gary hustwit: objectified.

Yes please. The amazing Gary Hustwit’s new full-length industrial design doc, “Objectified”, is gearing up to hit the festivals this spring and the trailer has just been released. Featuring design luminaries like Apple’s Jonathan Ive – the man who led the designs for nothing less than the iMac, Powerbook, iPod, and iPhone – and many more, “Objectified” opens our eyes to the fact that everything we see, all around us, every day… was designed. Someone, somewhere, is responsible for the specific way we interact with everything we touch. If you think about it long enough, you start to go nuts.

Watch the trailer. Watch it right now:

Hustwit also directed 2007’s “Helvetica”, one of my fave documentaries ever, about the ubiquitous, much loved (and much maligned… someone’s always gotta hate) mega-font. If you didn’t see “Helvetica” then you missed out. Even if you’re not a design nerd you’ll enjoy it. And if you are a design nerd, then “Helvetica” is pretty much typophile porn. I dare you to watch it without touching yourself…

craig oldham: nudist typeface.

It’s not everyday that you can say that a font made you laugh. Not the words the font describes, but the actual existence of the font itself. Today, however, is one of those days: check out the Nudist Typeface from UK designer Craig Oldham.

Letters with their dirty bits pixellated! How awesome is that? But it doesn’t end there, we’ve also got the biblical Adam and Eve version:

And the old-skool CENSORED version:

But it gets better. To announce the project Oldham sent out a package with plasticized porno-style protective wrapping and a warning sticker, with this awesome poster tucked inside. Rather than use the traditional “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” panagram (containing all the letters in the alphabet, so frequently used to demonstrate fonts) he brilliantly created a nudist-based panagram to market the new font. Smart.

Big thanks to Five Husbands for sending me this, via Boing Boing.

job + roel wouters: “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwyz”.

Call me a geek, but there’s such a unique beauty to the art of hand-drawn letters. Free-form calligraphy like this isn’t easy. For proof, look at the last thing you hand-wrote and compare it to the work of Dutch artist Job Wouters.

Job just released “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”, a video of himself and his 4-year old nephew Gradus hand-drawing the alphabet. Besides being totally cute, it’s fascinating to watch how a young kid imitates an adult. Initially tries to imitate and socialize (a prime source of learning for all kids) but then sometimes his little creative mind takes over and adds flourishes to the letters. Check out his “e” – it’s killer! The video was directed by Job’s brother, Roel.

Job is clearly the best uncle ever. For proof, check out this epic birth announcement card they designed for him. As he worked on different fonts for the card, he decided he likes them all… and so that’s what they sent. I want him to be my uncle.

Here are more samples of Job’s stuff. Awesome:

Via Fresh Creation

design police: “bringing bad design to justice”.

An edited version of this article also appeared on Josh Spear

The visually conscious (or sometimes visually obsessive) among us see it everywhere: bad colour combos, heinous spacing, over-sized logos, and – gasp – excessive use of Helvetica!

Now the design-minded have the means to take control… if taking control means slapping a sticker on a poster and running back to the Mac like a little girl. Design Police’s downloadable Visual Enforcement Kit gives you a series of offense-marking stickers to gleefully place on bad kerning and other layout tragedies whenever you see fit. These five comprehensive pages of design-geek glory cover the gamut of offenses from “Do not use clip art!“ to “turn off the CAPS LOCK”. My personal fave is “Hire a copywriter”. Amen to that.

If this is making any sense to you so far you’re probably a design geek – maybe even that particular sub-species… the font geek. If you’re curious as to your own design/font geek status then here’s an easy litmus test – if you find the “Comic Sans is illegal” sticker amusing, then congratulations. Don’t worry – I’m a font geek too. Despite the general mutterings I sometimes I hear from those around me about my incessant use of Arial Rounded MT Bold, I don’t care. It’s my fave:

I often flirt with the idea of cheating on it with Helvetica, but in the end I always come back to my baby. Long live Arial Rounded MT Bold!

fontifier: font you.

Avoid those impersonal looking “notes” with a font based on your own handwriting. Fontifier is pretty much idiot proof: download their template, fill it in, scan and upload it back to them. Then they send you a style chart of your brand new font to preview before you buy it (for the very reasonable price of $9 USD).

Please introduce yourself to the world’s newest font, which I have lovingly entitled “Jer Bomb”:

In the immortal words of Ouisa Boudreaux, I have “the handwritin’ of a serial killah”.

Via Gnomist