I spotted this in a recent copy of Wired Magazine. It’s an advert for (of all things) the Zune, making use of stacked, 3D-rendered type. Nowadays, such an effect is quite simple — just see some of the tutorials in PSDTUTS — but looks rather impressive. Massing the type together like this adds to the effect and makes for a pleasing composition. So I nabbed the pages out of the magazine and scanned them in*.

* Which makes it sound oh-so-simple, but when Canon insists on hiding its drivers, obfuscates the filenames of said drivers, provides multiple near-identically labelled files with only a minor difference you can barely spot, and then none of which turn out to work on OS X 10.5 (because really, you should buy a new scanner every two years shouldn’t you?) So you end up paying some dollars to the marvellous VueScan to take the pain away. Why is it that manufacturers’ printer and scanner software is so bad?

I’ve had this link on Hello Bauldoff hanging around for ages — the design of the box and the bold typography are fantastic, and the colours in the photo really appeal. One thing I noticed was the old-style General Mills logo which is far nicer than the version on their website, though they still use the crazy ‘G’ symbol. It’s the kind of thing that would drive me bonkers if I had to stare at it at breakfast every morning — is it a ‘G’? Is there an ‘M’ in there? Or is it some bonkers ampersand?

I know it’s the main point of the campaign they’re doing, but I’d remove the t-shirt promo flash, or massively simplify it — to me it looks like it’s trying too hard for that retro-Americana thang. The rest of the box carries that off perfectly, so it’s just not necessary.

Not much information about this, apart from it being from 2001 and being 24 characters that say “twenty four characters” in German. As a wall decoration, however, it reminds me of these.

David sent me a link to this, somewhat appropriate for April Fools Day, about an H&FJ spoof font, estupido. I find the idea of creating swashes for OCR A hilarious, but I thought, shouldn’t robots have fancy type too? One day, our machine comrades will be attending theatres and poetry recitals, and instead of programmes set in flourish-heavy Regency scripts like we do, maybe they’ll want something a little more evocative of their earlier eras; Simpler, slower times before 100 Exabyte connections ruined the slow pace of digital romance… And who says computers can’t read swashes? It’s discrimination I say! Discrimination!

There are many collections of vintage posters on Flickr, most of them full of the mundane, rather than the classic. What makes an old poster a ‘classic’ anyway? Does it have to have inspired a whole style of advertising, or be an exemplar of a particular style, be well-executed or just be by someone famous? I guess it doesn’t really matter, it seems it just has to be old and have survived to be scanned in and shoved online. It’s nice though when you find some good examples in these collections. I particularly like some of the (depressingly low-resolution) scans on this collection, especially the lettering on the Volga one, which I nearly missed thanks to Flickr’s brutal it-must-be-square thumbnail cropping.

An old one I’ve had around for a while, this poster (or invite?) for this year’s Gumball 3000.

Courtesy of the ever-fantastic Ace Jet 170, this collection of images of the 1958 Penrose Annual. A couple of my favourites at the bottom, but I just had to trace the Amores one, below. I love it. The M-R* ultra-ligature was rather satisfying to do.

UPDATE: I originally thought the R was a K, but Jes Sherbourne kindly corrected me. Despite the whole thing still being rather beautiful, I have to say that’s one of the worst Rs I’ve ever seen!