design

Beautiful typographic visuals for an interesting spoken word poem:

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

I’ve made a few handmade books before, none of this complexity, but I appreciate the artistry that goes into making a book by hand, and this video shows you the long laborious, detail oriented, and complex process. But when you’re finally done you really feel an amazing sense of accomplishment. The end result always instills a sense of awe, every detail is there and each and everyone was done by hand.

(via notcot)

I’m still getting the hang of recognizing fonts, and working with them. I found this quiz that tests whether you can spot the differences between Helvetica and the more common Microsoft backed/computer popularized Arial. I was able to spot the differences but I wasn’t always sure which was which.

Fun and informative: The Helvarial Quiz

(brought to you by IronicSans)

So many infographics are terrible, wasteful of your time, and often acheive the opposite of their intended effect. So, I was pleasantly surprised to come across a collection of very excellent ones. This flickr set is from the good magazine archives. Check it out for examples of infographics done right.

When will major businesses learn that design matters? Recently we saw how Tropicana lost 20% of it’s sales with a simple redesign of it’s packaging, well, here is an opposite story. With really good design Jacek Utko was able to increase circulation of his newspaper by as much as 100% in some places. This is a pretty inspiring TED talk.