Turn it up

Another great website from the people who did the architecture in Helsinki website, they are a great little design agency called mathematics which you can check out here:
http://xy-1.com/new/


The website above is not only a great piece of work itself with great interactivity and a brilliant design, but is also a showcase for young creative people to show thier work. There is video, type, image and sound to have a look at it.

Definately worth a peak @ http://www.sbs.com.au/turnitup/

Architecture in Helsinki Website

This is a website that I came across when looking for a band to do my website design for.



It's a very clever drag n drop website, you basically drag and drop anything and everything. Drag the links into the main area to load them, move the windows around, drag images to make them bigger etc.

Despite this when I right click it doesn't appear to be flash, anybody know how they've achieved this?

Check it out @ http://architectureinhelsinki.com/

Paint your way!

The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

Found via swissmiss

I really like it!

Grids

Wim Crouwel was highly influenced by technology and grids. Unlike most typographers at the time he was convinced that he should work with technology and embrace the order that was needed for typefaces to work.

Similarly when I was given my typography project my first thought was to buy some gridded paper so that I could more accurately design letters.

Not only did he use grids in designing his work but he used it in his final pieces. To the left is an example of this.

Vormgevers (designers) poster 1968.
Font: Architype Stedelijk


Some examples of Wim Crouwel working in a gridded sketchbook to design his letters:



Here are a few of the letters we came up with for the elastypography project, where we had to use elastic bands and pins/nails to construct letter forms. We pinned gridded paper to a cork board so that we could get the 3d aspect of the letters as accurate as possible.



And finally in my finished poster I also used gridded paper in a design format.

Light:


Dark:


And surprisingly I did this before I'd even heard of Wim Crouwel. Bizarre eh? But in terms of work after I've researched Crouwels work I'm thinking about trying to design a typeface using only 45 degree and 90 degree angles. Or experimenting with new alphabet (if I can find a download) to see how readable words are if I mix the letters up.

Wim Crouwel Interviews

Part one:


Part two:


Wim Crouwel interview made by french graphic design magazine "Etapes" talking about some of his work.

Comparison.

A very much enlarged comparison between a Garamond 'A' and Wim Crouwel's 'A'. These were both printed on a dot matrix printer. The problem with the garamond A can be clearly be seen, there are no real smooth edges. The printer also often printed the dots completely different each time as it wasn't designed to deal with the shapes used in traditional typography.

Uneradbale

Interesting video about how Wim Crouwel's new alphabet made a resurgence in England in the 1990's. He also makes some comments about the typeface being "unreadable" and purely an excercise.

I actually disagree with him and think it is quite readable even with some of the more abstract letters such as the a or the m. On whole words: the human brain can piece words together simply by the beggining or end letter without paying too much attention to the middle.

But hey he's the typographer, or just modest possibly.

In all seriousness I can't see it working well in an everyday setting.

P.S. the title was deliberate.

New Alphabet

For my typography project I picked the name 'Wim Crouwel'. After conducting a bit of basic internet research I found out that Wim Crouwell is a dutch graphic designer and typographer, most famous for his mordenist typeface: new alphabet(1967):



This font was also used on the cover of a compilation called 'Substance' (Joy Division, 1988) Funnily enough I'm a big fan of old music, particularly 80's altern and Joy Division are a favourite of mine.



Another fun fact: Apparently the 'N' on the cover is actually a 'M' in the alphabet.

I really love the alphabet that Wim came up with, it was based around the idea of dot matrix (I presume printers) and was meant to be made easier for computers to read. I think it really works because although abstract, the lines that he removes or adds don't take away from me being able to understand the word. Very cleverly designed and realised!

More to come soon.

This is Amy

Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Amy Thornley and I am currently a first year interactive design student at Lincoln uni. In the near future I will hopefully be posting some interesting things for your viewing pleasure. In the meantime you can take a look at my work via the interactive design website located here.