The site was briefly inaccessible today, and the RSS may show up as having some duplicate entries. Why? The Ministry of Type has moved! Servers that is. I would like to convey the sense of a thrumming nexus of raw computing power; a darkly gleaming enclosure of steel and carbon fibre buried deep underground in an impregnable vault under some faded ancient pile just off Whitehall, but I fear the truth is a little more prosaic.

Instead of a tiny patch of disc space on an overcrowded server among thousands of others in a vast, grey, air-conditioned warehouse in one of London’s more dismal suburbs, the Ministry’s online presence now occupies a spacious new server dedicated to a few carefully selected occupants. It’s most likely still in a vast, grey, air-conditioned warehouse in one of London’s more dismal suburbs though, but I gather that that’s by far the best habitat for servers.

So yes. Welcome to the new server!

I just followed a link to this interesting demo of the latest webkit wonders on Shaun Inman’s site. I’m excited of course by the possibilities that the transitions and effects could provide - from more responsive UIs to having vertical labels on a graph or spreadsheet without graphics or flash, for example - but, and there’s always a but in things like this, that baseline is seriously wonky. Oddly, Photoshop has this problem too - you can’t just rotate a chunk of text and have it maintain a smooth, straight baseline, so you end up converting text to outlines instead and having to start afresh with each content edit. Annoying!

Update: Shaun Inman got in touch directly and pointed me at the Safari Version 4 Developer Preview, which fixes the baseline issue, as you can see here.

After some casual browsing the other day, I found this film promoting applications to Stockholm’s University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. It’s just nice! I love the orange paint against the blue, and it’s lovely when it hits other objects rebounding from the floor.

You know when you see something and think, “If only that little bit was like this instead of that”? Well I just had that with the Openfolk Manifesto logo by Steve Jankowksi (bottom of the page), which is really rather attractive, but I think I would have ‘squared off’ a couple of the corners, instead of having them all rounded. So, you know, just to verify that idea, I redrew it. To be honest I’m not entirely convinced my redrawing is an undisputed improvement anyway, but it’s fun to play, no?

Also, on that page, take note of the Listening Party Five logo, which is rather nice too (though the roman numeral implies that this is actually Listening Party Four)

The Denver Egotist sent me a link to this rather nice piece of work, for Crawley Library in West Sussex. The new library is due to open in January 2009, so I might have to go up and have a look - I’ve not been to Crawley in years. There’s some more info on the Crawley Borough Council website, and some pictures on the Crawley Library Flickr set.

I can only hope that their new library gets a better logo than the one for Brighton’s, which is a typographic abomination.

There’s been loads written about the high quality and consistency of Barack Obama’s campaign branding and design. I don’t disagree with any of it, but I’ve not really seen anything that really grabs my eye, that makes me look closer and see how it was done. Maybe I’m being cynical because it’s advertising for a political campaign, but they’re perhaps too knowing, too carefully designed, sometimes perhaps too derivative, to be commented on individually as pieces of design work. That is in itself quite remarkable, of course, and collectively they’re interesting as an example of brand power, but at the end of the campaign it’ll be interesting to look at all of it together, as a single body of work, and I fully expect there to be a book published to allow us to do just that. I’ll probably buy it, too.

So, having said all that, I just came across this scan of a flyer promoting Obama’s speech at the Tiergarten in Berlin last week, and it’s a bit more special. It’s got a very nice grid, which to some, invites some comparison to the work of the Bauhaus, though I can’t be the only one to realise that diagonal grids are unique to the Bauhaus. Indeed, they’re quite often used in political, commercial and (dare I say it) theatrical advertising. Still, the flyer below is an excellent example of a diagonal grid, well applied:

I’ve been enjoying The Superest for a while now (since it started I think) after following a link from Chris Glass (I think), and while every post on it is good, it’s the ones by Kevin Cornell that I look forward to the most. Apart from the fantastic illustration, there’s often gorgeous lettering to look at. His site, Bearskinrug, is a joy to visit as well.

I’ve nabbed some of his work from The Superest to illustrate the point - I put them on a cards for my own amusement, as the site reminds me of Top Trumps (and because I think you need to visit the site to see the full ones). Go and visit this, and his main site.