My frequency of updating this blog is dropping sharply. As of today it’s well over two months since the last post. Now I’m no expert on social media, but I’m sure this is not a good sign. So as a drastic measure to keep this blog alive I’ve decided I’ll update this at least once a week. Even if it’s with random notes like this one!
Now on to more interesting things. I’ve just finished re-reading ‘Elements of Typographic Style‘. It’s truly an amazing book. More so because it lays down a framework for almost any kind of typographic work. The breadth of study that the book covers is remarkable. Next on the wish list are ‘Making & Breaking the Grid‘ by Timothy Samara and the Helvetica book by Lars Müller.
Finally got my copy of ‘Elements of Typographic Style’. It’s been a long time coming. I really must write sometime about my hunt across Bombay & Delhi to find a copy of this book. Finally I had to order from Amazon and then they took like forever to deliver it. Anyway now that I have it, it’s time to relish what has rightly been called the Typographer’s Bible. More updates later.
I’ve been terrible lazy at updating this blog. It’s mostly been due to a whole lot of work for Ahvan. For the uninitiated Ahvan is the management fest of IIM Indore. You might know about it by its previous name Iris. This year it is going to be held from November 19th to 21st. Ashwamedha is an event that occurs as part of Ahvan. It’s been the flagship event of this fest with participation reaching 1500+ last year. As part of the team developing Ashwamedha, I’ve been taking care of developing the creative content. The first two posters for this year’s Ashwa are put up below. To know more about us, follow us on Twitter.
This one was the teaser poster. It was launched internally in the institute to generate a buzz about Ashwa. We’re planning to send this out to other B-Schools at a later date. This one was made up pretty much in one sitting with Nachiket & Srinath coming up with the excuses and me putting it in as fast as possible. There are a few not-so-subtle references to folks around the campus. The response for this poster in the college was fabulous and I am thinking of putting out a different variant of this same poster after a few weeks.
This one is more of a recruitment poster for the Junior team selection. The people talked about in this poster are members of the previous Ashwa team who passed out of the college. The ideation for the lines to put in this poster took a phenomenally long amount of time. Various suggestions were thrown around before we came up with this comments. Some of them are inside jokes of sorts so we are expecting a few blank stares!
We’ve been thinking of designing a shirt for a while now, and after throwing around a lot of ideas, we decided to make one on Helvetica. This is the draft that I came up with. I’ve tried to keep it simple but still showcase the beauty of this font. We are thinking of changing this around. Some suggestions are to drop the ‘I Heart’ and just keep ‘Helvetica’. Also we’re thinking of adding some history to make it more interesting.
Mark Surman gives a quick roundup of the Open Video Conference that was held last week in New York. It’s exciting to see how much buzz they have been generating about Open Video. He also takes up the issue of what has been holding up the acceptance of Open Video. The prime factor would be the lack of simple tools to implement this technology. The lack of tools means that even enthusiasts of Open Video are unable to adopt it. Given that even the video feeds from OVC were in the Flash format it is pretty clear that there is a long way to go before Open Video technology can start making a real difference to the web. The support from Mozilla would definitely speed up the spread of this technology and hopefully this would be backed up by developments to make Open Video easier to implement.
I had talked about Collapse Design and their exciting work especially the wonderful badge designs. Borrowing some ideas from them, I have tried my hand at a poster design to showcase Helvetica Bold. This is a first draft and some more tweaks are required before it looks any good! Eventually, I hope to expand this into a series of posters, each showcasing a particular typeface. Comments and criticism are, as always, welcome!
A beautiful redesign of Monopoly by the French designer Florent Guerlain. I’ve been addicted to Monopoly for as long as I can remember and I can’t begin to think how much more awesome it would be in Helvetica!
Came across this stunning video on Vimeo. It’s shot in Tokyo by Samuel Cockedey with Canon 350D and 5D DSLRs. Watch out for the excellent interplay between the music and images at 1:54 and the amazing sky transitions around 2:40. For more experiments with live light see Remanence : Variance also by Samuel Cockedey.
Mike Beltzner gives a quick preview of what’s new and exciting in Firefox 3.5. I’m personally super excited about the Open Video support and blazing fast TraceMonkey engine. Open Video is definitely a big step forward in making videos on the web more democratized. To find out why Open Video is so important see this post by Christopher Blizzard and this one by Mike Shaver. Also, with CSS improvements and support for downloadble fonts this browser is definitely going to make the web a better place. The Release Candidate has been creating quite a buzz and if you are interested you can get it here.
