple forms of diversity in one happy package.

In the future, we will all have very low, flat cars, road signs will be hard to read, we will have genetically modified pets and will build large industrial entertainment complexes in areas of astounding natural beauty. That’s the future according to these amazing 1960s illustrations from United States Steel International, by Syd Mead*. Naturally, the implication is that we will be using lots and lots of steel, and will continue to use it to make sleek, shiny cars.

It’s strange how these pictures remind me of a book I had at primary school (I was about 7) which showed two possible futures. One was positively pastoral, with blue skies, happy people cycling along clean white paths through a garden city. The other showed what would happen if we didn’t reduce our energy dependency (apparently), and showed gigantic skyscrapers looming against brown, smoggy skies, with traffic jams and people wearing gas masks. They were both illustrated in an almost identical style to these retro futurist ones, and showed almost the same subjects — they could have been taken directly from this series.

I was going to make a point that all the people in the pictures are white, but there does appear to be one little nod to diversity in there (snippet at right). I think it’s a woman, but the face… ahem.

The lettering on the signs reminds me of the information screens from 2001.

Update: * Thanks to Angel Dominguez for the name

I was looking through my site earlier trying to find an article about Ian Kim’s work, and found that somehow I hadn’t done one. I’ve admired his work for a while, especially the piece below. I was doing some work today that needed illustrations of books flying around (right) and wanted to look at it again for inspiration.

As you can see, my style is rather different (I love working with vectors) but it’s always good to acknowledge your inspirational sources! The similarity in colours is entirely coincidental — the project I’m working on has a scheme of red and blue already!

Make sure to have a look at the ‘personal’ section on the site too, as there are some powerful images, some on some emotive and important subjects.

There’s a design agency near where I live called Eighth Day, and when they put up their sign I enjoyed the use of the numeral ‘8’ to form a lowercase ‘g’. I’ve seen some hand-drawn examples of it in the past, but not in a logo. I’m sure plenty of examples must exist — it is after all an effective and yet straightforward typographic trick. I thought this example was even more intriguing, with all the letters formed from part of numeral eights. I’m especially loving the neat positioning of the trademark symbol — it’s unusual to see it nicely integrated into a logo.