Likes & Likes

John Langon, professor of typography and corporate identity at Drexel University’s Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, will have several paintings hanging at the Type Directors Club in New York in February and through March. On Thursday, February 4th 6-8 pm, there will be a reception and Professor Langdon will be giving a brief talk about his work. More information at the TDC website.

Letterheady is an online collection of letterhead design. An initiative of freelance writer Shaun Usher, the site is simple, straightforward, and instantly addicting. A must for anyone interested in typography, vintage ephemera, or just curious as to what a letter from Luke Skywalker might look like.

The Society of Typographic Aficionados has announced a call for entries for Font Aid IV, a collaborative typographical project to raise raise money for relief efforts in Haiti:

Type designers, graphic designers and other artists from around the world are invited to contribute artwork to be included in a typeface created exclusively for the Font Aid IV effort. The theme of Font Aid IV is “Coming Together” which we will represented though a font consisting entirely of ampersands. Coming Together will be made available for sale through several type distributors, with all proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders. SOTA, a US-based non-profit, is acting as a non-partisan organizing body to help coordinate the effort and ensure all funds are distributed appropriately.

To participate, submit a black and white vector format ampersand as an EPS file to fontaid@typesociety.org. But hurry! Submissions accepted up to this Friday the 29th.

UPDATE: The font will be sold for $20US, and is now available through font distributors Veer and Ascender Fonts. It will be available on FontShop and MyFonts later in the week.

Frustrated with the design of most airline boarding passes, designer Tyler Thompson decided to try his hand revamping them, and set up a site called Boarding Pass/Fail to showcase his efforts.

I must say these initial comps are pretty good looking, but might not be very practical in real-world situations. That’s a lot of black ink that needs to be laid down (or as some astute commenters on the site pointed out, heated via thermal printing). And while HF&J’s Gotham is one of my more favorite typeface designs in recent years, the condensed widths might be a bit harder to read than other faces.

Tyler offers his initial sketch as an Illustrator download, allowing other interested parties to try their hand at a redesign themselves. It will be interesting to see how this idea evolves…

Using no ink, these 18”x24” posters are foil stamped and embossed to create an alphabet composed of letters from many of the more famous (and some infamous) logos of all time. Numbers are limited to 500 prints of each color and are available to buy here.

Recently, the boy and I saw Zombieland. I fully expected a run-of-the-mill Halloween slasher flick. I hadn’t really bothered to look at the trailer, but was just turned off at the thought of an hour and twenty three minutes of zombies running amuck.

I’ll be the first to admit, I was totally wrong about this film. It was good, but the title graphics were even better. The way typography was integrated throughout the film was awesome. I can’t really do them justice explaining it here, but would urge anyone to go view it for themselves.

Below is an excerpt from an interview I found from the director speaking about the collaboration with the designers responsible for the work, Logan:

“I’ve done a lot of stuff with motion graphics in the past, and obviously music videos are inherently visual, and so I tried to bring that aspect to the film. I mean, I love comedy, and I’ve always tried to do things that were funny, but what this film allows was a very visual component that maybe a traditional, straightforward comedy wouldn’t allow. Yeah, I just was really excited, with my first feature, to really show what I can do, and so I used every opportunity, I worked with a lot of really talented people that raised the bar… I mean, the titles and the rules that you responded to were done by this company called Logan. I’ve been a fan of their work for a long time, so getting to work for them was an exciting thing for me, and I think that it’s one of the signatures of the film and I really have them to thank for it because they brought them to life and made them so dynamic. I think the filmmakers that I love are ones that cross genres and do different thinks, the way that David O. Russell can do something like Flirting With Disaster but then go do Three Kings which is like an incredibly visual film—that’s a huge reference point, Spike Jonze is one of my all-time favorite directors, and I love his music video work as well as his feature work, and he always makes things so visually interesting that I just wanted to be in the same playing field as them and try to do whatever I could to elevate the material and make it as cool, and something I would want to watch if I were going to go see the movie.”