Typography?

Oh well.… »Typo« is a common abbreviation in german. I will correct it in the OP…

For your pleasure:

http://www.rawtype.co.uk/general/for-mo … s%E2%80%A6

http://inspirationlab.wordpress.com/201 … -typeface/

*flagged for delete, since the fella below is right*

Last edited by Awebb (2010-07-15 21:36:40)

uh, what was going on here while I was diving into the world of type..? I found letterology aswell today.. along with some nice vintage hand-painted stuff... www.preserve.co.nz - I am pretty much into handlettering these days, had a look on sagmeister.com or see paula scher's good work.. there's some nice movies about her stuff.

telegrafico is nice, seems pretty close to Avantgarde, but the tops seem to weigh a bit to much here.. good one for headlines though.

If you like animated type, check out Saul Bass, and for conceptional & 3D, see Ewald Spieker from the Netherlands.

a good page with proper graphic-design: http://www.ott-stein.de

Last edited by saneks (2010-07-15 23:21:46)

Lots of "Web 2.0" sites do use a little too much css than is good for them, but some sites are pretty cool: http://heroku.com/how/architecture

I think news sites end up being driven by...news people. Every one of them HAS to have THEIR story on the home page, resulting in the monstrosities of content overload nearly every big news site is guilty of right now.

Back to topic: http://www.stefanoforenza.com/get-andro … tu-how-to/

Good to know the importance of graphic design is not lost on all developers. I think we need a serious look at traditional graphic design concepts and skills in the FOSS world. It's an area with decades and decades of serious study behind it and yet we don't seem to take it that seriously. Of course I find much of it fascinating, but many do not. I do think it's a key element missing from much of what FOSS produces.

I've been pursuing the area of graphic design as well over the past few years. One good source for newbies (aside from spending all your money buying good graphic design books ) is the Design Guy podcast. It's focused on the concepts, not the tools and he provides short concise podcasts and complete transcriptions of each episode as well. Hasn't been updated in a while, but man I found it quite useful and interesting. I posted about it briefly a while back: http://blog.rfquerin.org/2009/10/03/tim … explained/

Well, typography and minimalism have their roots somewhat intertwined. Both design philosophies stem from the need to make the most out of negative space (the empty parts of the page/spread/canvas). That's part of the reason why these people tend to take their spacing, layout and alignment very seriously.
Another reason is the sharpness factor. Typographists/minimalists tend to concentrate on 'pure sharpness' rather than the  'contrast to give the perception of sharpness' trick that graphic designers are taught to employ.
Newspapers just try to compress as much info as possible on their page, hence layout and design, while not completely overlooked, tend to take a backseat.

Last edited by gutterslob (2010-07-16 08:11:31)

are you joking, you can't even read the text.

good points, theres also the fact that graphic design is about graphics, web design 'should' primarily be about text, so typography skills turn out to be quite transferable.

i think you could probably accuse many broad sheets of cramming a lot of news in their dead tree editions, although they can still come out loking well designed.
to me i think the there are a few factors, first over use of colour and over use of 'media' is distracting,  the fact that 50% of the screen is given to navigation 'aids' and the cult of the 'home page'.
Possibly the biggest problem though is we just don't know how to work with that little browser window, an A3 newspaper contains much more news, and more tightly packed, but because you have an overview or something its managable.

I didn't read the whole thread, but I thought I might add Cat Fonts by Peter Wiegel. His website is by no means pretty, but at least from my dilettante perspective the collection of fonts seems unique.

I never use smilies, but there are exceptions that prove the rule
Now playing: Last.fm

i don't keep track of websites i especially like the design of, although i can give examples of what i like from this thread (ps im using adblock, so some of these websites could look rubbish without it, also on a 'narrow screen' crt which could explain colour and scrolling issues)

The good:
http://www.preserve.co.nz/
Simple, everything broken up into 3 columns (past posts, content, 'social'), both non content columns reachable within a page and a half scroll, also the fact that the content is in the middle column means its centred when youve gone past all the stuff in the other columns. If I had to be picky, the page itself is overly long especially as its all images, and contact info could have been moved to the right column, making the columns more balanced, and that info belongs on the right anyway.

http://blog.rfquerin.org/
I know I'll have to be polite as he will probably read this but again nice and simple, only 2 columns so you don't get the actual content squashed to one side once youre past the navigation stuff, decent amounts of white space.

http://www.ott-stein.de/
Minimalist to the point of being unhelpful (or it could be the fact I don't speak german), it also annoys me that you have to scroll to the right to see a particular image, having said that though, its all css so its sprightly enough and you don't have to load up a million and one images for one page, its not overly busy and theres nice amounts of white space too.

The Bad
http://heroku.com/how/architecture
At the moment its cloudy so i can make out the text but its not fun, I seem to be losing some stuff off the screen to the right , and from a navigation point of view, why are the page links at the top, it wouldn't be so bad if the page link at the bottom linked to the next page, but it doesn't, also each page has multiple javascript (and html) pages, so using the forward/back buttons is annoying, im not a particular fan of the colour scheme either.

I suppose its down to simplicity more than anything, its very easy to make a page busy and fill it up with extranious stuff aspecialy stuff that doesn't add anything useful, I don't think im alone either, I would argue 90% of googles sucess is down to the simplicity of the results page, if you compare it to yahoo, windows live from back in the day, having said that though, I argue a lot of things, and I'm very rarely right .

ive just discovered this which does basically the same.