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?

THE END OF GEOGRAPHY from Tatiana Plakhova on Vimeo.

The internet has, by some, been hailed as the end of geography as we know it. Physical distance and location may be becoming ever less significant in society, but the internet has redefined the concept of geography, with its own maps, sites, locations, routes and networks.

The End of Photography, a thought-provoking film and photography project by Tatiana Plakhova, explores the concept of new and old geography.

What is graphic design … what a graphic designer does

A question old as time! Well almost, and its about time there was a credible and well thought through response to this question. This is about the closest thing i’ve come across and goes some way to answering this familiar (and slightly annoying) question. More an introduction than conclusive answer, think of this as something you could show your mum and she’d finally ‘get it’..

The British Design Council have put together a series of guides for design professionals which offer practical advice and information on the business issues facing today’s designers. You can find more on the Design Council site or on their Vimeo channel.

Nice little video for a Rotating billboard (in NYC, Soho) designed by Sagmeister Inc. for Levi’s.

One for all you American medical professionals out there..
A fun, infographic laden video on Electronic Medical Records.

YouTube videos in which Lego people act out movies are the perfect way to break up a dreary day. Well, put in your headphones and close that Excel doc… Here is the entire Star Wars saga told via Lego… in two minutes and 13 seconds. This video, which hit YouTube on Star Wars day (which also brought us Hans Solo Yourself from the JibJab folks), has already racked up more than 400,000 views.

During the Apollo lunar missions from 1968 to 1972, those onboard were given 16mm cameras and told to film anything and everything they could, in space, in orbit, and on the surface of the moon itself. Two decades later, filmmaker Al Reinert went into the NASAvaults to create this incredible film set to a soundtrack by Brian Eno.

I love that after years of grueling training and selection processes to get to the moon and then when they finally get onto it’s surface, they become big kids!