Just followed this link from Design Observer, to this great clock by Christiaan Postma. I daren’t think how long it took to work out. It’s made out of lots of smaller clockworks that all combine to spell the time. For a large part of the day though you’d be at a loss what time it is, say at half-five, so if you wanted to make it practical (why?) you could stick a big set of hands in front… but I like it the way it is. Watch the animation (page 3) to see it in action.

I was catching up on Oh Joy! earlier today and saw this post about Lou Dorfman’s gastrotypographicalassemblage. Wow, what a piece. Cho links to a collection of images on Flickr (where else) showing some original photos of the piece in situ, and some of the work being done to restore it - more on that here. I love the restoration pictures, with all the letters laid out like that.

I would love to have something like this at home, or even at the office for that matter.

I came across Jörg Block’s site this morning from a link on Drawn! There are some fantastic illustrations and paintings on there; I love his clean, crisp, often isometric drawing style, and especially the page layouts:

Have a look at the paintings too, they remind me of the paintings of intersections and roadworks you’d see advertising the Glorious New Future in the 50s and 60s, but with a solitude and darkness that suggest the future isn’t all that glorious at all. Of course, he could just like architectural paintings and puts the figure in for scale?

A fair few sites have linked to this recently, but I’ve only just got around to watching it and I can’t recommend it enough. As well as Fry’s flawless presentation of the story of Gutenberg and his invention, there are a few examples of nice lettering to pause the video for too. Mention of the Gutenberg Bible reminds me of this article, from a while back.

It’s the first time I’ve used iPlayer, as it’s the first time my internet connection has worked at a reasonable speed (thank you Virgin Media, it only took you years). I rather like the way its laid out, it’s a bit like my other site, which has looked like that for years, I hasten to add.

Also, for those of you who’ve ever watched the original TV series of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, having Fry present this is just perfect; it’s like a chapter from the Guide itself.

Update: I hadn’t realised that people outside the UK had no iPlayer access at all. Kottke provided these links to a YouTube version in six parts, which unfortunately weren’t encoded to take into account the original widescreen format, so everyone looks a bit narrow: One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six. They may be removed if the BBC requests it, however.

Typographer.org has returned, with a beautiful new design and a single-column format. The infrequent Bald Condensed features will be given their own pages, as in David’s own words:

What happened to Bald Condensed? Nothing, it just appears less frequently, that’s all.  New editions of Bald Condensed will be announced in the news feed from now on.

And for the first time (oddly), I notice that the logo is not just truncated Didot - the serif has been removed from the ‘h’. Subtle!

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”.

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.