Pictures Found Online
Jeremy Pettis has produced a wonderful series of typographic illustrations, representing 26 animals — one for each letter of the alphabet. For each, custom lettering is designed to convey the appearance or behavioural characteristics of the animal. They’re all very clever, and some require a bit of contemplation to ‘get it’. My favourite is the (perhaps) rather obvious, but beautiful Zebra one, though the Kangaroo one has an ‘ar’ ligature that’s just perfect:
He’s put the background sketches and roughs on Flickr, which is a great use of the site and for once, a use of the site that I actually can get behind. Flickr’s soviet, rigid, artless presentation is actually ideal as a kind of digital scrapbook for roughs.
Digging around in my files this afternoon, I found this PDF. I’ve had it since early June 2007 after being sent it by David, who noted that they’d developed a branding remarkably similar to the far more important Ministry of Type, something I still find amusing. Hey, I was here first — just. The combination of white, black and chartreuse must be quite the current fashion for ministries — though I notice that the website carries the oh-so-accessible-but-dull Standard Public Sector branding. Shame that, as the branding of the PDF is rather pleasant.
I was trying to identify the typefaces used. It’s unlikely to be a custom job since the time between the announcement of the MoJ and the publication of this document was only a couple of months. I doubt they’d have been able to create a whole new typeface in that time. Also, the branding was included in the costs of “capital, hardware, accessibility, branding, templates, desktop” — £700,000 in all, and after the costs of IT that doesn’t leave much. So yes, I think it’s a modified version of Bliss — the y is not quite exactly the same, so perhaps some tweaking was done (if I’m right). As for the serif, that’s Perpetua. Quite a nice combination really.
The logo and some sample pages:
I’ve had this page of manhole covers open in the browser for the past few days, one of those things in the should-look-at-more-closely category. I’ve had a better look now, and I was reminded of seeing Japanese manhole covers, and they come in a much greater variety of designs (and colours!), so I was wondering why manhole covers are often so dull. I watched a How it’s Made on manhole covers the other day, and there’s no real reason why a city, region or département (say) shouldn’t have its own design.
This site has a good collection of images of Japanese manhole covers, four of which I’ve cut out below.
I saw this great little image over on James Squire (via 1+1=3). Unfortunately I can’t find a higher resolution version for closer type-ogling. There are some larger versions overlaid on images of the beer itself, but I like these type-only ones better.
No, it’s not a logo, it’s today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. It really looks like a logo though don’t you think? It reminds me of all the swooshes and planetary logos we’ve seen over the years, except this time it’s the real thing. That’s what it looks like.
I used to read the Nonist ages ago, and then it went ‘on sabbatical’ for ages. I’ve only just noticed that it’s back (despite posting a link to it recently — I thought it was an old post).
Anyway, this post brought me to a great selection of interesting bindings from the British Library. Worth a look through the site as there are lots of inspirational links and posts.
