Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

marypcb gave me a set of Type Trumps for Christmas. They (along with the Doc Brown T-shirt) appealed strongly to my inner designer. Yes, I may be a developer/architect/journalist but there's a part of me that relishes in fonts, and lusts after Eurostile Bold Extended.

Type Trumps are beautifully designed, reminding me of the classic 80s work of Neville Brody and the folks at Designers Republic.



Oh, and Helvetica wins. And don't try playing Comic Sans...

And now there's Type Trumps 2!

Peter Saville, who designed many of Factory Records' sleeves, has put several of his classic fonts online, for free.



Download them here.

They include several of my favourite New Order fonts...

While researching a piece on Apollo I came across Adobe's Kuler.

Built to demonstrate the capabilities of the latest versions of Flash and Flex, it's a web-based version of the extremely useful colour space explorer tools in Illustrator CS3 - with an added dose of community. Use the colour space explorer to choose a set of colours, then use rules to find complementary sets, or the appropriate colour triads, or even related shades to a base colour. It's an excellent tool for building colour maps that you can use in your web sites or desktop applications - you can take the RGB values of the colours you choose, or the hex.

What's even neater though, is the community, where people are sharing the colour sets and themes they've defined. A voting system lets you say which themes you liked the most - I'm particularly fond of Japanese Garden...

There are also RSS feeds of the most popular colour themes - so you can stay updated without having to visit the site every day - and OS X users get a Kuler dashboard widget.

An excellent tool for web and graphic designers.

It's been a while since I've done anything to the look and feel of this ole blog. So, I've switched theme to something that gives it a look that's a bit more like my other blog.

With the launch of the new CSS-based Expressive style today, I've switched to using its London Cityscape theme from the grey Component theme I was using. I've quite liked the idea of a London cityscape look, and as this is a London-based blog. There are some nice touches too, including a Tag browser and proper permalinks for each entry, so you don't have to go prying through the comment HTML to link to an entry.

There will be some CSS tweaks to come (I want to change some of the fonts to start with).

I saw this clock at the Design Museum a while back.


Solstice in South Kensington

An interesting idea, it's a piece of software linked to a web cam. Every second it stores an image, and displays them in a ring of 60 image slots. Every 60^th image is stored in a 60 slot minute ring. Every 360^th image goes to a 12 slot hour ring. The three rings add up to a view of the changes that take place over a day...



Now if only they'd make the software available, and take the hour ring up to 24 hours...

Here's an excellent list of the "Top 20 License Free Fonts". You may not agree with the choices, but there are some really nice examples of type design here.

I rather like Day Roman, Gentium and Agendia...