Archive for December 31st, 2005
This typeface and it's famous ligatures have seen a huge resurgence in popularity lately, and can be found all over the place (I see it use a lot in design coming from the UK).
Elsner+Flake had made the Avant Garde Gothic Pro and Alternates (Ligatures) available in digital form first, and
ITC has recently released an Opentype version.
Some examples of Avant Garde Gothic Alternates |
More
From graphic-design.com: Avant Garde -- the typeface -- was born as a logo for a new magazine of the same name in the mid-60s. Ralph Ginzburg collaborated with Herb Lubalin (pronounced "Loo-ba-lin") on four magazines, of which Avant Garde was their second. Ginzburg remembers, "Avant Garde (the magazine) began as the single most difficult collaboration we had -- his [Lubalin's] first logo was in Hebrew. He thought that was funny. Then he did it in Coca-Cola script. We went through a dozen logos, masterfully executed."
Graphic Design Publishing - Herb Lubalin's Avant Garde Lubalin and Ginzburg used a collection of Picasso erotica in the promotional materials for the new magazine and needed a complete alphabet for their titles. Lubalin used three assistants to hand draw the 26 characters (only capital letters were needed) very quickly and, with the vital involvement of Tom Carnase, another of Lubalin's partners, many additional fitted character pairs (called "ligatures") were created as their work progressed. It is these upper case character pairs that made Avant Garde one of the most original typefaces of the twentieth century. But Avant Garde, the all-cap typeface, was intended only for use in the magazine by its art director.
December 31st, 2005
Continuing the meaty theme, I happened across this iPod giveaway contest.
Mike Davidson's 'Make a Meatspace Shuffle' contest asks people to submit images of an iPod shuffle made from food - anything from dill pickles to spam. There are some really ingenius submissions, as well as some pretty lame ones. There is a funny comment about Spam being the state food of Hawaii.
December 31st, 2005
The last couple days I've had the opening song to '
Honey & Clover' stuck in my head. It's Dramatic [
mp3], by
Yuki, a super chibi J-Pop girl with Bjork-ish touches - I caught one of her vids on AZN TV (um, no i dont watch that! *grin*) and it was super weird. Kind of blue man group mixed with j-pop style and all smothered in a good dose of anime mentality.
More info here. The 1st 1/2 Season End song is good also Waltz, by Suneohair. OMG - save me, I'm admitting to liking J-Pop stuff....
Honey and Clover is a good anime, with a large focus on character development, the interactions of normal kids and the people around them. Nothing super-mecha-action-harem-fanservice about it. It centers around art students at a college, and as such has some interesting tidbits about life as a designer, the trials of a genius artist, and the difficulties of art students. It has very nice watercolory animation, and a decent amount of fun, crazy animated segs.
December 31st, 2005
Chriss Angel (aka the MindFreak) is a total idiot. If you don't know who this is, you're not missing anything. He likes to think he is a 'magician' - He's the first magician that I could actually figure out how he did his
on-TV tricks, and that blatantly edits his '
feats' in post production. It is so cheesy, he is so lame, it makes me want to laugh... Which, by the way is the only reason he is on A&E. Just like Dog the Bounty Hunter who is a comic facade of a bounty hunter, Chriss Angel is a parody of a magician, and him and his production crew are completely blind to their idiocy. Sure, he fools a lot of people, but people seem to be easily fooled these days. Maybe next time he gets struck by pseudo-lightening, he'll stop bugging me on TV.
December 31st, 2005
