For all that I’ve heard and read from friends, colleagues and associates, it seems that the end of 2009 can’t come soon enough. I’ve not had a bad year at all — it’s been full of good things, both professional and personal — but somehow I’ve picked up the excitement and promise of a new year and I’m looking forward to 2010. It’s going to be a good year, I think. So, without further ado, I’ll bring your attention to a fantastic collection of ‘The End’ title stills from Warner Bros on The Movie Title Stills Collection, perfectly timed to commemorate the end of the year. Go and take a look!

Have a very happy and prosperous new year, and thank you for your visits, your kind, interesting and useful emails — I read every one and even if I can’t reply I appreciate and enjoy all of them. Here’s to two thousand and ten!

Some end titles from The Movie Title Stills Collection

I’m fascinated by the (mostly) Ohioan gravestones in this Flickr set by Tom Davie. Take a look, then have a look at these ghost signs, and you’ll notice how similar the lettering is. I’ve never seen gravestones lettered like this —any flamboyance I’d seen was kept to Celtic patterning or hideously overblown Victorian sentimentalist statuary; the lettering was universally rendered in a sombre, understated style, or at least an archaic one. Still, most of these stones look to date from the mid-19th Century, when commercial lettering like this was all the rage, and I can imagine that for many towns the best-qualified letterer was the same person who did the signpainting and advertising, so much of the style would have carried across. I wonder also whether people simply preferred to have their relatives’ gravestones done like this — who’d want a dull, plain bit of lettering when even a tin of Cocoa gets something far more ornate? What, didn’t you love Grandpa? It’s a theory anyway. The three at the bottom are all ones I’ve taken myself, all from the north of England, so you can see the style I’ve been used to.

All images from this Flickr set by Tom Davie

The left and centre ones are from St. Oswald’s church in Warton (my hometown!) and the one on the right is from Kendal’s parish church.

I’ve just seen this project on Swiss Miss and I really like the idea. Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth compared how much ink different common typefaces use at the same point size by drawing them out on a wall using biros. It’s not a scientific analysis or anything but it is a gloriously fun thing to do. I like the way they ended up with a graph made out of biros at the end of it, showing how much ink is left — the resulting evidence is its own data. It’s a great way of explaining typographic colour too. Love it.

One of the sites I visit regularly (or at least, read the RSS feed of) is Arch Daily. I’ve always had a strong interest in architecture and I enjoy looking through the pictures of new building designs — even if they do often look unrealistically neat and perfect. It’s nice, then, to find actual photos of an actual built structure, and this one caught my eye for the rather predictable reason that it’s got giant floor numbers painted in bright pink Helvetica Neue on it. As so often happens I was reminded of something, this time another set of car park numbers that also caught my eye, the Futura-esque ones on the Brighton Marina car park just down the road from me. I also think I have a bit of a thing for the number 5.

Photo by David Schreyer, from this article on Arch Daily.

Picture taken near here by me. Still there on my old photoblog.

Normally I find all-Flash websites intensely frustrating and rarely recommend them to anyone. I think no matter how glittering with effects, how technically accomplished they may be, they represent a regrettable attitude to the web; a lack of ‘playing nice with others’ that keeps the information locked away, often unlinkable, frequently unquotable and usually inaccessible. Still, sometimes there are sites that do something so nice it’s worth linking to them, despite their Flashtastic nature. A few days ago It’s Nice That linked to the new site of Established & Sons which has some lovely things, and some lovelier type treatments using URW’s Didoni. One of my favourite examples is below:

Now I really have been meaning to post about this for ages. So long in fact I really can’t remember where I found it. I don’t even have a link to it anymore and it’s only because it’s easily Googled* that I could find it again. As far as I understand it, OASIS is a map-based system for New Yorkers to see how open space is used in the city - the page about it describes this as enhancing the stewardship of said open space, whatever that means. Still, the new maps they’ve got are really quite lovely, and astonishingly detailed. I know our very own Ordnance Survey has maps this detailed, but the data is jealously guarded and even with recent changes in the right direction, detail at this level is not something for we mere taxpayers (who pay for it) to see and use without paying for it again. I hope the Ordnance Survey will see sense soon and we’ll see some fun applications with UK data like this.

Hey, I just like the maps without anything on them.

* If everyone else is going to verb it, then I shall too.

I found a link to this little beauty by Yee-Haw Industries on Coudal today. The linked article on Northcoast Zeitgeist says, “Now that’s a lockup”. Indeed. It’s quite something. It reminds me a bit of the round ones Reden ist Silber posted up a while back.

I got the link to this video on YouTube via Jason Santa-Maria on Twitter. It’s compiled from around 3000 images taken over 2 months documenting the creation of 35 hand-made books at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. There’s a website with more info and clearer photos here. The whole thing is lovely and worth watching — note especially the attention to detail with the thread colour for the binding and the creation of the headband. These images are all from the video:

I’ve had a few emails (so soon!) asking how I created my version of the star posters in an earlier article. I created mine using Photoshop vectors (out of habit) but Illustrator, or indeed any app that supports vectors, would be fine — just adapt the processes to your app.

So, without further ado…

You need to create two sizes of star. Mark Brooks used an additional star shape that was an outline, so you can create one of those as well if you want. The simplest way is to draw a square (mine was 40px × 40px) then create four circles of the same dimensions, offset them to the corners, then set them to subtract from the square, like above. I normally expand the shapes just to leave a nice clean star. Then it’s a process of duplicating and offsetting, like above. Create the large stars on one layer, and the small ones on another.

Keep going until you’ve filled whatever size you need.

Then, turn off the layer with the big stars and create a new one with your shape on it. If you’re using a photo, posterise it into black and white using whatever method you prefer, then put it below all the other layers — fiddle with the opacity so it doesn’t hurt your eyes.

Then it’s quite simple. Delete all the small stars that aren’t mostly on the black areas of your shape — zoom out now and again if unsure and use your judgement.

Then turn the other layer back on, and turn off or delete the one with your shape on it. You’ll end up with two layers - one completely covered in a pattern of big stars, and another with a pattern of small stars on the area of your shape. Print, and savour.

Of course there are tools available to simplify the process of creating patterns from images, and some of them seem to be good. However, I’m rather more than a bit obsessive about the fine details, and something like this really needs accuracy — doing it manually means I can make sure it’s just right.

Some time ago I quietly redid the logo for The Ministry of Type, recreating the crown image out of little dots. I didn’t make an announcement out of it at the time, but I was (and am) pleased with it — it’s a lot more me now. I had a number of reasons for wanting to redo it, mainly that even though I drew the original crown image, it was very close to the official ones, and related to that, those Keep Calm and Carry On posters have become so incredibly popular that I’ve had more than one person ask whether there was a link between them and my site. Short and long answer: no, there isn’t.

So, it was time to redo it, and with the dots I was feeling very pleased with myself indeed, until the very next day when I saw a link on TypeNeu (I think) to the recent work of Brighton’s own Colophon foundry, specifically their typeface Perfin, which has a crown made of dots in it. Consternation! Had I unwittingly ripped them off? But no, their crown is very different from mine, and I’m pretty sure I had my idea without seeing theirs, and more importantly, there’s plenty of room in the world for lots of things made of dots. Still, it did provide a nice excuse to get in touch and I can confirm they’re an extremely talented and nice bunch of people. Here’s a bit of Perfin, designed by Alison Haigh for Colophon, you can see their inspiration for the face: the perforations and dot-matrix printing Royal Mail use to identify post in their systems.

Perfin, designed by Alison Haigh for Colophon. Images courtesy of Colophon.

That was some time ago, and I was reminded that I’d meant to make a post on this when I read on Brand New about the new Pfizer branding. Ignoring for a moment the regrettable update to their logo, I was drawn to the other brand assets that Siegel+Gale produced for them — the dotted illustrations and typeface, below.

I can imagine that there were all sorts of discussions that likened the dots to pills or something or other, but to me, thinking of Pfizer as one of those old 20th Century companies like ICI, IBM and all that, I had images of mid-century computer displays, specifically a type of nixie tube called (I think) a pixie tube. I’ve got a picture of some basic nixie tubes below, as it seems that the type I’m familiar with—where the letters are formed from individual points of light — are quite rare. Indeed, this is the closest I could find online to the type I saw in my father’s and grandfather’s workshops. They’re really rather beautiful things:

A couple of nixie tubes. Image courtesy of Adam Greig on Flickr.

Update: If you’re interested in perforated typefaces, you may also like to take a look at Dividend, from Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Amusingly, there’s also an article on typography.com about nixie tubes.

So yes, that Pfizer logo change. Overall, it’s good, but it’s just that P. It seems so disconnected from the rest of the name now — I really think they should have kept the serif in it, it provided a visual ‘push’ of the P into the F. Just my opinion, mind.