Nice use of typography to mimic the shape of a xmas decoration.  Love the warm and glamorous colour palette in this window and the over sized decorations.

Great referencing to the animal kingdom which follows the recent trend of using animal shapes within knitwear designs and t-shirt graphics. The animal masks, fur cones, scarves and bare twigs represent Autumn perfectly!

Zara had focused on stars as shapes to use. The black dresses along with the gold & silver typography echoed style and sophistication.

Next weekend I’m going to the Clothes Show at the NEC so I’ll be on the lookout for the catwalk scenery and graphics … Any excuse to go shopping!

We have been attending regular meetings of the Ghent Work Group and are involved in discussing the important detail in PDF workflows. There seems to be a range of opinions which depends primarily on how far your customers have gone with PDF creation; the newer ‘flavours’ of PDF can add problems rather than make life easier, it seems.

While Adobe’s PDF/X-4 standard incorporates transparency and updated layering, there have been issues reported by users, more especially with some fonts. This issue was raised at the recent meeting in Milan and concerns missing glyphs in some typefaces, which may only be shown as a space in PDF/X-4 files made from some applications, including Adobe CS. The resulting output error, although rare, can be expensive in the wrong place. This problem is intended to be fixed by the .notdef glyph which should have a certain shape – an empty rectangle, or one which contains a X or a question mark inside it. This should then highlight the problem with that character in a visually obvious way.

The GWG and its members is working hard to resolve the reporting of these problems and provide specifications that will create PDF/X-4 files appropriate to a range of printing conditions and which flag up .notdef problems in an efficient way for current workflows. Further testing of the new specifications is underway prior to final release, due in 2012.

More information can be found at the Ghent Work Group website.

I attended the Typo London conference last week. The event which hosted a wide range of speakers from Neville Brody to Lawrence Weiner, had the theme of ‘Places’ but to be honest was much broader than that. It was brilliantly facilitated by Erik Spiekermann and Adrian Shaughnessy (among others) and was easily the best conference I’ve been to in some time. One of the best things about it was that most of the speakers stayed for the duration and watched the other presentation, which created a real feel of community.

It’s the first time this event has been held in England, having previously been in Berlin and judging by the feedback from everyone, it looks like it’s going to return to the capital next year. I will be putting together a presentation covering all the amazing talks which will be shared here but for the time being here’s additional reading about it from Creative Review and Design Assembly.

ABC 3D Book from Aarni Heiskanen on Vimeo.

A charming pop-up 3D book by Marion Bataille, with some wonderfully playful animations and transitions from one letter to the next. And yes, she can teach you your numbers as well…

If I had kids, this is how I’d get them to learn their ABCs… I’m just not sure I’d trust a 3-year-old with such lovely books, all those flaps and folds just waiting to be ripped off…

I visited Yorkshire Sculpture Park over the bank holiday weekend, and there are some fantastic temporary installations on there at the moment. Jaume Plensa’s enormous figures built from typographic characters from different cultures are beautiful, especially when viewed up close, and the scale models on display are equally interesting for their intricacy and the way the artificial lighting interacts with their forms.

But for me, Aeneas Wilder’s work really steals the show. Untitled #155 is a free-standing structure built from 10,000 equally sized pieces of wood destined for parquet flooring, supported by nothing more than their own weight – no glue, no nails, no fixings. There’s an amazing sense of scale and fragility, and the fact that viewers are able to walk right up to the structure (no touching!) is brilliant. The installation reaches its climax on 3rd November with a big ‘Kick Down’.

Well worth a visit if you’re looking for something to do this weekend. I’ll post a few pics shortly.

Just My Type from Pentagram on Vimeo.

Hypnotic video trailer for Pentagram’s book, Just My Type, re-released next month. It pulses through 999 fonts in a minute starting and ending with Archer, the font used for the book’s US cover. While the smooth flow and pace of the animation is nice (at least the first 30 seconds), it’s a shame it doesn’t offer us a bit more, and tell us more about the book itself. It somehow feels a bit ‘basic’.

The book itself considers typography through the usual historic figures like Gutenberg, Baskerville and Gill and considers legibility, readability, typeface choice, politics, digital type – nothing new and much like many other typography reference books. I think the theory of typography has been pretty well exhausted now, and find the culture of type, and real-world contextual studies much more worthy of exploration.

I guess this raises a completely different question to the original purpose of this post. Are we being saturated with reworks of old material? What would you prefer to see? Any thoughts?

Punctuation is not just a great friend of the copywriter and author. Designers and typographers have long valued the punctuation mark for its succinctness and beauty of form, bringing simplicity, clarity, homour and intelligence to design. This charming Print.Magazine gallery showcases a history of the question mark and exclamation mark in design through the years.