Maison Theater

Coupe International Awards 2007
lg2boutique


This is a fun advertising campaign from lg2boutique for the Maison Theater. It promotes a series of plays written by well-known authors for an audience of children. Bright colors and handwritten type serves the purpose well.

Here's an identity system created for B2 by paprika. The cramped, blocky type used gives this package a very contemporary look

Commisaires

How International
Paprika

Sorry, Design Army, you have a new rival for my affections. Today I'm in loeve with PAPRIKA. This Canadian firm has been featured in every annual and magazine imaginable. Above are two pieces they created for the art gallery Commissaires.

Rail Euorpe

Adnews, July 2008
Taxi

Fun advertising campaign aimed at bolstering railway travel through Europe.

Mmmm...Cheese

Coupe International Awards 2008

Clever typographic billboard from Taxi for the Canadian Dairy Farmers Association. I love that the e's seem to be laughing. When I was little and I first learned the alphabet, I would always anthropomorphise the letters. I always thought that the lowercase a and e looked like they would be the most fun to hang out with. My, was I a strange child!

The Young Foundation

AIGA Design Annual 2007, Pentagram

OK. Just one more from Pentagram. This is the logo for a British nonprofit that provides services for children and youth. Using a tree to symbolize growth and stability could have been trite and cliched, but the type-based treatment makes this logo seem fresh and clever.

McDonald's Billboard

Luerzer's Archive, Communication Arts Interactive 13

I found this McDonald's billboard while researching Leo Burnett's ad agency (their site won a Comm Arts Interactive Award). Greenwashing? Yes. Awesome? Absolutely. They made real lettuce grow on a billboard! These are amazing times we live in.

AIGA, Washington DC
Design Army

These promotional materials for the DC regional chapter of the AIGA are playful, fresh, and contemporary. The first a website (It's so rare to see good typography on the internet that I had to include it) and the second is a poster.

AICGS

Art Director's Annual 87th Design Awards

More from Design Army. Who could possibly find fault with large, cropped letters and crisp blocks of color? Certainly not I!

Design Army

Communication Arts Annual 2007, Coupe International Awards 2007
Design Army

I just killed an hour browsing through this firm's site and I'm in love! More entries will definitely ensue. I guess, though type-based, this identity package isn't a great typography find. But I like it so much i thought I'd post it anyways. I guess the font is Helvetica?

HOAX REVEALED!

Thanks to Miriam's forensic typography I don't need to do a big reveal this week. The Economist cover I posted last week was, obviously, a hoax. The real cover is posted above. Last week's version has been floating around the blogosphere for a while, so I no longer remember where I originally saw it.

The Economist has a long history of typographic ads and covers, though. For decades they had humorous quotes in a white serif Bodoni or Bodini-like font. Here are a couple examples:


Their most recent ads build on this tradition and incorporate illustration elements. Here's an example:

Economist Cover

This was the the cover for the economist a week or two ago. Nothing says it like Helvetica.

ABC3D

ABC3D

I found this link on Cosas Visuales, a Spanish design blog. It features a pop-up book that takes on the alphabet as a sculptural challenge. Very clever. Very cool. Very catchy tune.

Gymboree

This logo was created by Michael Osborne Design. The firm was mentioned in Computer Arts magazine a couple of months ago. I tried to identify the font for GYMBORee, first by typing the words out in different fonts, and then by taking it to What the Font. Neither worked, which is not surprising, because my guess is that this was custom-made for the logo. The G, Y, M, and the B all look like a squashed slightly more angular version of Gill Sans, while the rest of the letters seem like squashed Helvetica. Answer: My believe is that this is the long lost child of the two-- Gillvetica Anorexica. No? I challenge you to make a better guess! Bottom line. I think the wordmark is fun and energetic, but it achieves its quirkiness with subtle variation in type and case rather than over-the-top imagery. This is refreshing in a children's brand.

THIS JUST IN: I believe Bureau Grotesque one three comes pretty close to the logo type. See for yourselves.

Grawlix: Word of the Week

Ever wonder what those strings of non-alphabet characters used to indicate swear words are called? Jonathan Hoefler explains:

grawlix, n. A string of typographical symbols used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swear word.

Apparently the term was coined in 1964 by Mort Walker, but is still waiting to be recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary. What's taking them so @!$&^$* long?! Apparently the term is not used widely enough, so we'll just have to contribute to the effort. So, do you have a favorite set of grawlix characters? Do you prefer to grawl in a particular type?

New Xerox Logo: What the Grawlix?

This is not an example of outstanding design. I stumbled upon xerox's new logo and was quite puzzled. While I think the new treatment of the wordmark is actually an improvement and quite lovely, I just don't understand that big red marble sitting beside it. Far from adding meaning or harmony it detracts from the cleanliness of the type and throws the entire composition off-blance.

So, I decided to find out a little more about the logo, and lo and behold, I came across this article in underconsideration.com. They were not complimentary, either.

The design firm responsible for this new logo is Interbrand, and apparently they chose to incorporate a symbol in order to better animate the logo. In their own words:

The new Xerox logo is now a lowercase treatment of the Xerox name — in a vibrant red — alongside a sphere-shaped symbol sketched with lines that link to form an illustrative "X," representing Xerox's connections to its customers, partners, industry and innovation, and designed to be more effectively animated for use in multi-media platforms.
— Official press release

Signaling a clear change and evoking a dramatic shift in the world's perception of this iconic brand, the visual and verbal identity system for Xerox has undergone a massive redesign. The new signature incorporates a lowercase treatment of the Xerox name — in a vivid red Pantone 1797 — alongside a sphere sketched with lines, called "connectors," that link to form an "X", representing the company's connections to its customers, employees, partners, industry and innovation. The "connectors" are super-graphics that appear as reoccurring design elements.
— Interbrand project description

Here's the much talked-about animation. Wipee! If you didn't click on the link, don't bother. The logo recedes, glints, and has a shadow. In the words of Michael Beirut, who commented on the article (it's no lie, apparently he reads the blog at 1am in the morning):

Michael Bierut’s comment is:

I wish I were dead.

On Jan.08.2008 at 01:10 AM

Pain is Good 'Zine

Pain is Good Magazine
Client: Original Juan
Design Firm: Barkley
Source: Communication Arts Annual Interactive 14

This is the cover and contents page for a 'zine used to advertize hot sauces. I love the campy, retro feel and the hand-drawn type radiating from the product. It makes me want to read the 'zine and I don't much care for hot sauce!

And Then There Were Two...

In this day and age when branding is ubiquitous, you'd think that our presidential candidates would put a little more thought into how they package their image into a logo. Every nuance, line, and joke that issues forth from their mouths is subject to endless analysis from the media, but the graphics they choose as visual shorthand for whom they are seldom get any scrutiny. The two notable exceptions are the remaining candidates. I think Obama has the best presidential logo I have ever seen. The round, geometric O depicts a sunrise against a blue sky. The stripes evoke a landscape that leads off into a hopeful tomorrow. It is sunny, contemporary, and hopeful, while the clean, well-kerned serif font beneath (Gotham) is more traditional and inspires confidence with its mixture of upper nd lower case caps.


John McCain, on the other hand, chose Optima for his logo. The typeface is blunt, ugly, and to the point, much like the persona he projects. It is no cincidence that the font used is the one in which names are written at the Vietnam Memorial. This, plus the naval star remind us of his military experience.

Picardie

Client: Picardie
Designer: Catherine LePage
Source: Communication Arts interactive Annual 14

I love the whimsical treatment of this typographic design. The text skips along the page and has very obviously been hand-drawn; there are variations in size and shape within the same letters.

Restraint

Restraint

This font was released in 2007 by Tiroworks. It was created by Marian Bantjes, an illustrator. It is an ornamental typeface with letters included so you can build intricate ornamental design in a modular manner around the letters. Where the majority of ornamental type begins with a typeface onto which swashes and decoration are added, this one was built inside-out. The characters themselves have been defined by the negative space of the ornament, as if the letterforms are just a lucky happenstance. Ornate borders and swirly pattern based designs magically reveal themselves as words.

It looks like it requires a lot of forthought to use correctly (it comes with rather detailed instructions). This sfont should definitely be used sparingly as a display font, but in the right context it could be spectacular.